Job Description

Exciting opportunity for a Legal PA to join an International Law Firm to provide skilled administrative and secretarial support to an assigned group of senior fee earners, helping to maximise the effectiveness of the lawyers\' practices. The Legal PA works as part of a team, proactively assisting the Dispute Resolution group in order to meet deadlines or share workload.

Key activities/responsibilities

• Proactively managing and maintaining diary planning and coordination for allocated fee earners, making appointments and co-ordinating internal and external client meetings, identifying and resolving potential challenges and clashes, ensuring arrangements are made for equipment, venue and resources and that fee earners have all necessary paperwork.
• Travel management, booking transport, hotels, client meetings and producing detailed itineraries.
• Coordinating business development and client liaison initiatives for fee earners, including updating database information and assisting with marketing initiatives and events (including occasional support at events e.g. registration desk).
• Proactively dealing with all aspects of claiming expenses, including InterAction entries.
• Liaising with the firm\xe2\x80\x99s clients in a confident and professional manner, building strong working relationships with clients and contacts.
• Dealing professionally and promptly with client (internal and external) telephone calls and communications, including calls diverted to the team.
• Creating, uploading and general maintenance of client sites and extranets.

Technical and Organisational Skills:

• Monitoring fee earners\xe2\x80\x99 mailboxes when they are out of the office or attending a long meeting, responding to emails as necessary and prioritising correspondence to enable fee earners to focus on urgent matters.
• Using initiative to route emails to the appropriate individuals for swift response and action and responding to and filing emails in Filesite on behalf of partners and fee earners to reduce volume (where possible).
• Preparing bills, including resolving queries and dealing with outstanding fees, maintaining accurate billing/contact details, preparation of narratives and drafting first bills with covering correspondence for partner approval. Assisting fee earners by liaising with the billing team, and following up with debt recovery as requested.
• Proactively ensuring Carpe Diem is updated for all allocated fee earners, particularly for holiday or sickness absence. Informing the Legal PA Co-ordinator if a fee earner is working from home or absent due to holiday or sickness.
• Providing secretarial assistance to assigned fee-earners, which includes audio typing, copy typing, formatting documents, creating correspondence, pitches and presentations.
• Delegating complex and lengthy documents to the Document Production Team, ensuring requirements and timescales are clearly set out.
• Coordinating the opening of new client matters and assisting with Anti-Money Laundering processes, undertaking as much research as possible before passing over to the Partner for approval.
• Organising client documents (delegating scanning, formatting, photocopying and collating of information where necessary) for client meetings or hearings and carrying out research as required.
• Management and delegation of client filing and regular updating of client relationship management systems (Interaction), archiving historic files or closed matters.

Skills and experience - essential

Three to five years\' previous experience in a legal secretarial role within a Dispute Resolution (with some exposure to Real Estate Disputes) or a non-contentious Real Estate department is required.

• Excellent knowledge of Outlook, Word, PowerPoint and Excel.
• Clear and professional in both written and verbal communication.
• Highly organised and able to assist others with the management of their practices.

Accurate with a high level of attention to detail.

Personal skills/attributes

• Enthusiastic, can-do, positive approach to tasks and situations, as well as requests for action outside normal scope of duties.
• Remaining calm and focussed under pressure, delegating and requesting assistance when necessary.
• Ability to take personal responsibility, ownership and behave responsibly.
• Friendly, co-operative and approachable and all times.

AJ Chambers