Blake Morgan is a leading full service law firm, with offices in London, Wales, Manchester, Reading, Oxford and Southampton. We provide our clients with practical and straightforward legal advice whatever their regional, national and international requirements. Our clients are commercial businesses, not-for-profit organisations, central and local government agencies and private individuals. The Property Services Group (PSG) comprises teams built around Commercial Real Estate (including Planning & Environment), Residential Property, Property Litigation and Project and Cost Management providing property services to our clients nationally from our offices. Construction is in a separate business group. Our “One Team” approach allows work to flow around the PSG to the lawyer with relevant experience and capacity. For business development purposes we align to sector and asset types through our Routes to Market. There are no geographical boundaries to these and whom can be involved.
We are looking for a Property Professional Support Lawyer (PSL) who can guide the PSG through the next phase of the growth and development of the PSG by building and developing a knowledge management toolkit for its commercial and residential and both contentious and non-contentious lawyers. We see this as an exciting opportunity to help shape the knowledge management and hence the performance of the group as it moves through this phase with further adoption and development of technology, software and AI to support lawyers operating in the ever faster, better, cheaper world and the key markets we operate in.
The Leadership Team of the PSG have a number of core projects it wishes to deliver and so it would look to work with the successful candidate to agree the key priorities and objectives to ensure timely delivery, balanced with resources available. The PSG will ensure engagement of its lawyers in assisting the PSL with the appropriate support together with the Information Services Team, and the Applied Technology Centre (for producing documents in house styles). The PSL will be expected to liaise closely with our IT & Learning and Development teams as we explore and develop the supporting technologies and resources available to the PSG.
Key Projects:
- Build an accessible central knowledge data base and depository for its knowledge toolkit.
- Work with the Leadership and Risk Teams to produce a set of property specific policies and procedures designed to support and protect the lawyers and the business.
- Work with our Business Development Team to build our lawyer biography library.
- Provide a monthly legal update service with content appropriate to lawyers, but also tailored to clients for dissemination through the BD Team.
- Develop and support the delivery of internal training and re-invigorate our Property Academy for junior lawyers.
- Support the delivery of bespoke client facing training.
- Deliver a programme to review and enhance the Blake Morgan “One Team” approach through developing and improving existing client precedents and best practice.
- Work with the Leadership and IT Teams to review and assess appropriate technologies and the use of AI to form part of our toolkit.
Key responsibilities:
- Building effective relationships within PSG and across the firm generally.
- Drafting precedents and user notes, managing the quality and consistency of departmental documentation.
- Regular review of existing precedents and bringing forward recommendations for improvement and adaptation to conform to best practice.
- Reviewing, vetting, approving and co-ordinating documentation produced by other Real Estate lawyers.
- Designing and delivering relevant technical training both remotely and where appropriate in person.
- Reviewing departmental systems and processes, suggesting and implementing improvements.
- Writing articles and press releases.
- Co-ordinating and producing departmental and sector content for the firm's website.
- Supporting lawyers with bespoke queries (although not to be a substitute for lawyer research with support from Information Team).
Qualifications and Personal Qualities
- Confident, personable, good communications skills
- Proactive, inquisitive
- An experienced real estate lawyer with 8 years PQE+
- Demonstrably strong on technical issues
- Previous experience in a client facing role within a large city, national or regional practice
- Excellent drafting skills including drafting policies procedures and property documents
- Strong academics