Owen Reed is looking to recruit a dynamic and driven Legal Secretary to join a top law firm in London.

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.

• Diary and contact management
• Proactively manage and maintain fee-earners' diaries, scheduling 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.
• Having a good knowledge of fee earners clients, liaising with their PAs.
• Monitor individual responses for meetings and update fee-earner(s) as required. Ensure fee-earners have relevant materials and information in advance of each meeting.
• Arrange the booking of conference rooms, video conference facilities, taxis refreshments, restaurants, and liaising with meeting attendees, both internal and external.
• Monitoring and responding to post and/or emails, prioritising correspondence to enable fee-earners to focus on urgent matters and using initiative to route emails to the appropriate individuals for swift response and action; wherever possible, responding to and filing emails on behalf of fee-earners to reduce volume
• Organising travel arrangements through the firm’s travel company, booking and confirmation of reservations, flights, hotels, car transfers, ordering currency and expense claims and producing detailed itineraries.

Administrative tasks

• Day-to-day administrative tasks such as photocopying, scanning and demonstrating the ability to delegate to appropriate department(s) and team administrators, when necessary, e.g. for organising large volume printing, photocopying, document production.
• Effectively manage new client matter opening and any additional tasks and duties relating to this process, following Service Excellence workbooks and process throughout.
• Organise document management, including closing of files, archiving and ensure that all relevant documents are filed electronically and paper-based, if required.
• Dealing with and submission of travel invoices and expense claims using Chrome River.
• Submitting invoices for payment through the Accounts Payable team and monitoring progress.
• Demonstrate an understanding of the end-to-end billing process and AX (Financial system); assisting fee-earners by proactively leading on relevant administrative processes, to ensure that bills are completed within required timeframe.
• Prepare WIP reports to be reviewed by fee-earners.
• Supporting fee-earners, Secretarial Co-ordinator or Group Head on time recording (Intapp), including reporting as required.
• Supporting fee-earners with maintenance of InterAction; ensure new business contact details are entered and contacts from fee-earners Outlook address book are shared, updating changes of contact and entering activities when a M&BD activity is planned with a client or target by own fee-earner, proactively downloading and printing reports on contacts ahead of meetings and pitches with the contact.
• Supporting team in updating information on the SharePoint intranet or in managing and maintaining particular pages.
• Supporting fee-earners with the preparation of speaker CVs and formatting of speaker materials, RSVP management for events sponsored by own fee-earner by responding to MS Team calls and email enquiries from interested delegates, responding to fee-earners’ queries about attending delegates using InterAction reporting function, notifying own fee-earners about events that are coming up in their/other office when visiting using intranet events calendar and notifying the organiser if fee-earner wishes to attend.
• Preparation of key documents and correspondence
  Drafting letters and correspondence as required.
• Proof-reading all work to ensure that completed documents are delivered accurately and to a consistently high standard
• 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 preparation time.
• Submit edits and format changes to bids, pitches and other client documents to Document Management Centre and monitor progress.
• Drafting letters and correspondence as required.
• Sourcing fee-earners’ CVs for pitches and co-ordinating the update of the CVs for the pitch then submission to the BD contact by required deadline and/or submission of pitch documents where online submission is required.
• Support with presentations for client training, seminars and conferences if required by submitting to Document Management Centre to ensure they meet the firm’s branding and house style guidelines.
• Maintenance of CVs; maintaining fee-earner CVs on CV Bank and the website to include entering content changes as directed by fee-earners, and proactively supporting the quarterly CV review by printing all versions of own fee-earners’ CVs from CV bank for review and mark-up, proactively asking fee-earners about adding new deals and cases to their CV upon completion of a matter.

What we are looking for:

Education / Qualifications / Experience

• Experience working as a secretary within a professional services environment
• Knowledge and Technical Skills
• Good working knowledge of all Microsoft applications
• Experience of working with house-styles and branding
• Good working knowledge of document and client relationship management systems, OCR/PDF software and financial recording applications
• General Skills

Client service orientated approach

• A proven working understanding of teamwork
• Problem solving skills and solutions focused
• Advanced communication skills at all levels
• Self-management, ability to take ownership and excellent organisational skills, with the ability to prioritise work calmly and effectively in a pressurised environment
• Accountability and professionalism
• Business and organisation awareness
• Ability to develop self and others
• Attention to detail and discretion with confidential information Able to work effectively as part of a diverse and inclusive team Creative and forward-thinking approach to tasks.