Legal Practice Assistant – Corporate Real Estate and Funds

Position(s) I am Applying for Legal Practice Assistant – Corporate Real Estate and Funds (2 Days per Week)

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:

• 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.

• 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…