Working at Clarivate: Life as head of the Clarivate legal team

Vicky joined Clarivate 10 years ago. She is based in the London office where she heads up the global legal team, currently comprising 10 employees and sitting within the general counsel office. In this blog, she talks about her varied role and why every day at Clarivate is different.

 

A legal opportunity

I joined Clarivate in 2009 when the business was Thomson Reuters, but even prior to this I worked with Thomson Reuters on secondment when I was employed by Slaughter & May. However, it doesn’t seem this long at all as the nature of my job means that no two days are the same.

I lead the Clarivate legal team of 10 lawyers who are a mixture of generalists and specialists. For example, we have an employment lawyer, a privacy lawyer and a vendor contracts specialist all sitting within the team. It’s unusual for me to get involved in these areas on a day-to-day basis but I do if it’s necessary.

 

No typical day

It is hard to describe my typical day as there isn’t one! That’s one of the reasons that I really enjoy working at Clarivate — the variety and opportunities here are tremendous, as is the passion and dedication of my colleagues.

Another exciting aspect of my role is that I get to work with a wide variety of our customers, employees and other stakeholders. I also support our acquisition activities and that has become a significant part of my role lately. It’s interesting to be involved in negotiating with sellers and working through the due diligence to bring onboard new talent and products.

For example, we recently acquired SequenceBase, a leader in providing patent sequence information and search technology to the biotech, pharmaceutical and chemical industries. It’s very gratifying to have worked on a project that will help our customers to pursue new and innovative biological drugs more easily.

 

It’s interesting to be involved in negotiating with sellers and working through the due diligence to bring onboard new talent and products.

 

Thankfully we don’t have many disputes, but I will get involved with any that are escalated. Often these will be dealt with before they get to my team. The data in our products and services is critical and so content questions feature heavily in my day-to-day job. We are an innovative analytics company, but we must be clear about our rights to use this information within our business and what we can allow customers to do with the data.

Delighting our customers and employees

Another exciting development for the business was becoming publicly listed on the New York Stock Exchange earlier this year. In fact, making sure that we are complying with all our legal obligations as a publicly listed company has been another big focus area for the legal team over the last six months.

We also like to enjoy some social time together in the London office when time allows. We have a great social committee as well as LGBT+ and women’s networks which put on some very well attended events. Diversity is celebrated very well across the London office as well as the rest of the organization.

The next big event is the end of year party which is always a great evening and everyone really looks forward to it. Last year it was themed in a ‘Hollywood style’ with Oscars awarded on the night!

Clarivate provides a fast-paced environment and the chance to work with experts who are incredibly passionate about what they do. There are certainly no dull days — the variety and career development on offer are vast — which is why I am still excited to be working here after more than 10 years.

To find out more about working with Clarivate and our current opportunities visit: careers.clarivate.com.

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