Senior Corporate Counsel

Discovery Education UK; Charlotte (NC); Hybrid; USD 170,000 - 189,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Insurance package

Tuition reimbursement

Mentorship program

Job summary

Discovery Education in Charlotte, NC is seeking a Senior Corporate Counsel to serve as a trusted legal partner across teams, reporting to the General Counsel. The role covers vendor, procurement, and operational matters, including data privacy, AI governance, and marketing compliance.

You will help align legal effort with business risk, triage requests, and support scalable, self-service approaches while advising on products, content, and customer impact.

Qualifications

• J.D. and active membership in good standing of at least one U.S. state bar.
• 8+ years of relevant legal experience, including in-house, government, or law firm experience drafting, negotiating, and advising on a broad range of agreements.
• Sophisticated, practical contract drafting and negotiation skills, with the ability to balance business objectives, customer commitments, operational needs, and appropriate legal risk management.
• Experience counseling a product or technology organization, including advising on how vendor and business arrangements may affect products, content, data, customers, or operations.

Responsibilities

• Review, draft, and negotiate a high volume of diverse vendor, procurement, and operational agreements, including vendor and SaaS agreements, independent contractor agreements and SOWs, NDAs, and marketing and advertising arrangements, frequently on third-party paper.
• Issue-spot and triage incoming legal requests across business lines, managing competing priorities and varying urgency levels.
• Advise on data protection, COPPA, and privacy considerations in vendor arrangements, including data processing terms and appropriate handling of customer and student information.
• Spot and address routine trademark clearance, copyright, content-usage, gifting, sweepstakes, and related marketing compliance matters.
• Use technology, templates, playbooks, and lower-touch or self-service approaches to align legal effort to business risk and support efficient handling of routine work.

Education

J.D. and U.S. state bar in good standing

Job description

We are looking for a highly skilled Senior Corporate Counsel to serve as a trusted legal partner to teams across our business. Reporting to the General Counsel, this role will support vendor, procurement, and operational matters across business lines and support functions, including Product, Marketing, Finance, HR, IT, Security, Production, and Content. You will counsel on the goods, services, technology, and relationships that enable the business and our products to operate. This is a high-visibility role for an experienced attorney who can work independently, manage varied legal intake, exercise sound judgment, and escalate novel, high-risk, or strategically significant matters as appropriate. Beyond handling day-to-day legal work, you will contribute to improving how legal services are delivered by aligning legal effort to business risk and supporting smarter, more scalable ways of working.

We are a tech-forward legal team. We run intake and triage through Asana, redline with an AI-powered contract tool, and use AI tools to search, analyze, and improve how we work. We value curiosity, experimentation, and practical adoption of tools that help the legal team deliver efficient, business-aligned support.

In This Role You Will

Handling Vendor, Procurement, and Operational Matters

• Review, draft, and negotiate a high volume of diverse vendor, procurement, and operational agreements, including vendor and SaaS agreements, independent contractor agreements and SOWs, NDAs, and marketing and advertising arrangements, frequently on third-party paper.
• Issue-spot and triage incoming legal requests across business lines, managing competing priorities and varying urgency levels.
• Advise on data protection, COPPA, and privacy considerations in vendor arrangements, including data processing terms and appropriate handling of customer and student information.
• Spot and address routine trademark clearance, copyright, content-usage, gifting, sweepstakes, and related marketing compliance matters.
• Use technology, templates, playbooks, and lower-touch or self-service approaches to align legal effort to business risk and support efficient handling of routine work.

Applying Product-Counseling Judgment

• Recognize when a vendor, procurement, or operational matter has broader product, content, data, or business implications and engage more deeply as a product-minded legal partner.
• Partner with business and product stakeholders on important relationships, helping anticipate downstream impacts to our products, content, data, and customers.
• Escalate novel, high-risk, or strategically significant matters to the General Counsel as appropriate.

AI-Related Vendor and Product Counseling

• Support the company’s review process for AI tools and vendors by providing legal and procurement perspective on use cases, vendor practices, contractual terms, and risk considerations alongside Security and other stakeholders.
• Help ensure vendor contracts include appropriate protections related to AI, data use, confidentiality, intellectual property, security, and customer commitments.
• Advise the business when AI is incorporated as a user-facing feature in our products, as part of counseling on significant product features.
• Stay current on how vendors deploy and use AI, and help the business navigate associated legal and contractual considerations.

Core Competencies For Success

• Decision Quality: Makes sound, timely decisions using practical legal judgment, business context, available information, and appropriate risk tolerance. Knows when to move work forward independently, when to recommend a path, and when to elevate novel, high-risk, or strategically significant matters.
• Manages Complexity: Effectively evaluates varied and sometimes ambiguous legal issues across contracts, privacy, IP, AI, product, procurement, and operational matters. Identifies the core issue, separates routine from higher-risk work, and helps stakeholders understand practical options, trade-offs, and implications.
• Business Insight: Applies an understanding of the company’s products, customers, operations, and risk tolerance to provide legal advice that is practical, business-aligned, and scalable. Connects legal guidance to product, content, data, vendor, and customer impact.
• Collaborates: Builds trusted working relationships across Product, Marketing, Finance, HR, IT, Security, Production, Content, and Legal. Works cooperatively with stakeholders to solve problems, manage risk, and move work forward while maintaining appropriate legal standards.
• Tech Savvy: Uses legal technology, AI-assisted tools, intake systems, templates, and process improvements to increase efficiency, consistency, and scalability. Demonstrates curiosity and sound judgment in adopting tools that improve legal service delivery while maintaining quality and risk awareness.

Credentials And Experience

• J.D. and active membership in good standing of at least one U.S. state bar.
• 8+ years of relevant legal experience, including in-house, government, or law firm experience drafting, negotiating, and advising on a broad range of agreements.
• Sophisticated, practical contract drafting and negotiation skills, with the ability to balance business objectives, customer commitments, operational needs, and appropriate legal risk management.
• Demonstrated experience drafting, negotiating, and advising on procurement, vendor, technology/SaaS, independent contractor, SOW, NDA, and marketing-related agreements.
• Experience counseling a product or technology organization, including advising on how vendor and business arrangements may affect products, content, data, customers, or operations.
• Familiarity with data privacy, intellectual property, AI governance, and/or the education technology sector is a strong plus.
• Track record of working independently, managing competing priorities, and exercising sound judgment with appropriate escalation.
• Curiosity and willingness to learn, adapt, and apply new tools, technologies, and ways of working.
• Legal right to work in the United States.

This role is designed to be hybrid and based in Charlotte, NC. As a role that serves as a trusted local legal partner to our business teams, only candidates with reasonable proximity to Charlotte, NC will be reviewed for consideration. You can expect to work primarily in a typical office setting.

The hiring range for this position is between $170,300 - $189,200 annually, however, base pay offered may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and location. Additionally, this position is eligible for an Annual Bonus.

At Discovery Education, we are fulfilling our mission of preparing learners for tomorrow by creating innovative classrooms connected to today's world.

Serving more than 4.5 million educators and 45 million students, available in approximately half of U.S. classrooms and primary schools in the UK, and more than 140 countries around the globe; we are on a journey to transform teaching and learning though innovative partnerships with school districts, states, ministries of education, and other like-minded organizations.

We have built an award-winning and highly reputable organization because of talented and driven people who work together to accelerate student achievement by tapping into students' natural curiosity and desire to learn by capturing their minds and imagination through the fascination of Discovery.

Why Join Discovery Education?

Discovery Education believes empowering each team member is vital to cultivating high performing, highly engaged teams. Being a part of our team means we partner together to achieve mutual goals. To this end, Discovery Education offers a robust and comprehensive insurance package. You can find a complete listing on our Career Page.

Along with traditional insurance offerings, our inclusive offerings center around:

• Career Development Ownership - Be the driver of your success!
• Continuing Education AND Tuition Reimbursement Programs
• Mentorship program and collaboration with veteran leaders
• Constant opportunities for cross-functional training and skill building
• Uncapped career growth

Team Member Wellness – When you feel great, you do great work!

• Leave for life's moments including 7 recognized holidays
• Take PTO without the vacation guilt
• Up to 12 weeks of Paid Parental Leave
• Annual Winter Holiday Break (typically the last week of December)

This opportunity is perfect for people interested in joining a high-performing, collaborative team, who enjoy a dynamic industry, and are excited about high-impact, project-based work.

Discovery Education is an equal opportunity employer. Discovery Education is committed to being an employer of choice, not just a good place to work, but a great and inclusive place to work. To that end, we strive to recruit and maintain a workforce that meaningfully represents the communities we serve. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to their race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender, protected veteran status or disabled status, or genetic information.