Legal Counsel - SaaS

About Soda

At Soda, we’re on a mission to bring everyone closer to the data. We believe that all stakeholders in the data (and we think that’s everyone) should be able to understand it, trust it, and stay on top of it. We are pioneering the fastest-growing category in the data and analytics space, known as data observability. We allow teams to discover, prioritize, and collaboratively resolve data issues. Our integrated platform brings everyone closer to the data, resulting in data products and analytics that everyone can trust.

We’re an international team, headquartered in Brussels, Belgium and dispersed globally.  We are looking to locate this role in the UK or Western Europe, for proximity to our existing Operations Team.

To further strengthen our team, and on the back on significant commercial traction, we are looking for a:

Legal Counsel

Who are we looking for?

Someone, probably earlier in their career, who wants to apply formal legal training and experience to a real-world, commercial application.  Currently, legal work (mostly customer contracts) is handled by our Head of Operations and an external team - but now is the appropriate moment in our growth journey to bring this capability in-house.

As our Legal Counsel, you'll work alongside our Head of Operations and external lawyers to ensure that Soda's interests are protected, but balanced against our commercial ambitions.  The scope of work will broadly look like the below:

Commercial contracting with prospects

• Reviewing and redlining commercial contracts from prospective customers
  • Including internal syncing on:

    • Commercial judgement calls (e.g. clauses capping price increases, payment terms, …) - syncing with sales/finance

    • Liability judgement calls (what kind of liabilities are we willing to accept in the context of this deal) - syncing with the CEO for exceptions

    • SLA and infosec judgement calls - syncing with head of customer engineering and head of engineering

• Participate in calls with prospects, walking through redlines and negotiating compromise language with their legal counsel

• Reviewing NDAs

• Working with external counsel for any specialty areas we can’t take on ourselves (e.g. specific regulation for customers in heavily regulated industries)

• Make sure our standard MSA, NDA and online T&Cs are kept up to date, in line with any changes in the product, our pricing or our GTM strategy

Amendments with existing customers

• Draft amendments to existing contracts where necessary

  • Changes in pricing model

  • Changes due to new features requiring additional legal coverage (e.g. AI features with third parties)

Other

• Review contracts with partners (lead gen, implementation partners, resellers)

• Review contracts with suppliers

• Review employment contracts

• Maintain our legal folder

Characteristics

• Strong talent at

  • understanding what’s important to the counterparty in a negotiation

  • Formulating a compromise proposal that addresses the underlying concern of the customer but protects Soda’s interest

• Calm, friendly demeanour in customer-facing negotiations

• Able to cope with irregular workloads and sudden short deadlines

• Strong at structuring and managing a lot of disparate, concurrent tasks - making sure nothing drops off the radar

• A capacity to manage internal stakeholders

Hard requirements

• Fluency in English equivalent to native speaker (in grammar, vocabulary and writing)

• Law degree

• Experience with hands-on legal work (in particular, commercial contract review - experience with SaaS contracts specifically is a plus)