Employment Senior Associate (or Legal Director)- Leeds

Job Introduction

The Employment Pensions and Immigration Team at DAC Beachcroft LLP is one of the largest teams in the UK. We have a strong client base across insurance, health and corporate clients, including a significant number of household names.  Our Leeds employment team is Band 1 ranked, and is led by Louise Bloomfield, who is the Legal 500 Northern Powerhouse Employment Lawyer of the Year 2024 as well as in The Lawyer Hot 100.  The team is one of the largest employment teams in the North and comprises over 30 team members. It is also part of the wider Employment, Pensions and Immigration Group across the UK (London, Manchester, Bristol and Newcastle) and the Group overall which has over 120 fee earners.

The Leeds employment team advises many significant public, private and health employers on human resource issues from daily personnel matters, including disciplinary and grievance issues, to strategic management issues such as collective redundancy programmes, industrial action, transfers of employees and sensitive hires and exits.  The team handles approximately 2,000 Employment Tribunal claims per annum and we are one of the largest users of the Employment Appeals Tribunal.

At DAC Beachcroft we offer “A Life That Works”, a way of working which enables our diverse group of colleagues to balance professional responsibilities with personal commitments. Flex Forward is how we deliver this. We offer location based working, fully flex and hybrid working, enabling colleagues to work primarily in office, remotely or a mix of the two, which offer the maximum flexibility for each colleague’s role. We also offer a flexible approach to working hours, enabling colleagues to “glide their time”, or flex their hours across the day and week with relaxed core hours, balanced against meeting client and team demands.

Role Responsibility

• Undertake a varied workload of employment matters advising employers in a variety of sectors, including major corporates, retail, hospitability, central government, insurance and health work.
• Be a key player in the management and supervision of the team, clients and relationship development.
• Progress and manage a wide variety of client matters both contentious and non-contentious, and of varying complexity and scale.
• Manage own matters, time and relationships with minimum supervision.
• Maintain an awareness of the appropriate limits of own competence/authority.
• Actively identify and exploit business development opportunities and marketing activity for team clients and own contacts.
• Participate in and initiate marketing / network activities in order to maintain and develop work from existing clients and potential clients.
• This includes presenting and assisting in client and other external seminars, taking part in pitches and contributing positively to business development.
• Maintain and develop technical knowledge through leading and attending training sessions, reading appropriate publications and exceeding Law Society CPD requirements.
• Support the effective running of the team e.g. contributing to team meetings, leading training, supervising reports and documents of more junior fee earners and providing guidance and feedback, assisting with the allocation of work.
• Provide support for colleagues where appropriate e.g. progressing matters in senior colleagues’ absence, providing technical supervision and skills development, supporting CRM activities.
• Continually monitoring and taking responsibility for own financial performance and demonstrating proactive financial management; attention to billing regimes, credit control, debt collection, accounting procedures and client service level agreements.
• Handle confidential data in line with the firm's data security protocols.

The Ideal Candidate

• A qualified Senior Associate or Legal Director (including aspirational candidates) ideally from 8PQE+
• Must have experience of handling tribunal claims from start to finish. Supervising others to do the same is desirable, as is civil and/or appellate court experience (EAT, High Court, Court of Appeal etc).
• Must have experience of contentious and non-contentious matters, and preferably experience of advising transactional projects involving restructures, TUPE, collective consultation as well general advisory work with clients on senior level or strategic issues, such as executive terminations or collective / industrial relations issues.
• Prior experience of working with or advising large institutional employers in heavily regulated sectors (e.g. financial services, health, local and central government, PLCs) would be advantageous.
• Good academic record, together with experience in a firm dealing with respondent work.
• Independent thinker with a focus on generating commercial solutions to problems on behalf of clients. Up to date knowledge of key trends in order to maintain credibility in conversations with clients.
• Confident communicator with an ability to develop relationships, undertake client marketing and influence at all levels, in particular HR Director/General Counsel level.
• Enthusiastic team player with a flexible approach, and demonstrates role model behaviours at all times.
• Track record of business development is desirable.

About the Company

We are a leading international legal business with over 2,900 colleagues and a diverse range of capabilities. We have 11 offices in the UK as well as offices in Dublin, Madrid, Paris, Milan, Rome, Singapore, Argentina Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Miami. We also have associations/alliances with firms in Malaysia, Brazil, Peru, Central America, the USA, Australia and Germany.

We are a broad-based commercial firm with a strong heritage in insurance, health and real estate. This is complemented by a fast-growing Business Advisory capability. We represent a wide range of clients, ranging from household names to government departments and NHS bodies. We act for all of the UK’s top-ten insurers, we are market leaders in the provision of strategic, commercial and regulatory advice to providers and commissioners in the health sector, and in real estate we advise all of the UK’s top-12 housebuilders.

We have an impressive legal pedigree, with 142 Chambers UK 2021 practice area and individual lawyer rankings. In Legal 500 UK 2021, the firm received a top tier ranking for 37 of its practice areas, and 58 DACB lawyers were singled out in the ‘Leading Individual' rankings.

Our successes have been recognised by the legal industry and the markets in which we operate. These accolades include two top prizes in the ‘Excellence in Business Development’ and ‘Excellence in Technology & Innovation’ categories of the 2020 Law Society Excellence Awards – the highest accolade for law firms in England & Wales. Our health sector team won the ‘Crisis Management Team of the Year’ award at the 2020 British Legal Awards for its support to the NHS at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and our Cyber & Data Risk team received the ‘Business Development Innovation Award’ at the 2020 Legal Innovation Awards, as well as ‘Cyber Law Firm of the Year’ at the prestigious Insurance Insider Cyber Rankings Awards, for its market-leading suite of digital tools to help our clients prepare for and respond to cyber and data risk crises.

Our vision is to be leading business advisers, recognised for our insight and our outstanding commitment to clients, and for being the place where talented people want to work. For further details on our work and our culture, please visit www.dacbeachcroft.com.

Application Details

At DAC Beachcroft, we don’t just accept your differences we celebrate them.  From bespoke solutions for our clients, to treating you like an individual.  Our strength comes from your diverse ideas and bringing the whole you to work. So if you’re good at what you do, come as you are.  We welcome direct applications and are happy to talk flexible working.

We also want you to be at your very best.  Please feel free to let us know of any changes we can make at any point in the recruitment process that will help support your application.  If this opportunity sounds of interest to you, please make an application and submit your CV.  Your application will be dealt with in the strictest of confidence.

Note for Recruitment Agencies – the DAC Beachcroft recruitment team is responsible for managing all current vacancies through direct hiring and referrals wherever possible.  We do work with recruitment agencies and where we require external support we will formally release those vacancies to the agencies on our Preferred Supplier List deemed best placed to assist us.  Speculative CVs sent by any agency to any DAC Beachcroft employee without a specific request by the recruitment team will not be accepted and with no introduction fee applicable.  Our recruitment team can be contacted at recruitment@dacbeachcroft.com

DAC Beachcroft