Job Description

Legal Services Assistant
Salary: 31,490
Location: Ealing office based 5 days per week
Contract: 11 month fixed term contract, 35 hours per week
DBS check required: Basic
Role Overview
We are looking for a Legal Services Assistant to join our dedicated Legal department. The successful candidate will provide support to the Group's in house Legal Services team, assisting either the litigation team or the transactions team, or a mix of both; by providing high quality, responsive and consistent legal administrative support and working collaboratively with colleagues.
About the Legal Team
The Legal Team is a high achieving in house legal team providing litigation and transactional property legal services. As an entrepreneurial department and team, we are constantly looking at how we can add value and improve the services provided to A2Dominion so that it can reinvest back into its social purpose. We also support professional and personal development, and many of our team members have been promoted into their roles and supported to qualification. It is because of this success, that we have created this new role, on a fixed term basis initially, with scope to become permanent.
The litigation team, deals with all areas of housing management including leasehold, ASB, possessions injunctions, disrepair and other litigation. The team is inclusive and diverse, and work really well together. We're looking for someone who can enhance our offering and is team spirited.
About the role
The legal assistant post is for a competent admin professional who is able to support the team with admin support, support with its systems and processes (in particular our matter management system), and delivery. We are looking for someone who works well in a team, understands technology and workflows, and in particular, someone who takes initiative, and is a great communicator.
You will have an interest in the law - in particular social housing or landlord and tenant law, and some experience of working in a legal practice and using a matter management system.
Key responsibilities:

• To assist the team in meeting its objective of remaining a high performing team by providing administrative support to include (but not limited to) drafting correspondence, arranging meetings, diarising and organising meetings, training or other events; obtaining documents, preparing bundles, filing and file opening and closure, dealing with supplier payments, signing and sealing, and any other reasonable requests from the legal team
• Be performance focused and explore ways of self-development
• Represent legal services with internal and external teams including attending client team meetings and taking notes and actions as require
• Actively participate and be willing to contribute ideas for continual improvement and innovation and feedback on projects and changes made to ensure effective provision of legal services to the Group
• Ensure that expenditure is captured correctly, this includes recording time taken to carry out work and recording disbursements against cases
• Comply with departmental policy before incurring liability for disbursements and keep an accurate record of the same
• Liaising with official departments, including the courts and tribunals, and Land Registry, for various reasons including obtaining documents such as official copies and claim forms; and assisting with filing (sometimes in person) and requisitions
• Preparation of court bundles, this includes creating electronic and paper bundles, preparing bundle indices, case chronologies, and other documentation
• Dealing with post in and post out for the team
• Updating the legal team diary and colleague diaries with deadlines and court and tribunal dates
• Using the legal case management system. This includes opening electronic files, updating information on it such as contact and hourly rate information ,and using it generally to ensure that case information is accurate and up to date. This also includes ensuring that its use is maintained and thinking about how it can be optimised to help the legal team deliver an excellent service and supporting that optimisation work
• Carry out the buyer role for the team, dealing with supplier set ups, processing purchase order numbers and invoices; arranging payments, and dealing with procurement card reconciliation

More about you

• Educated to GCSE level or equivalent in Math's and English (Grades A*- C)
• Good user of technology to support work, in particular Word, Excel, Adobe Acrobat, Copilot and Teams or other Microsoft packages, use of Sharepoint and other applications as they evolve (including Power BI for reporting)
• Demonstrable organisational skills and the ability to prioritise and keep to deadlines
• Housing management and residential property law experience, or conveyancing/transactional experience (Desirable)
• Experience working in a law firm or other in house legal team (Desirable)
• An understanding of landlord and tenant and/or general property law, in particular with reference to social housing (Desirable)

About us
We're a UK housing association committed to a vision - providing homes people love to live in.
With over 38,000 homes in management across London and southern England, we provide a wide range of homes for social, affordable and private rent, specialist housing services, as well as homes for sale and shared ownership.
Our 70,000 customers have diverse backgrounds and levels of income and we're here to provide all of them with homes that are safe, high quality and sustainable. And with social housing roots going back eight decades, we continue to ensure that every penny of profit we make is reinvested into our charitable social purpose - delivering more homes and better services for customers.
We're also members of the G15, a group of leading housing associations that work together to house one in ten Londoners and tackle the housing crisis.
Choosing us is easy
As an employee of A2Dominion, we want you to feel rewarded and have a choice of flexible benefits, salary exchange benefits, and rewards and discounts that work for you, wherever you are in your life.
We offer a wide range of staff benefits. For this role, these include:

• 25 days' holiday (Plus Bank Holidays) increasing up to 28 days with 3 years of service
• Up to 8% contributory pension
• Flexible working
• In addition, all permanent and fixed-term employees receive a generous annual allowance of up to 300 to use towards health and lifestyle benefits for both you and your family.

Diversity & Inclusion
We're proud to be a Disability Confident Employer and welcome applications from people of all backgrounds. Our recruitment process is inclusive and accessible, and we guarantee an interview to disabled applicants who meet the minimum criteria. Reasonable adjustments are available throughout the process - just contact our Resourcing Team at resourcing@a2dominion.co.uk
We know some people hesitate to apply if they don't meet every requirement. If that's you, we encourage you to apply if your skills and experience align - please get in touch with us to talk it through. At A2Dominion, we value diversity, embrace flexibility, and are a family-friendly employer. Everyone belongs here. Join us and help make a lasting difference in the lives of our customers.
Resourcing Partner - This vacancy is being managed by Ryan Loasby - ryan.loasby@a2dominion.co.uk

Skills Required