We are seeking a Property Litigation Lawyer (Solicitor or Associate) to join our motivated and highly regarded Charity Property Team (forming part of National Charity Legal Services practice), based from Bristol, Exeter or Plymouth with a blend of home and office working to meet business, client and team needs.

We're incredibly proud to have established a leading national reputation as experts in resolving property related disputes for charities and have forged trusted and lasting relationships with clients through the consistent delivery of considered and commercially relevant advice. Specialists in partnering with prestigious charity clients to maximise the value of their legacies, support their legal teams and manage their property portfolios, the team works with an impressive list of high profile national charities and (together with the Charities team) is ranked in Tier 1 for Charities (Legacies) UK-wide in Chambers. This is a superb opportunity to further your career in Property Litigation whilst working closely with our Charity and Legacies colleagues, with a focus on delivering highly relevant and commercial advice to respected charity clients from the outset.

What you'll do

Our goal is to enable our charity clients to maximise the value of their properties (whether gifted to them through legacies, charitable purpose, operational or retail) in order to optimise their income and best achieve their wider goals. Day to day, you will be working with experienced and expert charity property colleagues on a wide range of property litigation and problem solving in those contexts: title queries, lost deeds, third party rights (rights of way, easements restrictive covenants, Town and Village Greens etc) landlord and tenant, overages and professional negligence. With natural curiosity and enthusiasm to explore potentially complex property issues, you will be proactive in the interests of each charity client and consider options within a commercial context.

Although you may not have worked extensively with charities previously, you will be keen to understand the landscape within which they work and the challenges they face. You will be joining the wider cross discipline National Charities Legal Services team, which is comprised of over 25 people and has evolved to meet the specific needs of our charity clients over time. The team provides a range of tailored advisory services including dispute resolution, employment, commercial contracts, data protection and IP, estate administration and legacy income management, all focussed around the unique considerations of charity clients and their needs.

In this role, you will be working within an innovative environment where being proactive and forward thinking on behalf of our clients is actively promoted. We use bespoke technology solutions and legal design to interact with our clients in order to deliver exceptional service. We encourage personal development through our Business Skills & Digital Skills Academy and other opportunities such as client secondments.

What we're looking for

A Solicitor or Associate with good experience across a variety of Property Litigation matters and potentially some previous exposure to contentious probate matters and/or charity (though not essential). You are also an enthusiastic problem solver and possess an active and enquiring mind. In this role, you will be working with charity clients as your primary focus, and as such, will need to share in their desire to generate the maximum potential return on their property assets. You will appreciate the importance of delivering value, considering proportionality in all aspects of your work by actively weighing up cost effectiveness against the perceived benefits to the client of a particular course of action you are recommending. We won't expect you to be familiar with the nuances of our work but will want you to be keen to learn from experienced colleagues and welcome their support in order to provide clients with the very highest standards of service. With strong rapport building skills, you will be able to demonstrate your aptitude to develop lasting and trusted relationships with key contacts, and possess an articulate, interested and naturally engaging style of communication.

In technical terms, you will have begun to gain confidence in handling more complex matters with supervision, combined with a good level of independence on straightforward Property Litigation and trust issues.

Our offer to you

In return for your efforts, you can expect considerable scope for personal, as well as professional, development. We encourage people to engage with our popular and well supported coaching and mentoring programmes, which connect you to people right across the firm and at every level. We create space for mental and physical wellbeing with our weekly Lifestyle Hour, along with 28 days’ annual leave (plus a day in your birthday month), private medical insurance (eligibility applies) and a sabbatical you can take every 5 years. You can also buy holiday, managing your benefits flexibly using our sophisticated portal to configure your total reward offer according to what you value most. As part of this, you can make ongoing or one-off donations to our charitable foundation and access our CSR programme where you can engage with community-based initiatives (as a team, or individually) twice a year, to give something back where you feel it matters.

For further details of our benefits packages, please visit the link attached – Our benefits | Foot Anstey

Successful applicants will be required to complete a pre-employment screening process which includes a financial integrity check and a DBS check. If you wish to discuss any issues or questions in connection with this, or anything else, please do speak in confidence with a member of the Talent Acquisition Team: recruitment.team@footanstey.com

Why Foot Anstey?

As one of the UK’s fastest growing law firms, Foot Anstey believes in helping our clients and people achieve their ambitions, unlocking new and exciting opportunities. Our team of business and legal advisors are motivated by understanding clients’ goals and collaborating with them and other advisers to deliver solutions. By becoming our clients’ most trusted advisor, we are enabling them to achieve their ambitions. How we do it is just as important as what we do. Our values define the way we act with our clients and one another every day, and because of this we think our culture and environment sets us apart.

Over our history we’ve grown from a high-street firm to a significant regional and national player working with leading brands and individuals predominantly across seven key sectors: Private Equity, Retail & Consumer, Energy & Infrastructure, Islamic Finance, Developers, Private Wealth and Charities. Our strategy of gaining market share through meeting clients’ needs, investing in and developing high quality talent and using technology and innovation to enhance our services has led to significant growth. We now operate from nine locations: Bristol, Southampton, Exeter, Plymouth, Truro, Taunton and London, as well as a ‘hub’ bases in Manchester, Guildford and Oxford.

Our people are central to our success, in every part of the business. We actively support our employees to achieve their aspirations through offering meaningful careers with balanced rewards, which have been carefully designed to focus on personal wellbeing. We offer continual opportunities for support and professional development through our Business Skills Academy and Digital Skills Academy and believe in empowering each other to achieve and strive to create a progressive and inclusive working environment. Being forward-thinking, we are open to discussing flexible working patterns for all of our vacancies, with over 40% of our existing employees having a permanent flexible working pattern. In addition, our impressive suite of flexible benefits will enable you to prioritise what matters most to you.

Creating a diverse and inclusive workplace is integral to delivering our strategy, and we were delighted to be awarded the National Equality Standard for a second time. We consider this to be right at the heart of our priorities and goes way beyond our policies – it’s something we consider across everything we do, from the make-up of our client teams, encouraging staff to reach their potential, through to our leadership. We aim to support our clients and our people to achieve their goals, regardless of background, gender, race, beliefs, sexuality or other non-work related factors. We champion aspiration and encourage it in everyone that works with us. As such we actively encourage applications from all suitably qualified people, regardless of any characteristics protected by law. If you apply for this role, you may be encouraged to answer our diversity and social mobility monitoring questions, so please be reassured that any answers you provide will remain entirely anonymous and confidential and will in no way impact your application.

Foot Anstey. Seriously Ambitious.

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Property Litigation Lawyer - Charities

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