General Counsel, Head of Legal

Summary

Join Devoted Studios, a global video game production management company, as their Head of Legal. You will oversee a wide range of legal responsibilities, focusing on international expansion, legal research, and process design. Key priorities include mitigating financial and operational risks, strengthening cross-functional legal workflows, proactively identifying and resolving legal risks, and designing a global legal structure and tax strategy. The role involves managing customer contracts, ensuring global tax compliance, implementing legal technology, advising on M&A activities, and managing legal operations. This is a remote, full-time contractor position offering a strong team, collaboration with the Finance Director, challenging tasks, and flexible working conditions.

Requirements

• English fluency is required
• Excellent communication, analytical, and organizational skills
• Master’s Degree in Law
• Minimum 10 years of high-quality experience in corporate law, preferably with a focus on international tax law, international corporate finance, and compliance, including at least 3 years of management experience (senior manager and partner level jobs)
• Demonstrated capability to manage complex legal projects and multiple stakeholder engagements in a dynamic environment

Responsibilities

• Lead legal reviews of customer contracts and personally negotiate the most complex provisions — indemnities, limitation-of-liability, IP ownership, data-protection, export-control, and governing-law clauses
• Coordinate any resulting changes with Business Development, Production, and Finance to safeguard the company’s interests and mitigate risk
• This responsibility will be shared with external counsel on a 30 % / 70 % basis
• Act as lead company negotiator with customers in resolving disputes and negotiating out-of-court settlements, protecting commercial relationships while minimising litigation risk
• Co-develop with the CFO a global tax strategy and target legal structure
• Advise on the design of the corporate legal structure, including creating subsidiaries and sub-holdings, their legal forms, countries and states of incorporation
• Maintain relevant documentation describing the tax strategy and target legal structure
• Conduct research and advise on global tax strategy matters to create a scalable and tax efficient legal structure
• Co-develop and maintain a comprehensive legal and tax compliance calendar to manage all regulatory deadlines and requirements effectively across jurisdictions
• Monitor country-by-country compliance with all statutory legal, financial and tax reporting and tax filing deadlines
• Assist internal accounting and tax department in dealing with external auditors and service providers
• This also includes annual compliance and reporting in areas such as CFC in the USA (subpart F regime, GILTI regime, foreign tax credits, etc.) and setting up respective processes and systems
• Conduct quarterly internal legal audits to identify and assess potential legal risks associated with the company’s operations and contractual engagements in all material areas of the business
• Co-develop with the CFO strategies and policies to mitigate identified risks, including implementing risk management protocols and training staff on compliance matters
• Ensure adherence to international data protection regulations such as GDPR
• Create policies and procedures to safeguard both corporate data
• Conduct ad-hoc legal research as warranted by business needs and as directed by the CFO
• Select and implement an AI-enabled CLM platform; own legal tech roadmap and budget
• Design legal processes and workflows
• Design and implement customer scoring and risk assessment procedures, including credit risk assessment, to define acceptable payment and credit terms
• Review and approve the scoring on a customer-by-customer basis
• Review and regularly update standard templates of customer agreements, vendor and contractor agreements, intra-group service agreements, cost sharing agreements, loan agreements, and respective SOWs, invoices, and certificates of acceptance
• Implement a matrix of obligatory, acceptable and unacceptable terms and provisions
• Implement (and conduct regular reviews of) a customer agreement review and approval process; vendor agreement review and approval process; operating supplier agreement review and approval process
• Update the design of JIRA workflows and an approval matrix
• Review and redesign the system (process) of contracts execution throughout their lifecycle, from initial review/drafting through approval, compliance, renewal, and termination
• Update the design of JIRA workflow and an approval matrix
• Design a simplified contract form for tests and low-value sales orders to speed up contract signing with small customers
• Structure strategic transactions with the CFO – recommend optimal deal types (asset vs. stock purchase, reverse merger, earn-out, joint venture) to balance valuation, tax efficiency, liability allocation and regulatory approval timelines
• Own the legal work-stream for buy-side and sell-side deals – lead data-room diligence, red-flag reporting and integration risk assessment; distill findings into SPA adjustments
• Draft and negotiate core transaction documents – term sheets, purchase & merger agreements, shareholder agreements, disclosure schedules, transition-service agreements and post-closing covenants; coordinate signing/closing check-lists with external counsel and bankers
• Advise on corporate-finance instruments – review and negotiate equity raises (SAFE, convertible notes, preferred rounds), debt facilities and warrant issuances; ensure securities-law compliance across the US (Reg D/144A), EU and Canada (NI 45-106)
• Act as lead company negotiator with counterpart counsels
• Find and contract new service providers for legal services, as required by business needs
• Register new legal entities
• Prepare all incorporation documents
• The preliminary scope is: the USA, Canada, and the EU
• Open bank accounts
• Open investing accounts at financial institutions
• Issue credit cards
• Manage capitalization tables and equity contribution documentation
• Conduct a legal review (audit) on a monthly basis that all the documentation (agreements, invoices, exhibits, certificates of acceptance, both intra-group and external) are in place, organized and properly signed
• Process inbound and outbound KYC/AML/financial regulations requests from banks and other financial institutions
• Prepare intra-company agreements and financing agreements, as requested
• Monitor all legislative and taxation changes in the USA, Canada, and the EU having an impact on Devoted Group
• Keep the CFO and the CLO updated with the legislative and taxation changes and advise on respective actions

Benefits

• Strong and enthusiastic team – you will have the opportunity for knowledge sharing, learning, and professional self-development
• Direct collaboration with the Finance Director
• Interesting and challenging tasks – solve diverse and challenging issues of a growing organization
• Convenient working conditions – remote work and flexible hours
• �� chance to work in a highly professional and dynamic team working in an International Game Production company, attractive remuneration package, and opportunities to develop professionally