Full Job Description
The Vice President & General Counsel, Abcam is responsible for leading Abcam's global legal function and serving as a strategic legal and business partner to Abcam's President and leadership team. This role provides leadership, guidance, direction, and support across a broad range of legal, regulatory, compliance, privacy, intellectual property, commercial, litigation, trade, and business matters globally, while enabling Abcam to advance its strategy, manage enterprise risk, and scale legal support efficiently through DBS-enabled operating discipline.
This position reports to the Vice President & General Counsel, Danaher LS Omics Solutions Group and is part of the Life Sciences Omics Solutions Group Legal organization supporting Abcam located in Waltham, Massachusetts and will be an on-site role.
In this role, you will have the opportunity to:
• Shape and drive Abcam's legal strategy by partnering with senior leadership to build and execute a forward-looking, business-informed legal strategy that enables growth, manages enterprise risk, and supports priorities including commercial expansion, product and regulatory positioning, partnerships, and M&A.
• Serve as trusted counselor to Abcam's President and leadership team on complex, high-stakes, and cross-functional matters, bringing clear judgment to legal risk decisions and ensuring the right legal expertise is engaged at the right time across Abcam, Danaher Life Science Omics Solutions Group, and Corporate teams.
• Lead a high-performing global legal function that delivers proactive strategic advising at the point of impact, efficient and cost-effective routine legal support, effective outside counsel and budget management, and continuous improvement in how legal services are designed and delivered.
• Enable Abcam's commercial and innovation agenda by advising on customer, supplier, distributor, channel, licensing, collaboration, co-development, sponsored research, material transfer, e-commerce, data-sharing, and strategic partnership arrangements that support Abcam's research tools, reagents, antibody, assay, diagnostic, and therapeutic-adjacent business model.
• Oversee legal support for product, regulatory, quality, privacy, trade, and compliance risk across Abcam's global footprint, including product claims and promotional review, data privacy and protection, export controls and sanctions, ethics and compliance, investigations, and risk management in collaboration with enterprise subject matter experts.
• Support business development, M&A, and integration activities by advising on diligence, transaction risk, deal structure, integration, and post-close governance that support Danaher and Abcam strategic objectives.
• Develop future-ready legal talent and embed DBS into legal operations by building a diverse and inclusive team, strengthening succession planning, coaching leaders, using data and process discipline to improve speed, quality, cost, and risk outcomes, and applying continuous improvement tools such as standard work, problem solving, policy deployment, and operational metrics.
The essential requirements of the job include:
• Juris Doctor (J.D.) from an accredited law school and active bar membership in good standing in at least one U.S. jurisdiction.
• 15+ years of progressive legal experience in a complex, global, regulated, technology-based, life sciences, biotechnology, diagnostics, medical device, pharmaceutical, research tools, or adjacent scientific products business.
• 7+ years of legal leadership experience, including experience leading legal professionals or multidisciplinary legal teams and managing outside counsel, legal budgets, and legal service delivery.
• Experience serving as a senior legal advisor to executive leadership on enterprise legal strategy, governance, commercial growth, risk management, product/regulatory strategy, and cross-functional business decisions.
• Broad legal expertise across commercial contracting, strategic transactions, intellectual property, regulatory and product counseling, privacy and data protection, ethics and compliance, trade and export controls, litigation and dispute management, and M&A/business development.
• Experience operating in complex, matrixed and multi-jurisdictional organizations, including effective collaboration with Legal, Compliance, IP, Regulatory Affairs, Quality, HR, EHS, IT, Finance, Commercial, R&D, Manufacturing, and Operations stakeholders.
• Experience applying legal operations, continuous improvement, legal technology, AI-enabled workflows, standard work, metrics, or other process disciplines to improve legal function speed, quality, cost, scalability, and risk management.
Travel, Motor Vehicle Record & Physical/Environment Requirements:
• Ability to travel domestically and internationally as business needs require, expected up to 25-35%.
• Ability to work in a standard office environment and attend in-person leadership, business, customer, and functional meetings in Waltham, MA and other Abcam/Danaher locations as needed.
It would be a plus if you also possess previous experience in:
• Legal leadership in life sciences reagents, antibodies, assays, protein biology, research tools, diagnostics, therapeutic discovery, or other product-based scientific tools businesses.
• Experience advising on data-driven or e-commerce-enabled life sciences business models, including data sharing, digital product information, privacy and data protection, AI, and legal technology governance.
• Experience with Danaher Business System, Lean, Kaizen, policy deployment, daily management, structured problem solving, or similar continuous improvement systems in a legal, compliance, quality, operations, or commercial environment.
Abcam, a Danaher operating company, offers a broad array of comprehensive, competitive benefit programs that add value to our lives. Whether it's a health care program or paid time off, our programs contribute to life beyond the job. Check out our benefits at Danaher Benefits Info.
The annual salary range OR the hourly range for this role is $250,000-350,000. This is the range that we in good faith believe is the range of possible compensation for this role at the time of this posting. This range may be modified in the future.
This job is also eligible for bonus/incentive pay.
We offer comprehensive package of benefits including paid time off, medical/dental/vision insurance and 401(k) to eligible employees.
Note: No amount of pay is considered to be wages or compensation until such amount is earned, vested, and determinable. The amount and availability of any bonus, commission, benefits, or any other form of compensation and benefits that are allocable to a particular employee remains in the Company's sole discretion unless and until paid and may be modified at the Company's sole discretion, consistent with the law.
