This is an exciting opportunity
for an experienced Senior PA to join a busy Commercial team, to support our UK
Head of Commercial, alongside a group of Partners and Fee Earners at varying
levels of seniority. The practice sits
within the Business Transactions Group.
This is a permanent position
based out of our Bristol office, that offers hybrid working.
About the team
The Business Transactions
practice group accounts for around a third of our business and encompasses
three service lines Commercial, Corporate and the Financial Institutions
Group. Our sector-based approach enables
us to help our clients tackle the issues they are facing today, and prepare for
the ones that they will face tomorrow. Advising them both comprehensively and
commercially. We love working closely with our clients on new deals, products
and solutions which will transform their businesses, markets and even sectors.
Our unique approachable culture is not an added extra, it's fundamental to our
success.
What you'll do
- Play a key role in supporting the UK Head of Commercial,
Partners and Fee Earners by scheduling meetings, arranging International travel,
assisting with the co-ordination of internal and external events, monitoring
spend against budgets, taking minutes of meetings, preparing action lists and
proactively driving forward delivery of the actions by colleagues across the
business.
- Proactively take responsibility for the organisation of all
travel arrangements and itineraries, for the team of Partners and Fee Earners.
- Draft short correspondence and communications, demonstrate
excellent IT skills, with the ability to amend and format large and complex
documents.
- Develop strong working relationships with key personnel in
our UK and International teams.
- Identify opportunities, actively contribute and be involved
with ad-hoc projects.
PA Responsibilities to the Team
- Provide highly professional, effective and proactive PA
support to a number of Partners and Fee Earners, including the UK Head of
Commercial.
- Assist with full diary management for the Partners and diary
commitments for the team, pre-empting and identifying any diary conflicts, and
pro-actively helping to resolve these.
- Proactively take responsibility for travel arrangements,
conference bookings and meeting room bookings in advance, together with
ensuring any meeting materials are prepared and delivered in a timely manner.
- Own the end-to-end billing and financial administration
process: collaborate with Finance to plan quarterly billing cycles; prepare
clear reports for clients (Excel), Partners and fee earners; co-ordinate timely
invoice issuance, including with Finance's eBilling team; deal with client
queries arising, including liaising with Finance and the eBilling team; assist
Finance with monitoring WIP and debtor ageing by prompting and supporting fee
earners; attend matter/finance reviews.
- Assist with the file opening/client due diligence process,
set up new matters, draft engagement letters.
- Develop strong working relationships with our key clients,
anticipate, mitigate and resolve potential client relationship issues or
concerns.
- Deal with enquiries from clients, colleagues and third
parties, understanding the context of the requests, managing expectations, and
provide effective transfer of information.
- Provide proactive support in terms of inbox/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.
- Document work involving a variety of amending, formatting as
well as creating PowerPoint slides and pitch documents and Excel spreadsheets,
agreements and structure charts, document comparisons, and understanding the
role of the Central Services team to seek their support when appropriate.
- Collate and process expenses including proactive management.
- Assist with any ad hoc IT queries, liaising with the IT team
to resolve these queries, and help with the integration of new colleagues.
- Actively participate in initiatives that are relevant to
your role; attend events as required.
- Work closely with the other PAs in the team, including cover
for PA absences, which may extend across service lines within BTG.
- Provide training and support to junior colleagues to ensure
a high-quality service.
- Actively contribute and enhance the firm's culture and focus
on collaboration and sharing of knowledge.
- Take ownership of your development and understand the
expectations of your role.
- Comply with the firm's policies and complete all mandatory
training.
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 Coordinator to
improve team efficiencies, communications, management of work-in-progress and
roll-out of IT applications, and improved working practices.
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:
- Excellent organisational skills and the ability to
prioritise work.
- An enthusiastic and positive approach.
- Proven experience of end-to-end billing administration.
- The ability to work under pressure and to tight deadlines
with little supervision.
- Flexible and proactive approach.
- Excellent time and performance management.
- Initiative and problem solving capabilities.
- Exceptional 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.
For internal purposes, this role is graded as an OC level: Senior PA
Our recruitment process
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.