Senior PA

Our Financial Institutions Group is seeking an experienced Senior PA to support a team of partners and fee earners of varying levels of seniority, including the Head of the Financial Services sector and FinTech sub-sector Leader. The main purpose of this role is to provide highly professional, efficient and proactive PA support to the team.

This is a permanent position based out of our London office that offers hybrid working.

What you'll do

PA responsibilities to support the Head of the Financial Services Sector and FinTech sub-sector Leader

• Play a key role in supporting the Head of the Financial Services and FinTech sub-sector Leader.
• Develop strong working relationships with key personnel in our UK and International teams to support the Head of the FS Sector.
• Support the Head of the FS Sector by scheduling meetings, arranging International travel, assisting with the co-ordination of internal and external events, monitoring spend against budgets, taking minutes of FS Sector Management 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, including for both the Head of the Financial Services sector and FinTech sub-sector Leader.
• 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 Head of the Financial Services sector and FinTech sub-sector Leader.

PA Responsibilities to the Team

• Provide highly professional, effective and proactive PA support to a number of fee earners, including the Head of the Financial Services Sector and FinTech sub-sector Leader.
• 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.
• Play an active role in understanding, managing and taking responsibility for the billing process by working closely with our accounts team and preparing financial reports for clients, the Partners, and the fee earning team; 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
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Proactively identify opportunities, actively contribute and be involved with ad-hoc projects as given by the team (and across OC).
• Actively participate in initiatives that are relevant to your role; attend events as required.
• Work closely with the other PAs in the team, covering for absences, as and when required.
• 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.
• 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.
• Support the Senior PA Resource Co-Ordinator to improve team efficiencies, communications, management of work-in-progress, roll-out of IT applications, and the development and effectiveness of PA and administrative 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.
• 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).

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

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.