We are seeking a Contracting Operations Manager to join the WTW legal team, based in Ipswich. Reporting to the General Counsel GB, the Contracting Operations Manager will play a pivotal role in supporting WTW’s Legal Front Door and Global Contracting Team initiatives across multiple regions, including North America, GB, Western Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America. The role will require close collaboration with legal, administrative, and technology teams, as well as direct engagement with regional and global legal leads.
The Legal Front Door (LFD) is a work intake platform, tracking tool and capacity management system used by WTW’s legal team for requesting a contract review in most regions. The Global Contracting Team (GCT), comprised of paralegals and apprentice and qualified lawyers, sits within the global legal team and is a team responsible for reviewing and negotiating client, carrier, supplier, and other contracts.
The LFD and GCT together enable contract review work to be assigned to colleagues who have the appropriate level of skill, irrespective of the colleague’s location. Junior GCT members located in Ipswich, London and Mumbai handle end-to-end reviews of simple agreements as well as performing initial reviews of other contracts before passing them to more senior colleagues for final review.
The Role:
1. Manage the GCT junior teams in Ipswich and Mumbai, adopting an approach of continuous improvement, to ensure workload is distributed and managed effectively and that the colleagues in these teams receive appropriate training as their skills and expertise develop. Support recruitment and performance management processes for the junior teams, including managing job descriptions, candidate selection, interviews, and regular performance monitoring and feedback.
2. Coordinate and administer the UK legal apprenticeship programme, including candidate selection, internal training, liaison with training provider mentors, managing study days, and overseeing performance reviews. Ensure apprentices are provided opportunities to work on an appropriately broad range of matters to support the needs of their apprenticeship programme.
3. Foster a collaborative and high-performing team culture, ensuring effective communication and knowledge sharing across regions. Be responsible for the development and maintenance of GCT training and guidance materials, in coordination with subject matter experts within the legal team and the wider WTW environment;
4. Ensure the smooth and effective running of the LFD. Liaise with WTW’s technology support teams and legal’s admin team to request resolution of any technical issues or updates to contract routing and automatic triage rules as necessary. Working with our technology and Legal Operations teams, provide ad hoc LFD support to legal leadership, including training, system enhancements, dashboard customization, and assistance with miscellaneous queries.
5. Oversee the day-to-day management of the LFD matter triage process. Act as the first point of consultation for any triage queries to ensure work is assigned to appropriate resources in accordance with skillset and capacity. Pay particular attention to requests that are urgent or are missing information or which have been wrongly categorized by the business users. Where appropriate, seek further information from business requesters or redirect them to the appropriate resources. Utilise assistance from the legal administrative team to regularly follow up with individual members of the GCT to ensure their matters are updated or closed in a timely manner.
6. Coordinate and support the ongoing rollout of LFD/GCT processes in Asia and Pacific and Western Europe, coordinating as necessary with WTW’s technology and Legal Operations support teams, including requirements gathering, system testing, training, and communicating changes with local legal teams. Provide support and guidance to local legal teams to ensure the ongoing usefulness and responsiveness of the processes in each region;
7. Actively participate, representing the legal team’s perspective and requirements, in projects related to system replacements, process mapping, and integration with other platforms wherever there is overlap with the LFD and/or GCT processes. Projects include expanding the use of AI tools for contract reviews and improvements and enhancements to WTW’s contract lifecycle management tool;
8. Act as the legal team’s liaison with the Sales Operations team, particularly their client contracting support team and their questionnaire management team.
9. Act as secretary and co-ordinator to WTW’s contract template and playbooks governance committee, monitoring incoming requests for changes to templates and playbooks, circulating materials and producing minutes for quarterly governance committee meetings;