Legal Support Assistant

We currently have an exciting opportunity to join our Real Estate Disputes and Farms, Estates, and Rural Land teams in either our Bristol or Southampton office on a permanent basis as a Legal Support Assistant.

Our team provides services to prominent national companies, charitable organisations, and private individuals, focusing on a broad range of property-related legal issues. These include both contentious and non-contentious matters such as landlord and tenant relations, adverse possession, easements, title disputes, development disagreements, general property concerns, and transactional work involving rural land.

In this role, you will play a key part in supporting lawyers across both our Real Estate Disputes and Farms, Estates, and Rural Land teams with high-quality administrative and support services, enabling the efficient delivery of the team’s operational strategy. This is an exciting and rapidly growing area of our firm, offering ample opportunities to develop your skill set and engage in interesting and challenging work. It is an excellent opportunity for someone with strong administrative skills looking to advance their career.

What you’ll do:

• Diary management: Organise travel, meetings, and ensure events are fully supported within the group.
• Manage and take calls on behalf of lawyers.
• Assist lawyers with managing monthly billing procedures, cash collection, expenses, and credit control processes.
• Handle file opening and maintenance procedures, including the production of terms of business letters, confirmation of instruction letters, ID checks, etc.
• Manage all file management tasks to ensure full compliance with Foot Anstey practices and procedures, including Lexcel, Code of Conduct, and anti-money laundering regulations.
• Support administrative tasks related to business development, including client research, building marketing lists, coordinating external invitations to business development activities, preparing resources for client meetings, and tracking team business development activity.
• Provide transactional property support such as undertaking searches and dealing with the Land Registry.

What we’re looking for:

• Proactively support lawyers and the wider team by understanding and addressing their needs.
• Build and maintain positive relationships with clients through effective interaction.
• Demonstrate confident prioritisation skills and meticulous attention to detail to complete tasks efficiently.
• Exhibit excellent organisational skills and the ability to work well under pressure and meet tight deadlines.
• Possess strong IT skills across the MS suite of programmes, with a willingness to learn new software packages.

Pre-employment screening

Successful applicants will be required to complete a pre-employment screening process which includes a financial integrity check and a DBS check. If you wish to discuss any issues or questions in connection with this, please do speak in confidence with a member of the Talent Acquisition Team at [email protected]

Eligibility to work in the UK

Eligibility to work in the UK will be verified in the final stages of the selection process. All candidates must be able to prove their right to work in the UK, which may include meeting the Home Office criteria for Visa sponsorship. Candidates who require sponsorship should evaluate the Home Office eligibility criteria for a Skilled Worker visa before applying and keep up to date with any legal developments.

Our offer to you

In return for your efforts, you can expect considerable scope for personal as well as professional development. We encourage people to engage with our popular and well supported coaching and mentoring programmes, which connect you to people right across the firm and at every level. We create space for mental and physical wellbeing with our weekly Lifestyle Hour, 28 days annual leave, a day off for your birthday, and a sabbatical you can take every 5 years. You can also buy holiday and manage your benefits flexibly using our sophisticated portal to configure your total reward offer according to what you value most. As part of this, you can make ongoing or one-off donations to our charitable foundation and access our CSR programme where you can engage with community-based initiatives (as a team, or individually) twice a year, to give something back where you feel it matters. Take a look here to find out more about Our benefits | Foot Anstey.

Why Foot Anstey?

As one of the UK’s fastest growing law firms, Foot Anstey believes in helping our clients and people achieve their ambitions, unlocking new and exciting opportunities. Our team of business and legal advisors are motivated by understanding clients’ goals and collaborating with them and other advisers to deliver solutions.  By becoming our clients’ most trusted advisor, we are enabling them to achieve their ambitions. How we do it is just as important as what we do. Our values define the way we act with our clients and one another every day, and because of these we think our culture and environment sets us apart.

Over our history we’ve grown from a high-street firm to a significant regional and national player working with leading brands and individuals predominantly across six key sectors: Private Equity, Retail & Consumer, Energy & Infrastructure, Islamic Finance, Developers and Private Wealth. Our strategy of gaining market share through meeting clients’ needs, investing in and developing high quality talent and using technology and innovation to enhance our services has led to significant growth. We now operate from seven locations with offices in Truro, Plymouth, Exeter, Taunton, Bristol, Southampton, and London. 

Our people are central to our success, in every part of the business. We actively support our employees to achieve their aspirations through offering meaningful careers with balanced rewards, which have been carefully designed to focus on personal wellbeing. We offer continual opportunities for support and professional development through our Talent Development programme and believe in empowering each other to achieve and strive to create a progressive and inclusive working environment. Being forward-thinking, we are open to discussing flexible working patterns for all of our vacancies, with over 40% of our existing employees having a permanent flexible working pattern. In addition, our impressive suite of flexible benefits will enable you to prioritise what matters most to you.

Creating a diverse and inclusive workplace is integral to delivering our strategy, and we were delighted to be awarded the National Equality Standard for a second time in 2021.  We consider this to be right at the heart of our priorities and goes way beyond our policies – it’s something we consider across everything we do, from the make-up of our client teams, encouraging staff to reach their potential, through to our leadership. We aim to support our clients and our people to achieve their goals, regardless of background, gender, race, beliefs, sexuality or other non-work related factors. We champion aspiration and encourage it in everyone that works with us.  As such we actively encourage applications from all suitably qualified people, regardless of any characteristics protected by law. If you apply for this role you may be encouraged to answer our diversity and social mobility monitoring questions, so please be reassured that any answers you provide will remain entirely anonymous and confidential and will in no way impact your application.

Foot Anstey. Powering Your Ambition.