Our Commercial Team is seeking an experienced Senior PA to support a team of fee earners of varying levels of seniority, including the Location Head. The main purpose of this role is to provide highly professional, effective and proactive PA support to the team.
This is a permanent vacancy based at our Bristol office, although we are happy to consider some home working for this position too.
What you'll do
PA responsibilities to support the Location Head:
- Play a key role in supporting the Bristol Location Head
- Develop strong working relationships with key personnel in our business services teams to support the Location Head
- Support the Location Head by scheduling meetings, assisting with the co-ordination of internal events, monitoring spend against budgets, providing administrative support on day-to-day HR issues (performance reviews, promotions paperwork, etc.); taking minutes of Location Head's meetings, preparing action lists and proactively driving forward delivery of the actions by colleagues across the business; attending Business Development meetings taking notes and driving forward actions by all attendees
- Proactively take responsibility for the organisation of all travel arrangements and itineraries
- Draft short correspondence and communications; demonstrate excellent IT skills, with the ability to amend and format large and complex documents
- Identify opportunities, actively contribute and be involved with ad-hoc projects as given by the Location Head
PA Responsibilities to the Team:
- Provide highly professional, effective and proactive PA support to a number of fee earners, including the Location Head to the Bristol office
- Provide proactive support in terms of mailbox/file management and all diary commitments for the team
- Arrange, manage and attend meetings throughout each month actively taking and circulating notes and following up on actions
- Develop strong working relationships with our key clients, anticipate, mitigate and resolve potential client relationship issues or concerns
- Assist with the file opening/client due diligence process; set up new matters, draft engagement letters;
- Play an active role in understanding, managing and taking responsibility for the billing process by monitoring WIP; prompting fee earners to raise invoices; monitoring debt and prompting fee earners to chase clients for payment. Attend meetings, with matter managers and our finance team; track specific billing arrangements; prepare matter manager and client reports
- Proactively take responsibility for the organisation of all travel arrangements and itineraries in relation to client and non-client meetings, conferences and in-house and external events; complete expense reclaim forms
- Process expense reclaim forms, creating and adding InterAction reports to accompany them if necessary
- Draft short correspondence and communications; demonstrate excellent IT skills, with the ability to amend and format large and complex documents
- Proactively identify opportunities, actively contribute and be involved with ad-hoc projects as given by the team
- Work closely with the other PAs in the team, covering for absences, as and when required
In addition, this individual will:
- Role model flexibility and openness to change; be decisive, responsible and take ownership of tasks
- Work closely with the Senior PA Resource Co-Ordinator to improve team efficiencies, communications, management of work-in-progress and roll-out of IT applications and improved working practices
- Support and assist the Senior PA Resource Co-Ordinator in the development and effectiveness of PA and administrative working practices and efficiencies
We are looking for
We are looking for a candidate who has significant previous PA experience, who is able to use their own initiative, can demonstrate first class organisational skills and be an integral team player.
You will also be able to demonstrate:
- An enthusiastic and positive approach
- The ability to work under pressure and to tight deadlines with little supervision
- Excellent time and performance management
- The ability to pay close attention to detail
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills
- Working with confidentiality, discretion and diplomacy
- Being a team player who can build good relationships with the PAs and lawyers
- Excellent IT skills (Microsoft Office 365, MS Teams, Excel, PPT, document management systems)
Salary and benefits
We offer competitive salaries and generous benefits. We value the health and wellbeing of our people and our wide range of initiatives and benefits support this.
Our recruitment process
We welcome direct applications for our opportunities - if you would like any further information about this role or the firm, we would be delighted to hear from you. Please contact, in complete confidence, Tim Jenkins (Recruitment Advisor) on 0117 917 3666 or email tim.jenkins@osborneclarke.com.
Please note that although we include closing dates for our roles as a guide, we review and progress applications on a rolling basis. At Osborne Clarke we do not make any recruitment decisions using automated decision-making.
We are committed to providing an environment where you can perform to the best of your abilities at every stage of your recruitment experience and beyond. If you require any adjustments to be made during the application stage, interview process, or when working with us, please let us know in confidence.