Legal Pa

**Team**:
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**Business Services**

**Reports to**:
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**Legal PA Manager**

**Purpose of job**
To provide Fee Earners with effective, pro-active, professional and high quality Legal PA support that enables them to focus on providing legal services to clients. It is a key requirement that the Legal PA is able to demonstrate exceptional organisational 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 prioritise workloads and liaise with Legal Admin Assistants, DPS and other support functions to ensure timely delivery.

The PA will also perform the Co-ordinating PA role for the relevant teams. This will involve things such as absence management for the team, co-ordinating floor moves and other Co-ordinating PA responsibilities as required from time to time. In addition, as Co-ordinating PA for the relevant teams, there will be an element of supervising the Legal Admin Assistant team in the office.

**What’s in it for you?**
Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner is an award-winning international law firm that provides legal services to well-known brands, including National Grid, The Financial Times, Tesco and Thames Water to name just a few.

**Key responsibilities**
Organisation, diary and contact management:

- 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.
- 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.

Preparation of key correspondence, reports and business development (BD):

- 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 (including via Bighand dictation) 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 required deadline.
- Production of engrossed documents, particularly those with multiple appendices.

Administrative tasks:
Undertaking, or if appropriate delegating to a Legal Admin Assistant and thereafter managing, day-to-day administrative tasks such as:

- Small volume photocopying and scanning, and delivery/collection of large volume document production, courier and repro jobs.
- Dealing with and submission of travel invoices and expense claims, and maintenance/filing of copies.
- Payment for Fee Earner individual memberships of institutes and associations.
- Preparation of admin for money payments eg Chaps payments.
- File opening including conflict searches and money laundering requirements, liaising with the Business Acceptance Team.
- Taking minutes of meetings as and when required.
- Organising and maintaining up to date systems to ensure effective document management, including closing files, archiving and ensu