Practice Support Executive

Role title: Practice Support Executive 
Team    Real Estate    
Location: Milton Keynes
Duration: Permanent 
Reports to: Partner/Practice Group Leader

Role Purpose 
 
To deliver outstanding proactive executive support to partners and fee-earners, displaying a strong focus on exceptional client service.  This is a fantastic opportunity for someone who is driven, enthusiastic and passionate about delivering a professional service of the highest quality.  The role offers excellent experience, training and genuine career development prospects.

Key Duties & Responsibilities

Organisation and Planning

• Complex diary and travel management with supervision when needed.
• Diarising and supporting the monitoring of deadlines 
• Arranging client entertainment and assisting with organisation of client seminars/conferences with supervision when needed.
• Preparation of agendas and meeting papers.
• Responsibility for organising internal events (e.g. training sessions, social events).
• Creating first draft emails and letters on behalf of fee-earners ready for review. 
• Ownership of inbox filing delegating to an Administration Assistant as appropriate.
• Interface with other business services teams and ownership on resolving any business operations problems.
• Managing fee-earner capacity trackers 

Business Development and Client Relationship Management

• Research into clients as instructed by fee-earners. 
• Acting as key client contact for non-legal queries (e.g. dealing with telephone queries, liaising with client secretarial team to discuss billing processes).
• Building and maintaining effective relationships with both internal and external clients.
• Supporting client reporting requirements
• Supporting partners on bids, tenders
• Supporting partners with creation of client presentation materials
• Supporting events in collaboration with Business Development 

Financial Management and Matter Opening

• Taking ownership on any complex billing arrangements with supervision when needed.
• Supervising Administration Assistants with routine billing and expenses processing.
• Supervising Administration Assistants with post-matter completion. 
• Supporting Partners on monitoring WIP management with supervision when needed.
• Completion of NBI forms.
• Preparing letters of engagement.
• Arranging conflicts and AML checks.
• Ensuring all parties lists are kept up to date.

Document Management 

• Preparing pitch documents
• Transcribing BigHand dictations of less than 5 minutes 
• Archiving and storing of original documents 
• Creating and amending data sets in Excel 
• Creating and amending PowerPoint presentations
• Creating, formatting and amending Word documents*
• Carrying out document comparisons and document conversions (e.g. PDF to Word, house-style)*
• Proof reading
• Creating Tikit links

Required experience, skills and knowledge

• Ideally 18 months experience in a secretarial/admin role
• Demonstrable level of experience providing support to a Practice Group and experience in a wide range of secretarial/administrative tasks.
• Proficient use of MOS including Excel and PowerPoint
• Strong organisational skills
• Confident and professional communication skills/manner at all levels 
• Excellent prioritisation skills and acute attention to detail
• Ability to use own initiative and remain calm under pressure
• Willing to embrace change.
• Ability to delegate.
• Flexible and adaptable approach to work.
• Strong relationship skills.
• Strong project management skills.
• Proactive with very strong ownership approach to the operational workflow.
• Coaching and mentoring approach when working with junior members of the team.

Firm Profile

Dentons is the world's largest law firm, delivering quality and value to clients around the globe. Dentons is a leader on the Acritas Global Elite Brand Index, a BTI Client Service 30 Award winner and recognized by prominent business and legal publications for its innovations in client service, including founding Nextlaw Labs and the Nextlaw Global Referral Network. Dentons' polycentric approach and world-class talent challenge the status quo to advance client interests in the communities in which we live and work.  www.dentons.com

We undertake and support a number of internal and external initiatives aimed at increasing diversity within the profession and we encourage all our partners and staff to get involved. We welcome you to learn more about diversity and inclusion at Dentons. Inclusion and Diversity

Equal Opportunities

Dentons is committed to providing equal opportunities for all. We welcome applications from candidates with disabilities and support those in the workplace who have a disability. During the application process, any applicant has the opportunity to tell us about any adjustments they may require during the application process. Any disability disclosure will be dealt with confidentially and sensitively and if you want to speak directly to a member of our team, please email recruitment.matters@dentons.com. 

NO AGENCIES PLEASE

If you are interested in applying for this position, we welcome direct applications via our careers page, but if you have any questions beforehand please email recruitment.matters@dentons.com – Enquiries only please, applications will not be accepted via email.

Please note that we will not accept unsolicited CVs sent to the business, nor will we accept any associated terms of business.