Full-Time Director, America's Commercial Attorney

Cognizant has an opening for a Director-level commercial counsel who will serve as a senior attorney for Cognizant’s Americas Commercial Legal team, supporting a business unit’s lead counsel and acting as a trusted point of contact for all commercial initiatives; driving transactions to execution and other matters to favorable results.

The candidate must have prior experience serving as commercial counsel for senior business leaders (up to SVP) and managing a variety of aspects of commercial contracting. The candidate should also have extensive experience supporting project bids, negotiating service agreements, strategic alliance and partnering agreements, net-accounting reseller agreements, joint ventures, data protection agreements, product development agreements, and other similar types of commercial
agreements with complex intellectual property, licensing, privacy, indemnity, liability, and associated risk allocation issues. The ideal candidate will have experience training and managing a team of support attorneys and SMEs situated around the globe, as well as significant front-line experience providing strategic counsel to effectively structure, negotiate and close transactions with Fortune 500 companies. Experience managing outside counsel is also preferred. The candidate must possess exemplary communication and organizational skills and should have prior experiencing interfacing directly with Fortune 200 company executives.

Job Responsibilities Include:

• Serve as a trusted legal and commercial advisor to other senior business and legal leaders.
• Coordinate all legal matters arising in applicable business unit.
• Coordinate complex legal and commercial deal reviews and escalations, taking a solution-oriented approach focused on providing, rather than seeking, direction.
• Ensure legal support needs are well-prioritized based on impact and urgency
• Collaborate with team of commercial attorneys and their workflow across U.S., Nearshore (Guatemala) and Offshore (India) in order to optimize legal support and “rate right, right role” pyramid structure.
• Draft, review, and negotiate a wide array of complex and high risk/high value technology transaction agreements.
• Provide and/or coordinate oversight necessary to ensure compliance with applicable regulations and company policies.
• Provide strategic counsel to help analyze and assess business processes, identify issues/risk and offer solutions.
• Help drive process improvement and efficiencies across the service lines and commercial contract teams.
• Advise on issues with varying degrees of risk, including potentially adversarial issues, arising under commercial agreements with customers.
• Collaborate with legal colleagues to assist in the development and maintenance of legal templates, playbooks, updated contracting policies, negotiation best practices, and escalation process/policy.

This position requires the following qualifications:

• Licensed attorney with a minimum of 7+ years’ expertise in commercial transactions or M&A, preferably with both large law firm and at least one (1) year in-house commercial transactions experience.
• Ability to effectively and efficiently communicate with senior executives and business leaders.
• Experience in a wide variety of contract drafting and negotiations, preferably representing a client without significant contracting leverage.
• Experience with various deployment models relative to software and technology services (on premises, managed services, software-as-a-service, public/private cloud arrangements), system integration, or other commercial agreements with complex intellectual property, licensing, privacy, indemnity, and liability issues.
• Ability to work efficiently, meet demanding deadlines in a fast-paced environment, prioritize work, and adjust to frequent workload fluctuations across multiple time zones;
• Interest in working in a rapidly changing and diverse environment, with comfort navigating through ambiguous situations.
• Ability to train and manage attorneys as well as other legal and compliance professionals
• Ability to demonstrate and champion effective leadership behaviors.
• Commitment to promoting an ethical workplace culture and supporting compliance processes.

All candidates required to be licensed or have in house licensure in the state in which they work.

Salary and Other Compensation:

Applications will be accepted until December 31, 2024.