At BCLP, we’ve built our firm on the foundations of thinking differently. Curious, inquisitive and unbound by tradition, we’re building change within our sector and beyond.
It starts with our people, which is why we need a Legal Practice Assistant to join our team and to provide fee earners with effective, pro-active, professional and high quality LPA support that enables them to focus on providing legal services to clients. It is a key requirement that the LPA is able to demonstrate exceptional organizational skills and an ability to use their initiative at all times. They will be an integral part of a busy team and will need to interact daily with partners, fee earners and clients to understand ever-changing needs, and have the ability to prioritize workloads and liaise with Legal Admin Assistants, DPS and other support functions to ensure timely delivery. An LPA may also have work delegated to them from an LPA with coordinating responsibilities.
You’ll be responsible for:
Organisation, diary and contact management:
- Pro-actively manage and maintain partner and fee earners' diaries, making appointments and co-ordinating internal and external client meetings, and ensure all work activities are scheduled effectively, including the identification and resolution of potential challenges and clashes.
- Arrange (or delegate to Legal Admin Assistants) the booking of meeting rooms, video conference facilities, cars, refreshments, restaurants etc, and liaise with internal and external meeting attendees.
- Management of fee earners’ inboxes when they are out of the office (holidays/long meetings) and monitoring and responding to post and/or emails, prioritising correspondence to enable fee earners to focus on urgent matters and using initiative to route emails to the appropriate individuals for swift response and action; wherever possible, responding to and filing emails in to iManage on behalf of partners and fee earners to reduce volume.
- Responding and dealing with external or internal telephone calls and queries in a professional manner, taking clear and concise messages for other members of the practice group as required.
- Organising travel arrangements through the travel company, booking and confirmation of reservations, flights, hotels, car transfers, ordering currency and expense claims and producing detailed itineraries.
- Organise individual client entertainment – e.g. deal closing dinners/drinks, table plans, travel booking, arranging small-scale hospitality for Partners or teams.
- Arrange events (invitations and bookings for in-house and small external gatherings, individual client entertainment deal closing dinners/drinks, table plans, travel booking etc), occasional support at event e.g. registration desks.
Preparation of key correspondence, reports and business development (BD):
- Manage the flow to DPS of complex, lengthy legal documents, visualisations, house style client/training/seminar/conference presentations, reports, dictation, ensuring requirements and timescales are clearly set out.
- Typing and drafting where appropriate simple client correspondence; proof reading all work to ensure consistent accuracy and high standard, and finding documents on iManage.
- Preparation of agendas, presentations and meeting papers, including print production and timely distribution and chasing papers for meetings and ensuring that fee earners have papers and adequate planning time.
- Demonstrate an understanding of the end-to-end billing process and Elite financial reporting; assisting fee earners by liaising with the billing team, producing the relevant documentation and reports, and prompting fee earners to complete all necessary paperwork etc.
- Maintain fee earner CVs; pro-actively asking about adding new deals and cases to their CV upon completion of a matter, uploading onto Connexus and informing BD about any need for web CV changes.
- Amend and occasionally creating capability statements for inputting edits to client facing documents, typing riders, sourcing updated fee earner CVs then submitting to the BD team by required deadline.
- Production of engrossed documents, particularly those with multiple appendices.
Administrative tasks:
Undertaking, or if appropriate delegating to a Legal Admin Assistant and thereafter managing, day-to-day administrative tasks such as:
- Printing of emails and attachments.
- Small volume photocopying and scanning, and delivery/collection of large volume document production, courier and repro jobs.
- Dealing with and submission of travel invoices and expense claims, and maintenance/filing of copies.
- Payment for fee earner individual memberships of institutes and associations.
- Preparation of admin for money payments e.g. Chaps payments.
- File opening including conflict searches and money laundering requirements, liaising with the Business Acceptance Team.
- Organising and maintaining up to date systems to ensure effective document management, including closing files, archiving and ensuring all relevant paper based documents are filed electronically.
- Supporting fee earners with DynamicsCRM updating; ensuring new business contact details are entered, contacts from fee earners’ Outlook address books are shared, updating contact changes and activities when BD activity is planned with a client/target by own fee earner.
- Proactively downloading and printing reports on contacts ahead of meetings and pitches, populating DynamicsCRM mailing lists with contacts as directed by fee earners and editing/refining these lists as appropriate.
- Supporting fee earners with the preparation of speaker CVs and formatting of speaker materials, RSVP management for events sponsored by fee earners by taking/responding to telephone and email enquiries from interested delegates, responding to queries about attending delegates using DynamicsCRM reporting function, notifying fee earners about events that are coming up in their/other offices and notifying the organiser if fee earner wishes to attend.
- Supporting the group in updating information on Connexus or in managing and maintaining particular pages.
- Supporting fee earners and LPAs with the firm inclusivity strategy; key tasks include: booking rooms, coordinating meetings, booking meeting room facilities, arranging events (invitations, room bookings, catering, speaker presentations, event materials).
- Assisting Knowledge Lawyers/fee earners with internal know-how sessions and training; pull the programme together into the appropriate document to send through to L&D - e.g. speakers and topics; check back up speakers for each event to reduce cancellations; highlight any potential dates to avoid - e.g. Practice Group meetings and client events; liaising with the Knowledge Lawyer and L&D to advise L&D if non-standard AV will be required; copy materials for the session; assist Knowledge Management team by meeting external speakers; sending out reminders that the session is taking place; supporting the Knowledge Management team by helping them set rooms up - e.g. switching on computers; returning CPD attendance sheets (eventually with the aim of asking them to log CPD for their Practice areas); updating audio/video on Connexus.
- Creation, uploading and general maintenance of client sites and extranets.
- Undertaking research using the internet, databases etc.
- Collating and indexing legal documentation, deeds scheduling and deeds management.
Maintaining a deal database (in conjunction with marketing), ensuring partners have logged their deal ‘post-closing’ in the database with relevant information.
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Skills and experience required:
Interpersonal/communication skills:
- Constant enthusiastic, can-do, positive and proactive approach to tasks and situations, as well as requests for action outside normal scope of duties.
- Ability to take personal responsibility, ownership and behave responsibly.
- An excellent communicator, both oral and written; being clear and concise and use appropriate, intelligent and professional language in all verbal and written communications, including email.
- Friendly, co-operative and approachable at all times.
- Remains calm and focussed under pressure, i.e. when faced with high volume workloads or difficult situations, but know when to seek assistance.
- Ability to build relationships with Partners, Fee Earners, LPA Manager, other LPAs, Legal Admin Assistants and external clients/contacts.
- Listening carefully and question to make sure you have all the information you need to take action.
- Ability to maintain tact and diplomacy, trust and confidentiality.
Organisational skills:
- Proven ability to plan and manage own workload and multiple tasks, and prioritise work calmly and effectively in a pressurised environment, and adapting to changing workloads, deadlines and new developments.
- Naturally organised person who constantly strives to improve processes and increase efficiency.
- Driven to become fully involved in the role.
Knowledge/Technical/General Skills:
- PA experience is essential, ideally gained within a corporate professional services environment.
- Complex billing, diary and inbox management experience preferred.
- Sound knowledge of Microsoft and other commonly used legal applications.
- Effective and professional telephone manner.
- Client service orientated approach and ability to use industry knowledge and experience to anticipate needs and respond to requests/queries from clients on own initiative.
- Able to work either on own initiative or as part of a team.
- Displaying sound judgement and decision making/problem solving skills.
- Being attentive to detail; sense and quality checking your work and the work of others and identifying quality issues and address problems prior to fee earner review.
- Accountable and professional.
- Business and commercial awareness.
- Ability to develop self and others and be learning oriented, wanting to learn and seek improvement.
- Ability to display discretion when dealing with sensitive and confidential information.
- Be willing to learn and understand different cultures as well as have the required patience to ensure good working relationships.
Other requirements:
- Flexibility with responsibilities and working hours as required and willingness to go the ‘extra mile’ as required.
At Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner we understand the value of a diverse workforce and we believe people perform at their best when they can truly be themselves at work. We aim to create an inclusive environment where all our employees are valued, motivated and able to be themselves. In order to provide the best possible service to our diverse client base, we are committed to recruiting, retaining, rewarding and developing our people with regard to their abilities and contributions and without reference to their background, gender, gender identity or expression, ethnic origin, age, religion, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, political belief, disability or any other protected characteristic
