Job Description

Kennedys is looking for a Global General Counsel to lead our Risk and Compliance team. The global General Counsel (GC) serves as the principal legal advisor to the global leadership-including the Global Managing Partner, Senior Partner, and Executive Group-and spearheads all legal, compliance, governance, risk, and professional liability matters across Kennedys' international offices. The GC leads the global Risk and Compliance (R&C) function to ensure effective risk management and compliance across the firm.
The role will have responsibility for delivering global and regional projects on behalf of the R&C team in collaboration with other Business Services teams.
Team
Kennedys Risk & Compliance team handles a wide range of partnership and risk and compliance issues for the firm and acts as an in-house legal department assisting with regulatory and professional conduct enquiries.
Key responsibilities

• Executive Leadership & Governance: Leadership of the firm's global risk and compliance agenda at the executive and Board levels. Advise the Board and senior partners on emerging and global legal and regulatory risks, governance, and compliance matters.
• Strategic Risk Oversight: Development and continuous review and improvement of an integrated global risk management framework that aligns with the firm's strategic objectives and international regulatory environment.
• Regulatory Engagement: Serve as the firm's primary liaison with regulators, industry bodies, and external stakeholders on complex compliance, regulatory, and governance issues and proactively build relationships across the sector to develop industry and sector wide knowledge base.
• Policy Leadership: Design and enforcement of global policies and standards, including anti-money laundering (AML), data protection (GDPR and beyond), conflicts of interest, anti-bribery, sanctions compliance, and professional ethics.
• Risk Culture & Training: Develop a culture of risk awareness, integrity, and compliance across all offices and service lines globally. Oversee the creation and delivery of comprehensive training and communication programs targeting all employee levels.
• Crisis & Incident Management: Effective leadership and management of responses to significant compliance breaches, regulatory investigations, and reputational risks, collaborating closely with external counsel, regulators, and internal stakeholders.
• Global Team Leadership: Build, develop, and mentor a high-performing global team of compliance, risk, and legal professionals. Foster a collaborative environment that supports innovation and continuous improvement and provides a truly global service.
• Reporting & Assurance: Provide clear, insightful risk and compliance reporting to the Board, Executive Committee, Risk Committee, and external auditors. Ensure robust controls and assurance mechanisms are in place.
• Cross-Functional Partnership: Collaborate with practice group leaders, IT, HR, finance, and operations to integrate risk and compliance considerations into business processes and strategic initiatives.

Required experience

• Qualified lawyer with extensive senior legal experience, ideally within large law firms or global professional services organisations.
• Significant experience with progressive leadership responsibility in risk management, compliance, and legal advisory roles.
• Proven track record advising at Board and C-suite levels on complex regulatory, governance, and risk matters in multiple jurisdictions.
• Deep expertise in UK and international regulatory frameworks impacting legal services, including AML, GDPR, anti-bribery, sanctions, and professional conduct rules.
• Exceptional strategic thinking, leadership, and stakeholder management skills with the ability to influence at the highest levels.
• Experience managing global, cross-border compliance programs.
• Strong crisis management capabilities and proven ability to lead through regulatory scrutiny and change.
• Excellent communication and negotiation skills, with gravitas to represent the firm externally.

Please let us know if you require any additional support or adjustments to be made in order to submit your application to Kennedys.
*where a level of experience is indicated, this is a guideline only and represents the amount of time we would usually expect a candidate to accumulate the requisite level of experience. This does not preclude applications from candidates with more or less experience.
About Kennedys
Kennedys is a global law firm with expertise in dispute resolution and advisory services. With over 2,750 people worldwide across 47 offices in the UK, Europe, Middle East, Asia Pacific and America we have some of the most respected legal minds in their field.
Our lawyers handle both contentious and non-contentious matters, and provide a range of specialist legal services, for many industry sectors but we have particular expertise in litigation and dispute resolution, especially in defending insurance and liability claims.
We're a fresh-thinking firm, and we're not afraid to bring challenging new perspectives to the table way beyond the traditional realm of legal services. We empower our clients with a diverse range of ideas, tools and technology to make their lives easier, as well as delivering exceptional results, every time.
What do we have to offer?
We welcome high-performing lawyers, business services professionals, secretaries, graduates and apprentices to join our rapidly expanding global firm. Whatever your role at Kennedys, you'll be involved in exciting and stimulating work, where your input will make a difference.
Our culture and values form a big part of who we are and we take them seriously. We make a difference by being approachable, straightforward, supportive and distinctive. Our are at the core of who we are and what make us a great firm to work with and for.
The Firm recognises the value of investing in our people's development and believes our culture and values contribute to the quality of our work and of our client relationships. With a culture of on-the-job and experiential learning, peer to peer learning, mentoring, resources and tools that enable you to drive your career, we can support your development in your current and future roles. A variety of other opportunities are available including secondments to clients and our global offices.
We strive to celebrate empower our people and ensure everyone can bring their authentic selves to work. We've created a culture based on client service, professional excellence, hard work and trust, where diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) is a key priority. We recognise that many of our people want to work for an employer that is aligned to their values, which is why we are building an inclusive culture, decarbonising our operations and supporting our people to thrive at work. Our people are the key to driving this change and helping us to make a difference to our clients, our people and the communities in which we live and work.
Kennedys is an equal opportunities employer and is committed to ensuring our recruitment processes are as inclusive as possible. We expect all employees to be aware of and comply with all relevant policies and procedures within their jurisdiction, including those relating to Information Security, Data Protection and Quality Management, refer any breach promptly to Risk & Compliance and to complete all mandatory training when requested.

Skills Required