Senior PA (Corporate)

Osborne Clarke; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 100,000 - 125,000; Full time

Job summary

A prominent law firm in London is seeking an experienced Senior PA to support the UK Head of Private Equity and other senior staff. The role involves managing meetings, travel, and billing processes while providing high-level administrative support. The ideal candidate will have substantial PA experience from a legal background, excellent organizational and IT skills, and a proactive approach to teamwork. This 12-month fixed-term position offers hybrid working arrangements and competitive salaries.

Benefits

Competitive salary

Generous benefits

Health and wellbeing initiatives

Qualifications

• Significant PA experience from a legal or professional services background.
• Ability to demonstrate first-class organisational skills.
• Flexibility and a proactive approach to workload.

Responsibilities

• Provide effective PA support to the UK Head of Private Equity and Partners.
• Manage travel arrangements and diary commitments for the team.
• Assist with billing administration and prepare reports.

Skills

Excellent organisational skills

Communication skills

Attention to detail

IT skills (Microsoft Office 365)

Time management

Tools

Microsoft Office 365

Microsoft Teams

Excel

PowerPoint

Job description

Role profile

This is an exciting opportunity for an experienced Senior PA to join a busy Corporate team that is growing from strength to strength, to support our UK Head of Private Equity, alongside a group of Partners and Fee Earners at varying levels of seniority. The practice sits within the Business Transactions Group. This is a 12 month fixed term contract covering maternity leave, based out of our London office, that offers hybrid working.

What you’ll do

• Play a key role in supporting the UK Head of Private Equity, Partners and Fee Earners by scheduling meetings, arranging International travel, assisting with the co‑ordination of internal and external events, monitoring spend against budgets, taking minutes of 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, for the team of Partners and Fee Earners.
• Draft short correspondence and communications, demonstrate excellent IT skills, with the ability to amend and format large and complex documents.
• Develop strong working relationships with key personnel in our UK and International teams.
• Identify opportunities, actively contribute and be involved with ad‑hoc projects.

PA responsibilities to the team

• Provide highly professional, effective and proactive PA support to a number of Partners and Fee Earners, including the UK Head of Private Equity.
• 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.
• Own the end‑to‑end billing and financial administration process: collaborate with Finance to plan quarterly billing cycles; prepare clear reports for clients (Excel), Partners and fee earners; co‑ordinate timely invoice issuance, including with Finance’s eBilling team; deal with client queries arising, including liaising with Finance and the eBilling team; assist Finance with monitoring WIP and debtor ageing by prompting and supporting fee earners; attend matter/finance reviews.
• Assist with the file opening/client due diligence process, set up new matters, draft engagement letters.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Role model flexibility and openness to change, be decisive, responsible and take ownership of tasks.
• Work closely with the Senior PA Resource Co‑Ordinator to improve team efficiencies, communications, management of work‑in‑progress and roll‑out of IT applications, and improved working practices.

We are looking for

We are looking for a candidate who has significant PA experience from a legal or professional services background, 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.
• Proven experience of end‑to‑end billing administration.
• 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).

Salary and benefits

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.