Paralegal / Contracts Negotiator

Vitol•Houston, TX

1d•Onsite

About The Position

This Contract Negotiator or Paralegal would have the responsibility to be the Legal Assignment and Commercial Contracts Coordinator and will serve as a central point of intake, organization, and execution support for the Legal Department. The role requires someone who can draft, revise, and edit day-to-day commercial agreements while also bringing discipline and visibility to the legal workflow across the company. The successful candidate must be commercially practical, highly organized, precise in written work, and comfortable working directly with commercial teams to understand what they need, when they need it, and who within Legal is best positioned to handle the work.

Requirements

At least 6 years of experience as a contract negotiator, paralegal, legal assistant, contracts specialist, legal operations coordinator, or similar role, preferably in a law firm, energy, commodities, trading, financial services, or other fast-paced commercial environment.
Experience drafting, revising, editing, and managing commercial contracts and related legal documentation.
Strong organizational skills and demonstrated ability to coordinate multiple matters, deadlines, stakeholders, and document versions at the same time.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to work effectively with commercial teams, attorneys, and internal control functions.
Strong attention to detail and ability to identify inconsistencies, missing information, process gaps, and execution issues.
Proficiency with Microsoft Office and legal automation tools, particularly Microsoft Word (including formatting, styles, and comparison tools), document management systems, virtual data rooms, and comparison programs.

Nice To Haves

Highly organized, reliable, and disciplined in follow-through.
Ownership of the process, not passive message forwarding.
Responsive and communicative.
Frequent status updates and coordination among different groups internally.
Commercially practical.
Understand that legal work supports business activity and must be handled with urgency, judgment, and clarity.
Comfortable dealing directly with traders, commercial personnel, lawyers, and control functions, including asking enough questions to understand the real objective behind the request.
Able to multi-task and manage competing priorities in a fast-moving environment without losing track of deadlines or details.
Proactive in identifying bottlenecks, missing information, approval gaps, and avoidable process failures.

Responsibilities

Serve as a primary intake and coordination point for legal requests from commercial teams and other internal stakeholders.
Meet with commercial personnel to understand the business objective, relevant facts, requested outcome, timing constraints, and any sensitivities associated with a legal request.
Assign or route work within the Legal Department based on subject matter, urgency, complexity, and internal responsibility.
Track legal assignments from intake through completion, following up with commercial teams and Legal Department members to keep matters moving and ensure deadlines are met.
Coordinate with Legal, Compliance, Credit, Insurance, Tax, Contracts, Demurrage, and other internal groups as needed to ensure agreements receive the appropriate review before execution.
Potentially provide coordination and support to attorneys on major transactions as needed, including maintaining checklists and tracking open items, managing virtual data rooms, reviewing documents for formatting and internal consistency, and assisting with the completion of conditions precedent and monitoring of post-closing obligations.
Arrange execution of agreements and ensure execution packages are complete, accurate, and properly routed.
Maintain organized and accurate records of executed agreements, amendments, correspondence, approvals, and related documentation in company systems, including Diva Counterparty, iManage, and other document management or contract tracking systems.
Draft, revise, edit, and manage day-to-day commercial agreements, primarily using approved templates and established forms.
Support the review and negotiation of ad hoc agreements, one-off contracts, amendments, confirmations, termination letters, service agreements, consulting agreements, NDAs, netting agreements, transportation-related agreements, storage or terminaling documents, purchase and sale documentation, and other commercial contracts as needed.