Booking Holdings Romania - Legal Operations Lead

Booking Holdings Romania is a Center of Excellence based in Bucharest, Romania and was created to support the increasing business demands of the Booking Holdings Brands. The Center of Excellence provides access to specialized and highly skilled talent, leading industry best practices, and collaboration opportunities across all of our Brands.

As part of our Booking Holdings Romania team, you will have the opportunity to be a part of the world's leading provider of online travel, with a mission of making it easier for everyone to experience the world through five-primary consumer facing brands: Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, KAYAK and OpenTable.

Role description

Booking Holdings Inc. is currently looking for a Legal Operations Lead to provide global legal operations support from our Center of Excellence (COE) located in Bucharest, Romania.

The Legal Operations Lead will work directly with the Booking Holdings Inc. Legal Team, other leaders and Departments. The role will also liaise across the Booking Holdings family of brands and work with brand Legal Ops departments and lawyers to ensure that Corporate objectives are met.

The Legal Operations Lead will promote legal service delivery excellence, client satisfaction, accurate recordkeeping, and continuous process improvement. The role will manage legal systems and processes for Booking Holdings Inc. including systems related to the management of legal matters; billing and invoicing from law firms and legal vendors; recordkeeping; projects and legal workflow; entities; contracts; and, metrics, benchmarking and reporting.

The Legal Operations Lead must have flexibility to adapt to changing priorities, business and organizational needs. In addition, the role must have the ability to operate independently in a fast-paced, small but growing environment and work proactively with various teams across the organization.

Key Job Responsibilities and Duties

• Process improvement: Find opportunities to improve processes, learn about and share best practices, develop playbooks, create training and improve efficiency for the legal team.
• Technology: Implement and handle technology solutions to optimize legal performance, including: contracts and matter management tools, budget, matter and vendor tracking software. Stay up to date on legal operations industry trends and advise on needed upgrades and improvements to business processes and tools.
• Budget management: Organize the legal department budget, including staying on top of the planning cycle and delivering regular reports
• Legal Vendor management: Supervise expense control and guide the external vendor relations, including: vendor onboarding, overseeing Legal Tracker, reviewing of billing rates, and ensuring compliance with company policies and billing guidelines.
• Contracts Management: Work with the legal and business teams to facilitate contract tracking, record-keeping, and loading contracts into Conga, the global contract management database.
• Project management: Using strong attention to detail, help the Legal team stay on track with organization, storage, and timelines for ongoing matters.
• Reporting & Analytics: Develop and implement appropriate metrics and benchmarking through data analytics to measure and report on the Legal Team's performance both within and outside the department. Create and distribute regular performance reports using legal team tools, including but not limited to Conga and Legal Tracker.
• Group-wide partnership: Facilitate communications and deliverables between the Legal Team, and group brands to help ensure deliverables, obligations and strategic goals are met.
• Learning & Development. Identify key educational and learning opportunities to advance operations and performance of the Legal Team, including training sessions, internal and external speakers, and coordination with the parent company.

Role Qualifications and Requirements

• Bachelor degree / Specialized Diploma
• 5- 8 years relevant job knowledge
• 5+ years of experience as a paralegal, legal assistant or operations lead, or comparable legal administration and/or management experience.
• Demonstrated experience of standardizing legal processes and administering contract, budget management, and legal matter management systems
• High level of experience managing various legal administrative tasks with ease
• Strong skills on using reporting tools, presentation drafting tools, etc. (ex. PowerPoint, Excel, G-suite)
• Prior experience with relevant legal, project management and operational tools (ideally including Conga & Legal Tracker, but not required)
• Prior experience working directly with key partners throughout an organization including senior leadership, commercial sales & marketing, customer service and HR
• Ability to read, understand and review legal invoices
• Good judgment, high integrity, and strong communication skills
• Stellar organizational skills; proactivity; ability to follow up follow up to execute on tasks
• Comfortable operating under pressure
• In-house experience in a technology company legal department a plus
• A strong multitasker. The ability to effectively work across various time zones and balance challenging demands is critical.
• The Right Results, the Right Way is not just a motto at BHI; it's a way of life. Unquestionable integrity and ethics is essential.
• Legal education is preferred education, but not required.

Benefits & Perks

• Contributing to a high scale, complex, world renowned product and seeing real-time impact of your work on millions of travelers worldwide
• Working in a fast-paced and performance driven culture
• Technical, behavioral and interpersonal competence advancement via on-the-job opportunities, experimental projects, hackathons, conferences and active community participation
• Competitive compensation and benefits package
• Vast amounts of data to validate your ideas and the opportunity to experiment with real users

Booking Holdings is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status. We strive to move well beyond traditional equal opportunity and work to create an environment that allows everyone to thrive.

Pre-Employment Screening:

If your application is successful, your personal data may be used for a pre-employment screening check by a third party as permitted by applicable law. Depending on the vacancy and applicable law, a pre-employment screening may include employment history, education and other information (such as media information) that may be necessary for determining your qualifications and suitability for the position.