Senior Lawyer - Protection of Wild Land

We are looking for an ambitious and passionate Senior Lawyer to join The Lifescape Project and play an integral role in the expansion of our conservation covenant and protection of wild land work.

About Us and Rewilding Law Projects

We are a small but growing UK-registered charity which undertakes projects that protect and restore wild landscapes, helping to provide a future for all life on earth. We use the skills and expertise of our multi-disciplinary team (spanning science, law, economics, technology and culture) to develop projects that protect and restore wild, natural landscapes.

Find out more about our mission and our team on our website: https://lifescapeproject.org/who-we-are/ 

Job Purpose and Key Responsibilities

The Protection of Wild Land

The focus of your role will be to secure the long-term protection of wild land. This is a vital aspect of nature restoration as without it, current efforts to restore nature could be lost to future development or land use re-assignment.

In Autumn 2024, The Lifescape Project became a Responsible Body (under the Environment Act 2021) able to enter into conservation covenants for biodiversity net gain and other purposes. We aim to hold gold-standard covenants over sites targeting large scale nature restoration, as demonstrated in the covenants we already hold over the Knepp estate and Nattergal.

As our reputation for being a robust and ecologically-focussed Responsible Body grows alongside market demand, we are looking to recruit a Senior Lawyer to manage our covenants on a day-to-day basis.

Working closely with our Managing Lawyer, your role will include:

• Having initial exploratory meetings (over Teams) with landowners interested in entering into conservation covenants with Lifescape.
• Preparing quotes for landowners to enter into conservation covenants.
• Negotiating heads of terms.
• Undertaking financial and legal due diligence on landowners after heads of terms have signed and liaising with our in-house ecologist on ecological due diligence.
• Drafting and negotiating conservation covenants.
• Managing the ongoing monitoring of covenants.
• Assisting with the marketing of the conservation covenant workstream to landowners (networking, blogs, conferences, presentations etc).
• Task-managing more junior members of the team to support your work, including trainee secondees.

We are also a Responsible Body to hold conservation burdens in Scotland, and your role will involve pursuing the opportunity to place burdens over land on a voluntary basis in Scotland and for BNG purposes once the Scottish Biodiversity Metric goes live in the coming years.

In addition, you will be involved in our ongoing work to develop and put in place other legal mechanisms to protect land and potentially in the development of a programme to monitor and enforce appropriate standards in nature markets (depending on your experience).

Location

This is a remote-working position and will involve some UK and international travel. The full team meets in person at least three times a year. These are multi-day meetings, usually held in UK and European areas relevant to rewilding. The nature of the work means that we are in very regular contact on Teams etc, ensuring a strong connection amongst the team.

Applicants who are resident in the UK with appropriate qualifications and experience will be considered.

Salary and Benefits

• Full-time and permanent position with a salary of £51,000 - £52,500 per annum (depending on experience).
• Performance based annual salary increases available.
• Flexible working can be agreed with the successful candidate, as can temporary international remote work outside country of residence.

Closing date: Midnight on Sunday 22 February 2026.

If you would like to talk to someone about the role before you apply, please contact Sarah Hyslop in the first instance: sarah.hyslop@lifescapeproject.org

While the official closing date for applications is 22 February, we will be reviewing applications as they come in. Interviews will take place virtually on Microsoft Teams.

The role will commence as soon as possible.