In-House Legal Counsel
Salary: £55,075 – £63,771
Type: Permanent, Full time (35 hours per week)
Location: Ealing, London (Hybrid working – typically Monday is the team day in the office)
About us
We’re a UK housing association committed to a new vision – providing homes people love to live in.
With over 38,000 homes in management across London and southern England, we provide a wide range of homes for social, affordable and private rent, specialist housing services, as well as homes for sale and shared ownership.
Our 70,000 customers have diverse backgrounds and levels of income and we’re here to provide all of them with homes that are safe, high quality and sustainable. And with social housing roots going back eight decades, we continue to ensure that every penny of profit we make is reinvested into our charitable social purpose – delivering more homes and better services for customers.
We’re also members of the G15, a group of leading housing associations that work together to house one in ten Londoners and tackle the housing crisis.
About the legal team
The Legal Team is a high achieving in house legal team providing litigation and transactional property legal services. As an entrepreneurial department and team, we are constantly looking at how we can add value and improve the services provided to A2Dominion so that it can reinvest back into its social purpose. We also support professional and personal development, and many of our team members have been promoted into their roles and supported to qualification. It is because of this success, that we now have this opportunity in our team, owing to team members moving on to new roles consisting of promotions and new areas of law. The litigation team, deals with all areas of housing management including leasehold, carried out ASB and possession and other litigation, and currently, there is a disrepair focus. The team is inclusive and diverse, and work well as a team. We’re looking for people who can enhance our offering, are team spirited, and those who maintain an interest in what is happening in law and within A2Dominion.
About the role
We’re searching for an In-House Legal Counsel to join our friendly and hard-working Governance & Compliance division at A2Dominion. This role is for a competent housing management lawyer able to work without supervision, and with a love of the law and zest for ensuring that our client’s properties are fit for purpose and inhabited by those entitled to be doing so. To be successful in this role you will be a qualified lawyer with a right to practice in England and Wales.
Key responsibilities:
Professional
- To act in a way that upholds the rule of law and the proper administration of justice
- To maintain high standards of professional and personal conduct in a way that upholds public trust and confidence in you, the legal profession and in legal services provided by authorised persons
- To act with independence, honesty and integrity, and ensure that your independence is not compromised
- To treat everyone fairly and without prejudice, and to act in a way that encourages equality, diversity and inclusion
- To act competently and in the best interests of your client and respect client confidentiality
Departmental
- Provide specialist legal advice and carry out legal work on behalf of our in house client
- Manage own files from inception to completion
- Take client instructions, and provide legal advice both orally and in writing, and client care/case management generally
- Contribute to the drafting of policy, process and technical guidance on legal issues
- Prepare and deliver in house training in your area of expertise
- Be a trusted business partner, be entrepreneurial, facilitative, commercial and solutions focused. This means staying abreast of legal developments in your area of expertise (and where you’d like to develop) and sharing your knowledge
- Deliver an excellent service to our customers, stakeholders and team members by building strong relationships with colleagues and clients across all business areas, and providing technical expertise and guidance to all including to junior team members
- Manage any work sent out to our external legal framework provider and comply with the process of engaging such work/incurring such costs
- Forecast and capture expenditure accurately, comply with policy before incurring liability for disbursements, and recover such costs whenever possible
Litigation sub-team
- Conduct cross tenure legal work and advocacy (as necessary) on all aspects of housing and property management (and in particular housing management), with the primary aim of providing early cost-effective solutions without recourse to litigation where possible. This includes taking client instructions, and providing legal advice both orally and in writing, and client care generally
- Draft full suite of legal documentation as necessary, including (but not limited to) court applications, pleadings, statements of case/defences, witness statements, settlement agreements, instructions and briefs to counsel, instructions to experts, other legal documents and correspondence and all follow up as required
- Act on client instructions and in particular, negotiate settlements in accordance with their requirements
- Prepare cases for taking to courts and tribunals and ADR, diarising key dates in accordance with departmental requirements, and comply with all deadlines set by the relevant forum
More about you
For this role, we’re looking for someone with the following:
- Educated to degree level or equivalent with relevant post graduate qualification to enable practice at solicitor/CILEx fellow level
- A qualified lawyer (solicitor or CILEx fellow equivalent) with experience in practice – in house and/or private practice
- A strong property background with good working knowledge of all legal tenures, in particular those relating to social housing, Landlord and Tenant, and the work of the Group
- Clear analytical skills, with the ability to process large amounts of information into effective legal proceedings
- Excellent oral and written communication skills, a confident negotiator, with an ability to influence at all levels and explain and put complex legal and technical terms into practical workable solutions
Choosing us is easy
As an employee of A2Dominion, we want you to feel rewarded and have a choice of flexible benefits, salary exchange benefits, and rewards and discounts that work for you, wherever you are in your life.
We offer a wide range of staff benefits. For this role, these include:
- 25 days’ holiday (Plus Bank Holidays) increasing up to 28 days with 3 years of service
- Up to 8% contributory pension
- Flexible working
- Investment in your learning and development.
In addition, all permanent and fixed-term employees receive a generous annual allowance of up to £300 to use towards health and lifestyle benefits for both you and your family.
We also operate a Cycle to Work Scheme whereby employees have access to cycling equipment throughout the year and can pay via monthly salary deductions.
Whatever the role, we want you to bring your knowledge and experience to play your part in improving people’s lives.
If you require a reasonable adjustment during the recruitment process, please contact our Talent Team to request: resourcing@a2dominion.co.uk
A2Dominion Group is a Disability Confident Employer which means that we are committed to employing disabled people and will:
- actively look to attract and recruit disabled people
- provide a fully inclusive and accessible recruitment process
- offer an interview to disabled applicants who meet the minimum criteria for the job
- be flexible with assessing people so disabled applicants have the best opportunity to demonstrate that they can do the job
- make reasonable adjustments as required
At A2Dominion Group, we recognise the positive value of diversity, promote equality and inclusivity in our hiring processes. We always aim to recruit the person who is most suited to the job and welcome applications from people of all backgrounds – men and women, people of all ages, sexual orientations, nationalities, religions, and beliefs.
Meeting the role requirements
We recognise that some people will only apply for a role if they meet 100% of role requirements. If this sounds like you, we’d still encourage you to apply and also to arrange a call with one of our recruitment team to discuss your application further at resourcing@a2dominion.co.uk
A2Dominion is proud to be a family friendly employer
Everyone is welcome at A2Dominion Group. We know that equality, diversity, and inclusivity make us better. We embrace the unique contributions of our people and seek to create a workplace where everyone feels like they belong. Find out why our people love working with us.”
Join us at A2Dominion, where your expertise will be integral to our recovery journey, creating lasting positive changes in the lives of our customers. If you possess the right motivation and drive to contribute to our recovery and change initiatives, we invite you to apply and be a crucial part of our team.
