Austen Hays Legal Secretary

The Role

An excellent opportunity for a proactive and self-motivated experienced Legal Secretary to join our leading Austen Hays (part of Gateley) team. The role will be based at our London office. 

Whilst a regular office presence is required of three days per week, Gateley are fully embracing the new hybrid culture, so a mixture of both home and office working is available.

If you are looking for an opportunity to work within a supportive, ambitious, growing and energetic team, and would like to join an award-winning law led professional services business, we would like to hear from you.

The Team

Austen Hays ( part of Gateley) is a firm focussing on class actions. The team brings actions against big corporates on behalf of thousands of individuals and small businesses. The core purpose of the firm is to deliver access to justice in a fair, efficient, and transparent way.

Using the right expertise and the right technology Austen Hays brings a forward-thinking approach to individuals, businesses and consumers looking to achieve collective redress and help claimants to seek justice by sharing the cost and risk across many people or organisations in the same situation. Claimant-centred class actions is an exciting and growing area of the law, which play a key role in holding businesses to account to ensure access to justice and fair compensation for consumers.

Austen Hays (part of Gateley) has made significant investment in technology which will support hundreds and thousands of claimants to opt into a class action. The effect of this, is that manual intervention will be limited and the process of onboarding of clients will only require involvement by a Litigation Advisor in a limited number of scenarios. We therefore expect that the successful candidate for this role will have more exposure to the legal queries rather than queries of an administrative nature.

The Managing Director and Partner – Chaya Hanoomanjee, and Partner – Alicia Theuma have extensive experience in launching and managing group claims, usually with an international element, and in securing group settlements. Supplemented with detailed knowledge of litigation funding, they are well placed to advise on all stages of the collective actions process, and suitable funding structures. 

Our highly experienced and talented team has acted on some of the most complex and significant collective cases in the UK, brought by both consumers and businesses. The team has been at the forefront of the rise of consumer group claims, including previously acting as lead solicitor for over 71,000 individuals in the landmark Volkswagen NOx Emissions Group litigation, which settled for £193m in May 2022. 

The Person

The successful candidate will be confident liaising with colleagues, clients and external parties, proactively organising and managing diaries and taking the lead on tasks to ensure an exceptional and seamless secretarial support service.

In particular we look for the following attributes:

• At least three to five years’ previous legal secretary experience gained within a litigation team is essential.

Experience and competence in:

• Typing, drafting and producing documents efficiently and accurately.
• Document management – to include proficiency in using Word, Power Point and Excel.
• Experience completing manuscript amendments and general administration.
• General secretarial tasks that may vary depending on workload and capacity – to include compliance tasks as required.
• Diary management, ideally including travel and event booking.
•  First class, confident communication skills, both written and verbal.
• Attention to detail.
• Capability to prioritise and multitask effectively, with good time management and organisational skills, and escalating when required.
• Willing to continually learn and adapt to new procedures.
• Ability to be proactive, take initiative and self-motivate.
• Experience of working under pressure to tight deadlines while remaining calm.
• Always demonstrate discretion and maintain absolute confidentiality.
• IT skills – Confident in getting trained and using new IT systems, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, , typing, formatting and editing PDF documents.

The benefits
With support, coaching and feedback from some of the most engaging colleagues around our great development and progression opportunities will reward your commitment and loyalty. We offer a competitive remuneration package where you’ll be rewarded for your individual performance with an opportunity to receive an annual bonus.

In addition, we have a wide range of learning and development opportunities via our Learn platform to develop new skills and progress your career. Our My Flex comprehensive rewards package includes options covering annual leave (and the benefit of purchasing extra days), cycle to work, critical illness benefit, employee assistance programme, group personal pension, health care, season ticket loan and many more benefits (grade dependent). Finally, with Perks At Work/Home you can select a host of retail benefits that suit your needs alongside a Community Online Academy, free courses for all from fitness to coding to languages to hip hop dance.

We are Gateley
We are forward thinking and straight talking, our approach is to find solutions to the problems that our clients face. Gateley is a legal and professional services group, we are a group of formidable experts in all areas of law and business. Passionate problem solvers, we get our kicks from finding the right answers and getting our legal and business clients where they need to be. We support more than 5,700 active clients, ranging from FTSE 100 companies to private individuals, in the UK and beyond. Being part of Gateley is not just about the expertise that you bring; it’s about attitude too.

The ‘Gateley Story’ is the story of our people and our culture. It is what has got us to where we are today as a successful business and it’s the driving force behind the Gateley Team Spirit and the values that have shaped it. We have a set of shared internal values that capture what the Gateley Team Spirit is and this includes five elements that bind us all together as one Gateley: Ambitious for Success, Forward Thinking, Room to Breathe, Trusted to Do and Working Together. Every year across the group, we recognise members of our team that have gone and above and beyond and have lived these shared values. They are recognised at our annual Gateley Team Spirit awards.

Diversity, inclusion and well being
Diversity, inclusion and well-being is an important part of Gateley’s culture and values. We recruit talented people from a diverse range of backgrounds and cultures, providing equal opportunities for all to join our team regardless of age, sex, race, sexual orientation, disability, or culture.

We create an exciting and rewarding place to work that aims to fulfil everyone’s potential and together to achieve personal and business goals. We offer flexible working patterns to help our staff achieve a good work/ life balance and we encourage candidates seeking flexibility in their next role to apply for any of our vacancies.
We are proud to have been recognised by The Law Society as gold standard for our Diversity and Inclusion Charter and to be Stonewall Diversity Champions.

Additional Information
If you are successful in receiving an offer of a role with our company a variety of pre-employment screening checks will be completed. Our screening checks can include but are not limited to your eligibility to work, professional and academic qualifications, any criminal records, your financial stability, and references from previous employers. The screening that takes place will be relevant to your role and will vary from role to role.