Owen Reed are looking to recruit a Junior Secretary to join a top law firm in London.
Job type: Full Time, Permanent
Hybrid working: 2 days in the office and 3 days WFH
Reports to: Secretarial Manager / Secretarial Coordinator

Main purpose of the role:
To provide fee-earners with proactive and high-quality secretarial support that appropriately meets their requirements, enabling them to focus on providing legal services to clients and reducing the need for them to undertake administrative tasks.
Reports to: This role will report directly to the Partner. Other key liaison relationships are:

• Group Heads of all national and international practice groups
• Sector Heads
• Business Services Departments
• Fee Earners and Secretaries in the Central Management team
• Internal and external clients and contacts

Main Duties & Responsibilities:
Key Responsibilities:

• Complex diary management for the Partner ensuring the organisation and scheduling of the
  Partner’s tasks, including the identification and resolution of potential challenges and clashes
  and re-organising and re-scheduling where necessary
• Organising prep meetings with the teams before client meetings take place, ensuring full diary
  management in advance.
• Pro-active management to ensure the Partner is fully updated on diary activities, attending
  meetings on time and with the appropriate documents/presentations.
• Acting as gatekeeper for the Partner to manage diaries
•  Co-ordination of both internal and external meetings on behalf of the Partner, including
  booking all required facilities. Sourcing off-site meetings venues, arranging logistics for such
  meetings and dealing with related expenses/invoices.
• Planning and co-ordination of travel programmes to include liaison with overseas offices,
  booking flights, hotels, car transfers.
• Proactive management of emails and post, using initiative to route emails to the appropriate
  individuals for swift response and actions, ensuring that these are followed up.
• Prioritise correspondence to enable the Partner to focus on urgent matters. Bring urgent
  matters to the Partner’s attention.
• Drafting high-quality correspondence, letters, documents, agendas, reports, presentations and
  spreadsheets for meetings and ensuring their timely distribution and distributing and
  arranging DMC to undertake presentations.
• Responding to and typing/composing correspondence on behalf of the Partner.
• Taking Minutes at meetings and producing action lists.
• Production and maintenance of action lists for Partner, together with pro-active follow-up to
  ensure that actions are completed on time.
•  Building strong relationships with, and developing and maintaining a comprehensive
  knowledge of, internal and external clients, mandates and projects.
• Dealing with invoices and expenses.
• Maintenance of up-to-date and robust filing systems to ensure efficient document
  management.
• Undertaking other activities as required by the Partner and the Central Management team.
• Client facing work, including M&BD team events and webinars.
• This role has no supervisory responsibility and no responsibility for budgets.

Person Specification:

• A thorough understanding of working in a professional, service driven environment and of stakeholder /client / business confidentiality
• Ability to maintain tact, diplomacy, trust and confidentiality
• Confident and professional manner with the ability to build strong relationships with stakeholders and clients
• Excellent communication skills and ability to interact at all levels
• Forward thinking and proactive in their approach
• Works well under pressure in an ever-changing environment
• Collaborative and supportive of the business and its initiatives
• Adaptable and open to change showing a willingness and confidence to make suggestions for change where appropriate
• Strong organisational skills and excellent attention to detail
• Anticipate and identify potential problems and provide innovative solutions
• A strong team player
• Demonstrate strength of character, resilience and tenacity in the face of challenge and resistance – and so able to drive change
• Ability to build relationships with partners and colleagues and demonstrate good influencing and negotiating skills
• Must have previous experience of extensive diary management within a professional services environment and preferably a partnership
• Strong working knowledge of Microsoft Office suite of products, particularly Excel, Word and PowerPoint.