Legal Personal Assistant

To provide fee-earners with proactive and high-quality secretarial support that appropriately meets their

requirements, enabling them to focus on providing legal services to clients and reducing the need for

them to undertake administrative tasks.

Key relationships:

• Daily contact with Partners and Associates for work allocation.

• Daily contact with other secretaries and team administrators within and across practice group(s) to

provide/request assistance.

• Regular contact with your Secretarial Co-ordinator or Secretarial Manager for wider work

distribution.

• Occasional contact with Secretarial Manager for escalations or issues.

• Building and maintaining relationships with colleagues and key stakeholders.

Main Duties and Responsibilities

Diary and contact management

• Proactively manage and maintain fee-earners\’ diaries, scheduling 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.

• Having a good knowledge of fee earners clients, liaising with their PAs.

• Monitor individual responses for meetings and update fee-earner(s) as required. Ensure fee-earners have

relevant materials and information in advance of each meeting.

• Arrange the booking of conference rooms, video conference facilities, taxis refreshments, restaurants, and liaising with meeting attendees, both internal and external.

• 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 on behalf of fee-earners to reduce volume

• Organising travel arrangements through the firm’s travel company, booking and confirmation of reservations, flights, hotels, car transfers, ordering currency and expense claims and producing detailed itineraries.

Administrative tasks

• Day-to-day administrative tasks such as photocopying, scanning and demonstrating the ability to delegate to appropriate department(s) and team administrators, when necessary, e.g. for organising large volume printing, photocopying, document production.

• Effectively manage new client matter opening and any additional tasks and duties relating to this process, following service excellence workbooks and process throughout.

• Organise document management, including closing of files, archiving and ensure that all relevant documents are filed electronically and paper-based, if required.

• Dealing with and submission of travel invoices and expense claims using Chrome River.

• Submitting invoices for payment through the Accounts Payable team and monitoring progress.

• Demonstrate an understanding of the end-to-end billing process and AX (Financial system); assisting fee-earners by proactively leading on relevant administrative processes, to ensure that bills are completed within required timeframe.

• Prepare WIP reports to be reviewed by fee-earners.

• Supporting fee-earners, Secretarial Co-Ordinator or Group Head on time recording (Intapp), including reporting as

required.

• Supporting fee-earners with maintenance of InterAction; ensure new business contact details are entered and contacts from fee-earners Outlook address book are shared, updating changes of contact and entering activities when a M&BD activity is planned with a client or target by own fee-earner, proactively downloading and printing reports on contacts ahead of meetings and pitches with the contact.

• Supporting team in updating information on the SharePoint intranet or in managing and maintaining particular pages.

• Supporting fee-earners with the preparation of speaker CVs and formatting of speaker materials, RSVP management for events sponsored by own fee-earner by responding to MS Team calls and email enquiries from interested delegates, responding to fee-earners’ queries about attending delegates using InterAction reporting function, notifying own fee earners about events that are coming up in their/other office when visiting using intranet events calendar and notifying the organiser if fee-earner wishes to attend.

Preparation of key documents and correspondence

• Drafting letters and correspondence as required.

• Proof-reading all work to ensure that completed documents are delivered accurately and to a consistently high standard

• 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 preparation time.

• Submit edits and format changes to bids, pitches and other client documents to Document Management Centre and monitor progress.

• Drafting letters and correspondence as required.

• Sourcing fee-earners’ CVs for pitches and co-ordinating the update of the CVs for the pitch then submission to the BD contact by required deadline and/or submission of pitch documents where online submission is required.

• Support with presentations for client training, seminars and conferences if required by submitting to Document

Management Centre to ensure they meet the firm’s branding and house style guidelines.

• Maintenance of CVs; maintaining fee-earner CVs on CV Bank and the website to include entering content changes as directed by fee-earners, and proactively supporting the quarterly CV review by printing all versions of own fee-earners’ CVs from CV bank for review and mark-up, proactively asking fee-earners about adding new deals and cases to their CV upon completion of a matter.

What we are looking for:

Person Specification:

Education / Qualifications / Experience:

• Experience working as a secretary within a professional services environment

Knowledge and Technical Skills:

• Good working knowledge of all Microsoft applications

• Experience of working with house-styles and branding

• Good working knowledge of document and client relationship management systems, OCR/PDF software and

financial recording applications

General Skills:

• Client service orientated approach

• A proven working understanding of teamwork

• Problem solving skills and solutions focused

• Advanced communication skills at all levels

• Self-management, ability to take ownership and excellent organisational skills, with the ability to prioritise work calmly and effectively in a pressurized environment

• Accountability and professionalism

• Business and organisation awareness

• Ability to develop self and others

• Attention to detail and discretion with confidential information Able to work effectively as part of a diverse and inclusive team Creative and forward-thinking approach to tasks

Other requirements:

• Flexibility with working hours as required and willingness to work extra and on occasion unsociable hours when

required.

• Awareness of and adherence to the firm’s policies and values.