Head of Research & Delivery

Legal 500; Leeds; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Legal 500 is seeking a senior leader to own end-to-end delivery of our research cycles from planning to reporting. You will provide strategic leadership, oversee multiple research projects and manage managers, ensuring high-quality execution across our market-leading products.

You will drive resourcing, succession planning, and a culture of continuous improvement, partnering with Sales, Customer Success and Product teams to align priorities and performance.

Qualifications

• Experience managing managers and 35–40+ staff.
• Background in information, editorial or research settings.
• Proven ability to drive process improvement and KPIs.

Responsibilities

• Lead a team delivering multiple research projects with end-to-end accountability.
• Support managers in resourcing and continuous improvement culture.
• Own succession planning and talent pipeline across workload cycles.
• Drive KPI implementation and monitor productivity improvements.
• Provide accurate reporting on research stages to stakeholders.

Skills

Resource management

Workload planning

Project management

Information/editorial/research setting

People management

Continuous improvement

Tools

AI tooling

Data analytics tools

Job description

About Legal 500 Legal 500 is a global legal market research, data and intelligence business. Our research helps corporate clients make informed decisions about legal representation and gives law firms insight into their market position, performance, and clients. Beyond research, we're building a growing data, benchmarking, market-intelligence and subscription service offering. We bring the legal market together through a global programme of events - awards ceremonies, conferences and roundtables that convene leading law firms, in-house teams and their advisers. And through Legal Business, our journalistic title, we deliver independent news, analysis and commentary on the business of law and the strategy, performance and leadership of the world's leading law firms. We are a growing, multi-site organisation, with colleagues working across research, data, technology, product, journalism, commercial and events in London, Leeds and Bristol.

About the role: This is a new role, ultimately designed for someone to own end-to-delivery of our research cycles. This encompasses everything from planning and risk mitigation through to execution and reporting across Legal 500's suite of market-leading research products. This role will provide strategic leadership and operational oversight to ensure consistent and high-quality execution of our research products. As well as people management responsibility (managing of other people managers), you will also have accountability for responsible for building the capability and talent pipeline as research priorities and operations evolve.

What you'll be doing:

• Leading a team involved in the delivery of multiple research projects with ultimate accountability for end-to-end delivery and excution of our research (including planning, execution, monitoring, risk management and control)
• Supporting the research managers in managing resourcing pipelines whilst building a culture in the team of continuous improvement
• Owning succession planning and a talent pipeline whilst having a handle of workload capacity across the natural peaks and troughs that naturally occur in research cycles
• Helping drive a continuous improvement mindset through, for example, implementing appropriate KPIs (and monitoring performance) and identifying opportunities for increased productivity
• Ensure that accurate reporting and data on the various stages of the research is provided to all relevant stakeholders, and identifying potential risks/providing updates to relevant stakeholders (cross-business)

What we're looking for:

• A background in resource management, workload planning and project management, ideally in an information, editorial or research setting (though there are certainly other industries where there would be a large amount of crossover)
• Comfort operating both within a large research-focused department (ca. 100 people) and across a business - key stakeholders for this role sit across our Sales, Customer Success and Product teams
• Experience managing managers and, ideally, being accountable for a sizeable team (35/40+)
• An attitude of continuous improvement when it comes to technology, tooling and process - identifying opportunity for improvement, whether it be an AI-focused solution or a process tweak or otherwise

Role information:

• This role is based in Leeds (central location, close to Leeds station)
• Hybrid working - 3 days a week in the office, 2 days remote