Junior Legal Counsel

Base: London. We work 4 days in the office, 1 WFH. Bonus: up to 15%. Start: ASAP. 25 holiday days per year, 4 Me Days per year. Team social events and trips. Wellness allowance of £70 per month. Private healthcare with Vitality. Drive Electric salary sacrifice. Enhanced maternity, paternity and parental leave. Employee referral scheme, £2,000 towards a getaway of your choice.

HSPG: A social impact real estate company. Our mission is simple: Building partnerships, creating homes, developing communities. There is a critical lack of affordable housing across the UK, affecting the most vulnerable people in our community. We build long-term partnerships with Local Authorities to acquire and manage demand-driven social and affordable housing across various tenures. Across HSPG’s Living Sector platforms, we are actively acquiring 2,500 high-quality homes from national housebuilders and developers by the end of 2025. These properties are managed by our experienced team, grouped into portfolios, and funded by our institutional investment partners. HSPG aims to positively impact our residents’ lives while providing long-term, sustainable returns for our investment partners.

Core Behaviours: As Junior Legal Counsel, your core mission is to support the successful execution of HSPG’s real estate transactions, ensuring legal processes progress efficiently and commercially. You will be an integral member of the legal team, managing and progressing a wide range of transactional and operational legal matters across the business, including loan drawdowns, acquisitions, disposals, leasing and legal support. You will enable commercial decision-making by providing practical legal guidance. This is a hands-on and execution-focused role. You will take ownership of the detail and coordination required to keep matters moving – ensuring nothing is dropped or left unresolved. You will work closely with internal teams, external lawyers and stakeholders and will proactively manage relationships and hold all parties to account to achieve seamless transaction execution aligned with HSPG’s strategic objectives. You will support with legal research, drafting and process improvement across the legal function, helping the business scale efficiently with the implementation of innovative and tech-enabled processes and strategies.

Accountability

• You are accountable for:
• Optimising drawdown and condition precedent processes to ensure efficient delivery across the group’s financing arrangements.
• Proactively working with external advisers and pursuing outstanding deal items to ensure timely execution.
• Supporting the legal team in providing clear, structured guidance to stakeholders.
• You are not accountable for:
• Assessing the financial viability of transactions.
• Duplicating work undertaken by external lawyers.

Specific experience

• Qualified solicitor practising at a UK law firm or in-house and specialising in real estate (around NQ-2PQE). In-house experience is helpful but not essential.
• Experience leading and supporting residential and/or commercial real estate portfolio acquisitions, disposals, and financing is essential.
• Transactional experience in the Affordable Housing sector is beneficial but not essential.

Obsess:

• Communication: you have excellent written and verbal communication skills, providing clear and concise instructions – tailoring your communication style depending on whether you are speaking to external lawyers, internal non-legal deal teams or otherwise.
• Analytical: you focus on synthesising complex legal issues into simple information to be understood by non-lawyers internally and externally.
• Efficiency: you are obsessed with achieving optimal efficiency for you and your team and constantly tweak/revamp legal processes to optimise all aspects of the work that you do to ensure all timelines are met.

Excel:

• Emotional intelligence: you understand every relationship you’re working with deeply. As part of the legal team, you understand who makes the commercial decisions, who drives the business, what they want in order to feel like they’ve succeeded and whether our businesses are aligned to achieve this.
• Meticulous: you have phenomenal attention to detail and ensure that legal documentation is watertight and captures all the information required.
• Resilient: you have the capacity to keep making informed and timely decisions whilst under pressure, and you truly enjoy providing both legal and strategic input for internal and external stakeholders.

90-day wins

• Early traction and strategic control.
• Gain a solid understanding of HSPG's strategy and mission and be able to take ownership of discrete workstreams.
• Foster good working relationships with our main panel firms.
• Successfully drive forward: one property acquisition to exchange/completion; and one financing drawdown to completion.
• Have assisted in streamlining at least one significant transaction process to increase efficiency (including incorporating AI into our processes).

12-month impact outcomes

• Material impact and results within first 12 months.
• Have a comprehensive understanding of the wider business and drive at least 15 acquisition and/or drawdown processes to completion.
• Maintain strong working relationships with our main panel firms.
• Have implemented the streamlining of at least two significant transaction processes to increase efficiency (including incorporating AI into our processes).
• Be an integral part of the team providing advice on a wide range of legal queries – including at least three queries from each of the sales, acquisitions, investment and management teams.