Government Legal Department

The Government Legal Department (GLD) is the largest provider of legal services across government, working with all the main Whitehall Departments. From roads to rivers, and health to human rights, our work touches on most aspects of public life.

GLD has 15 client-facing advisory divisions who provide legal advice on the development, design and implementation of government policies and decisions, support policy officials and Ministers and work with Parliamentary Counsel on the development of primary and secondary legislation. We are a non-ministerial government department with more than 1,800 qualified lawyers, running one of the largest legal businesses in the country. GLD is based primarily in London but has expanding teams in Bristol, Leeds and the North West.

As an organisation our vision is to provide consistently excellent services which concurrently represent value for money. Through our high quality work, we want to instil trust in public services and support government departments with their legal needs. We want to be known throughout the legal profession for the quality of our legal work, and to be the best employer for our people.

To understand the other work Lawyers in Government do, please watch the below video:

Current needs

A unique opportunity has arisen for a number of Senior Lawyers to join the GLD on advising and developing legislation on unprecedented scale and complexity. This work is to help us deal with an increased demand for legal services due to the UK’s upcoming departure from the European Union. We have a wide variety of truly unique work available on Fixed Term Appointments of up to 2 years.

This exceptional opportunity to join one of the largest legal businesses in the country, at a truly ground-breaking time, is open to Senior Lawyers with relevant specialist expertise in at least one of the following fields:

What we’re looking for

We’d like to hear from lawyers with substantial experience and relevant specialist expertise in at least one of the following fields:

• Legislative drafting, especially secondary legislation
• Bill or planning experience
• Commercial experience, including commercial contracts, public procurement
• Rail franchising
• Financial services law
• International trade law
• Agricultural law, fisheries law or food law
• Environmental law
• Employment law
• Local government law, especially housing and local government finance
• Pensions – private pensions and/or public sector schemes
• Media law
• Telecoms and broadband
• Specific experience in company law, insolvency law, competition / state aid
• Experience of working for the Bank of England, FCA, HMRC
• Knowledge of tax law, financial law.
• WTO experience, trade remedies, negotiation of Free-Trade Agreements