Deputy Director, Legal

Role:
Deputy Director, Legal - The Royal Courts of Justice Group & Upper Tribunal

Location:
London

Salary:
The salary for this role is set within the MoJ SCS PB1 range (£81,000 - £117,800)

Job details:

Key Responsibilities

The Deputy Director Legal - RCJ Group & Upper Tribunal has overall responsibility for the professional and operational leadership of lawyers and legal staff, providing cohesive leadership across the Royal Courts of Justice Group and Upper Tribunal. They will have strategic oversight of legal resources and will drive performance improvements in the delivery of services across the whole Group. They will:

• Be accountable for strategic leadership of the senior legal team, setting direction and focus for wider RCJ legal operational group and identifying cross cutting issues which can be used to promote working together across the different areas of the Group.
• Maintain a strategic focus across services and realign priorities and/or assign responsibility for action where required to meet the strategic direction agreed.
• Provide strategic leadership of improvements to ways of working in RCJ Group, including ensuring new and evolving technical and digital systems enhance the delivery of legal services and ensuring that legal staff have the capability to exercise wide-ranging and evolving judicial or quasi-judicial functions.
• Ensure plans are in place to underpin the legal teams' ability to support the Courts of Appeal, High Court and Upper Tribunals effectively. This will include anticipating and responding to events which are likely to require changes to deployment across the whole of the RCJ Group.
• Act with judicial independence when exercising judicial or quasi-judicial functions and are responsible in conjunction with the judiciary for upholding and protecting the independence of all those exercising such functions - (s 28 and 29 Courts Act 2003 and Courts and Tribunals (Judiciary and Functions of Staff) Act 2018).
• Provide strategic jurisdictional leadership for RCJ jurisdiction/services at a national level. Responsible for leading and managing the effective and efficient delivery of jurisdictional/service performance across the RCJ Group. They will be responsible and accountable to the Delivery Director for the performance and delivery of their business area and have a clear mandate to take steps to sustain/improve performance where required.
• Build and maintain strong relationships with external stakeholders including senior judicial office holders, acting as a key point of contact and escalation for service issues and complex complaints. Engage with national and senior judiciary on listing and judicial priorities.
• Overall ownership and responsibility (and accountable to their Delivery Director) for governance, assurance and risk management within the RCJ Group and Upper Tribunals legal work. The DD Legal - RCJ Group & Upper Tribunal will balance risk, strategic impact and short and long-term needs when dealing with organisational issues. They are responsible for ensuring systems are in place to identify and manage risk and to ensure remedial action is taken to mitigate such risks, only reporting to the Delivery Director and/or internal audit teams where risks are intolerable and/or possible solutions would go beyond current policy or levels of authority.
• Develop and maintain effective close working relationships with Service Owners and the wider Heads of Operations - Legal community, engaging at a strategic level to deliver service improvement and performance.
• Embed organisational values and behaviours, ensuring wellbeing, inclusion, diversity, and equality is at the forefront of all people activities.
• Be visible as a leader, making best use of modern ways of working and be available to managers and staff across the RCJ Group. Act as representative of the senior leadership team in providing visible, collective senior leadership across service/jurisdictional boundaries to staff in all parts of the Group.
• Maintain management oversight of each jurisdiction in the RCJ Group and support senior legal managers and lawyers in management of their legal teams. Provide strong leadership, clear direction and support to lawyers and legal managers and set benchmarks to manage effective performance standards in line with strategic objectives.
• Lead legal talent and succession planning and be responsible for ensuring that lawyers and legal managers in the Group are equipped with the right skills to effectively support our people to grow and engage in their own personal and professional development and to effectively manage poor performance.
• Assess compliance and performance, identifying the reasons for workload fluctuations and variances to provide a detailed picture of the legal operations for which the DD Legal - RCJ Group & Upper Tribunal is responsible to support the work of the Delivery Director.
• Work with the senior leadership team, and senior judicial office holders to undertake business planning and set and agree strategic direction for all services/jurisdictions and support the Delivery Director in ensuring effective delivery of quality legal operations.
• Highlight opportunities to make efficiencies and potential improvements within services/jurisdictions to feed into national service/performance improvement and maintain consistency of service provision across HMCTS. Provide operational knowledge and insight into national project streams.
• Lead on the planning and implementation of legal strategy and legal change across the Group, including the interpretation and implementation of new legislation, advising all legal staff of new requirements and advising the Delivery Director on the impact of new and changed legislation and/or procedures on admin processes and ways of working.
• Accountable for the training of RCJ Group lawyers and legal staff, with oversight by the Judicial College, to ensure they have the skills and legal knowledge to perform their duties.

Essential Experience:

• Strong leadership skills with a proven track record of delivering in a complex and political stakeholder environment, building and developing relationships with senior professionals and working with them across organisational boundaries to achieve common goals.
• Solicitor or barrister with significant post qualification experience in a relevant field.
• Significant knowledge of a relevant areas of law.
• Demonstrable experience of building strong and productive working relationships with senior lawyers and the Judiciary.

If you have any questions in advance of making your application regarding reasonable adjustments please contact the SCS recruitment team