Legal Counsel

Dreamlab – Group Legal

Salary - 65,000- 80,000R per month

Reporting into the Senior Corporate Counsel

Salary based on experience

Hybrid, South Africa (Cape Town) Office

Company Introduction

Dreamlab is a diverse portfolio of experience companies operating across the UK and globally. The business invests in, supports and grows exciting business ventures across hospitality and entertainment, including (but not limited to) Michelin-starred chef restaurants, vibrant market stalls, leading white-labelled F&B products, international catering offerings and exciting entertainment ventures.

Role Introduction

We’re growing our Legal and Compliance team (currently 4) to support some exciting growth plans for the business into 2027 and beyond.

We’re looking for a capable and ambitious corporate lawyer with first-class drafting skills, meticulous attention to detail and strong commercial awareness. Working primarily alongside our Senior Corporate Counsel, you’ll play a key role in delivering corporate and corporate finance transactions across the group, while also supporting the Head of Legal on a range of commercial work streams. Precise, high-quality drafting and a sharp commercial eye are central to this role: you’ll be trusted to produce accurate, well-structured documents and to understand the commercial context behind every deal. This is an excellent opportunity for a lawyer looking to broaden their transactional experience within a fast-moving, entrepreneurial in-house environment and to grow with the team.

What You’ll Achieve

The role is subject to change and, like many in-house legal roles, you may be asked to support across all areas of law in many different jurisdictions. Your primary focus will be supporting the delivery of the group’s corporate transactions through precise, high-quality drafting and a strong commercial understanding, with the opportunity to build broad commercial experience alongside the Head of Legal. Examples of areas you’ll be involved in:

• Drafting, reviewing and marking up transactional documents to a high standard of accuracy and precision, ensuring consistency, internal coherence and attention to detail across all deal documentation.
• Supporting the Senior Corporate Counsel on M&A, joint ventures, and strategic partnerships, including assisting with due diligence, and helping to project manage transactions to completion.
• Assisting on debt and equity financing transactions facilitating investment across the portfolio, including preparing and reviewing term sheets, shareholder agreements, and investment documentation with a keen eye for detail.
• Supporting the Head of Legal across a range of commercial work streams, including drafting, reviewing and negotiating commercial contracts and supplier, customer and partnership arrangements, always with a strong sense of the commercial objectives at stake.
• Supporting corporate governance, board matters, and regulatory compliance across multiple jurisdictions (UK, US, Europe) for group entities.
• Assisting with cross-border transactions, including coordinating due diligence and liaising with internal stakeholders and external counsel across multiple jurisdictions.
• Helping to develop and maintain internal legal processes, precedents, playbooks and templates, contributing to consistently high drafting standards across the team.
• Contributing to the wider work of the legal team as the business grows, taking on increasing responsibility over time.

We want to build a world class legal offering that will be appreciated for our quality and integrity, as well as our legal and business advice. We will be true partners across the group and be trusted for our guidance so that our clients can in turn build on their potential to be the great businesses the group saw them to be when Dreamlab invested.

What You’ll Have Professional Excellence

• Qualified solicitor or equivalent with a minimum of 5 years of post-qualification experience (from a common law jurisdiction, UK or SA), developed within an international or reputable law firm and/or in-house within a fast-moving, multi-disciplinary environment.
• Exceptional drafting skills and meticulous attention to detail, with a proven ability to produce accurate, well-structured and internally consistent legal documents and to spot errors, gaps and inconsistencies that others may miss.
• Strong commercial awareness, with the ability to understand the business objectives behind a transaction and to provide practical, commercially-minded legal support that helps the business achieve its goals.
• Solid corporate and corporate finance experience, with exposure to M&A, financing transactions and/or investment work, and a genuine appetite to develop further in this area.
• Good working knowledge of corporate governance, directors’ duties, and regulatory compliance, with the ability to support advice to boards and senior leadership across a diverse portfolio of businesses.
• Confident drafting and negotiation skills across a range of transactional and commercial documents, such as SPAs, joint venture agreements, shareholder agreements, term sheets, investment documentation and commercial contracts.
• Experience supporting cross-border transactions and coordinating with internal teams and external counsel would be an advantage.

Personal Traits

• Early ventures can inevitably be a little chaotic and information may be hard to glean while the pace of business is fast. These are the investments we make and so the imperfection is what we’re here to fix. It’s therefore important that you can thrive in a dynamic, fast-paced environment where building structure and process from the ground up is a sign of success.
• A meticulous, detail-oriented approach to your work, taking genuine pride in producing precise, polished and error-free documents even under time pressure.
• A commercially astute mindset, with the judgement to balance legal risk against business priorities and to give practical, solutions-focused advice.
• A proactive, hands-on approach and a willingness to support senior colleagues while taking ownership of your own workstreams and driving them to completion.
• Strong organisational skills and the ability to manage competing priorities, keep transactions on track, and communicate clearly with internal stakeholders and external counsel across jurisdictions.
• A process-driven mindset, with an interest in helping to build and maintain internal precedents, playbooks, templates, and workflows that improve the efficiency and consistency of the legal function.
• Comfort with new technologies and an interest in new or innovative ways of working is strongly valued.
• A collaborative team player, eager to learn from senior colleagues and to contribute to a high-performing, supportive team culture.

Benefits

• 13th Cheque
• Parking Allowance