Senior Legal & Business Affairs Manager

Job Reference: 22199
Band: E
Salary: £80,000 - £93,333 depending on relevant skills, knowledge and experience. Plus London Weighting Allowance £5,319 plus 15% bonus. The expected salary range for this role reflects internal benchmarking and external market insights.

Office Base is London TVC. This is a hybrid role - split between Television Centre, 101 Wood Lane, London W12 7FW and The Dryden, 45 Gerrard Street, London, W1D 5QQ. The successful candidate will balance office working with home working.

ABOUT BBC STUDIOS

BBC Studios is a world-renowned content studio and channels & streaming business, powered by British creativity, with a reach that touches audiences in every corner of the globe.

We work with outstanding creative talent who are responsible for platform-defining shows from Strictly Come Dancing to Eastenders, Prehistoric Planet to Planet Earth III.

The range and quality of our content is unsurpassed, creating critical and commercial successes and global phenomena.

From BAFTAs to RTS Awards, BBC Studios is Britain’s most awarded production company and the only producer with three of the top ten shows on IMDB; we’re the home of bbc.com, the widest-read English language news website in the world; and the UK’s largest distributor of British content.

ABOUT THE SCRIPTED BUSINESS & LEGAL AFFAIRS TEAM

The Scripted Business and Legal Affairs team works closely with the editorial and production leads to acquire intellectual property rights and secure talent to enable BBC Studios to develop and produce first class Scripted content. The Scripted genre is split into Comedy and Drama, and includes a number of wholly owned and invested Scripted labels.

THE ROLE

We have an opportunity for a Senior Business and Legal Affairs Manager who is passionate about television production to join the team permanently supporting our Comedy hub. This role works closely alongside and collaboratively with business and legal affairs colleagues across scripted.

The Scripted Business and Legal Affairs team supports many of the BBC’s high profile flagship Comedy series such as Inside Number 9, Here We Go, and Mrs. Browns Boys, as well as exciting new commissions for the BBC (such as Black Ops and Death Valley) and for other commissioning platforms such as Apple TV (Trying), Amazon (Good Omens) and Netflix (A Whole Lifetime with Jamie Demetriou). This is a dynamic team that sits in the heart of production, offering valued commercial, legal and practical business affairs support and advice to the Drama and Comedy Scripted Production teams and editorial leads.

You’ll support the Head of Business and Legal Affairs by overseeing business affairs activity within the Comedy genre, manage and develop members of the Comedy team, evaluate legal risk and escalate issues where appropriate and provide valued advice and support to commercial leads, Head of Comedy, production teams and across the genre on wide ranging and complex legal and business affairs work.

The role reports into the Head of Business and Legal Affairs, Comedy and acts as a senior point of advice and direction to the creative and production teams in the Comedy label and will act as a representative for business and legal affairs matters at BBC Studios Boards or Forums, if required. It operates in accordance with all relevant policies and frameworks and is a pivotal member of the team in implementing the rights and business strategy. The successful candidate will build, maintain and manage first class relationships with internal stakeholders, key external organisations and across BBC Studios and the BBC Group.

Key Responsibilities

• Manage a broad workload autonomously, referring upwards as required;
• Manage and mitigate business, financial, reputational and legal risk within the department and escalate as appropriate;
• Quickly build and foster close working relationships with editorial and production stakeholders, to ensure trust;
• Manage internal stakeholders, collating information from multiple departments and using this to support day-to-day decisions and to inform advice given to the business and co-production partners;
• Carry out negotiation and agreement of intricate legal documents;
• Experience of working in the scripted genre and provide tailored advice in this area. In particular, drafting and negotiating underlying rights agreements such as book options, co-production agreements and script, format and treatment agreements;
• Production experience and provide tailored advice in this area (e.g. familiarity with location agreements, clearances and talent agreements);
• Have a good working knowledge of the key framework agreements with the organisations representing underlying contributor rights in programmes (e.g. trade unions, collecting societies, trade associations and other representative bodies including Equity, PMA, WGGB, D:UK and, ideally, a familiarity with US guild agreements);
• Deliver effective and efficient framework deals and propose structures for complicated rights and commercial deals, understand and implement strategy, and provide a point of advice to decision makers;
• Offer support to the Head of Business and Legal Affairs for Comedy, including deputising when required;
• Effectively manage a number of other members of the Scripted Business and Legal Affairs Team;
• Offer advice and expertise relating to deficit financing arrangements and complex tax and location incentives from a legal point of view;
• Act as a pivotal senior member of the Scripted Business and Legal Affairs team, taking responsibility for key decision-making;
• Determine financial and other resourcing priorities in line with financial and business objective.

WHAT DOES IT TAKE?

KEY CRITERIA

• Legally qualified with significant commercial PQE experience as this role will require acting in a formal legal capacity.
• Comprehensive understanding of scripted business affairs for the television, radio and digital media industry.
• Ability to demonstrate extensive market knowledge, for example, in relation to development deals and talent fees, and a sound knowledge of underlying rights deals, programme making, production processes and deal making for scripted programmes.
• Experience leading and delivering complex projects within both time and budgetary constraints, manage a broad workload autonomously and unsupervised.

DESIRABLE

• An understanding of third party development and commissioning terms (e.g. Sky, Channel 4, UKTV, Amazon, Apple, Netflix) and of funding, rights acquisition and distribution issues and commissioning processes in this area would be highly advantageous. In addition, experience of working with US talent agencies and within the parameters of US union agreements (e.g. SAG, WGA, DGA) and of working in the Comedy genre would be favourable.
• Adept at dealing with conflicts and helping devise solutions where trade-offs involved.

LIFE AT BBC STUDIOS

We don’t focus simply on what we do – we also care how we do it. Our values and the way we behave are important to us. Please make sure you’ve read about our values and behaviours here.

The BBC is committed to building a culturally diverse workforce, that represents the audiences we serve, and encourages applications from candidates from any background, especially people from diverse communities. Equity of opportunity is important to us, and we endeavour to make our processes equal, fair and meritocratic for everybody.

BBC Studios puts sustainability at the heart of everything we do both onscreen and offscreen, including delivering against the BBC Group’s science-based Net Zero targets.

We are proud to share that we are a Level 2 Disability Confident Employer and if you require any reasonable adjustments in order to apply please contact us on reasonable.adjustments@bbc.co.uk.

WHAT YOU WILL GAIN FROM WORKING AT BBC STUDIOS?

• We offer a competitive salary package
• Flexible 35-hour working week for work-life balance
• 26 days holiday (plus an additional day which is a Corporation Day) with the option to buy an extra 5 days
• Parental leave for new parents, regardless of gender, of up to a year with 18 weeks fully paid
• A defined contribution pension scheme with employer contributions up to 10%; and life assurance (at 4 times annual salary), eligibility for discounted dental, health care, gym and much more through salary sacrifice
• Excellent career progression – access to courses, webinars, workshops and the opportunity to work in different areas of the organisation.

NEXT STEPS

We appreciate your interest in this position and understand how important this opportunity is to you. Due to the high volume of interest we may need to close the application period earlier than anticipated. This step is necessary to ensure we can provide a high level of attention and service to all applicants. Thank you for your understanding.

Please note: If you were to be offered this role, the BBC will conduct Employment screening checks which include Reference checks; Eligibility to work checks; and if applicable to the role, Safeguarding and Adverse media/Social media checks. Any offer made is conditional on these checks being satisfactory.

DISCLAIMER

This job description is a written statement of the essential characteristics of the job, with its principal accountabilities, incorporating a note of the skills, knowledge and experience required for a satisfactory level of performance. This is not intended to be a complete, detailed account of all aspects of the duties involved.