Legal Vendor Manager

A new opportunity has arisen at a successful private equity firm for a legal vendor manager on a permanent, full-time basis. Based within the legal and tax team, this is a new, business-critical role where you will take ownership of how the firm manages external relationships and associated expenditure.

The main purpose of this role is to build processes and AI-enabled tools that provide visibility of external advisory spend and support the legal and tax teams in managing external relationships efficiently.

Main responsibilities include:

• Owning the annual budgeting process - setting and communicating budgets to relevant stakeholders.
• Providing regular reporting to legal and tax leadership.
• Monitoring and managing fee arrangements and rate cards across all external vendors.
• Identifying opportunities for fixed-fee arrangements and volume discounts.
• Leveraging and configuring legal spend management tools, integrating AI-enabled functionality where appropriate.
Ensuring that the legal spend management platforms are integrated with the firm's other finance systems.
• Continuously improving the spend management platform based on user feedback.
• Managing and maintaining external advisor panels, running regular panel review processes.
• Acting as the primary point of contact for external advisors on billing and relationship admin issues.
• Coordinating onboarding of new external advisors.
• Ensuring that all external advisory invoices are processed and settled within agreed payment terms.
• Collaborating closely with the legal technology team, staying aware of emerging legal technology systems and recommending new innovative tools.
• Identifying and implementing improvements to procurement governance for external advisors

Experience and skills required:

• Strong experience managing external counsel and professional advisory spend.
• Proven track record of implementing spend management processes or tools.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to build relationships at all levels.
• The ability to work under pressure and to tight timescales.
• Experience managing panel processes.
• Skilled in using legal technology and AI tools to improve processes.
• A solid understanding of finance and accounts payable function.
• Confidence presenting to senior stakeholders.

This is an exciting role that offers a competitive salary and the opportunity to make a big contribution in a high-impact role .To be successful you must possess excellent stakeholder management skills, be commercially minded and very well organised.