Solicitor - Employment, Manchester

Job Introduction

DAC Beachcroft is looking to appoint a Solicitor to strengthen our Employment team in Manchester, on the back of some significant client wins and growth in work.  Our Employment, Pensions and Immigration team is over 90 strong with 17 Partners and a presence in London, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle and Bristol.  Our clients include significant number of household names and listed businesses, and we regularly work on reported and market-leading employment law issues.

The team advises clients on employment tribunal litigation and also issues ranging from daily personnel matters, including disciplinary and grievance issues, to strategic management issues such as redundancy programmes, industrial action, and transfers of employees.  We also work closely with our commercial and corporate colleagues to provide support on transactional matters.

Role Responsibility

The role is varied and the main responsibilities include:

• Undertaking a varied workload of employment matters advising employers in a variety of sectors, including retail, health, logistics and insurance work
• Progressing and managing a wide variety of client matters both contentious and non-contentious, and of varying complexity and scale
• Managing own matters, time and relationships with varying degrees of supervision, but being a team player at all times
• Maintaining an awareness of the appropriate limits of own competence/authority
• Actively identifying and exploiting business development opportunities and marketing activity for team clients and own contacts
• Participating in and initiating marketing / network activities in order to maintain and develop work from existing clients and potential clients
• Presenting and assisting in client and other external seminars, taking part in pitches and contributing positively to business development
• Maintaining and developing technical knowledge through leading and attending training sessions, reading appropriate publications and exceeding Law Society CPD requirements
• Providing support for colleagues where appropriate e.g. progressing matters in colleagues’ absence, 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
• Handling confidential data in line with the firm's data security protocols

The Ideal Candidate

Ideally a solicitor from an established respondent focussed practice working with large employers, you will be able to demonstrate the following:

• Experience of handling tribunal claims from start to finish, and ideally supervising others to do the same would be desirable for more experienced candidates.  Civil and/or appellate court experience (EAT, High Court, Court of Appeal etc.) is desirable
• Solid experience of providing day to day advice to clients on all typical HR issues such as disciplinaries, grievances, sickness absence, family leave and termination discussions
• Experience of contentious and non-contentious matters, and preferably experience of advising on restructures, M&A, TUPE, collective consultation as well general advisory work with clients on senior level issues, such as executive terminations or restrictive covenant disputes. Work on multi-national issues, industrial action or immigration experience is also welcomed
• 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

About the Company

We are a leading international legal business with over 2,500 colleagues and a diverse range of capabilities. We have 11 offices in the UK as well as offices in Dublin, Madrid, Paris, Singapore, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Miami. We also have associations/alliances with firms in Malaysia, Brazil, Peru, Argentina, 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