The role
The purpose of this role is to administer, co-ordinate, raise awareness of, and support the practice to engage with our external knowledge resources (our internal knowledge resources are developed and managed by our lawyers).
To thrive you will have a commitment to supporting our lawyers by providing them with the resources they need to provide excellent advice to clients.
You will have experience of legal and/or business information resource management (preferably within a professional services firm); have or quickly develop a good understanding of the work of each of our practices to appreciate lawyers’ knowledge needs, identify relevant knowledge and effectively draft/edit summaries and disseminate content; and demonstrate competence in delivery of training.
A CILIP qualification or part qualification would be desirable but is not essential.
Key responsibilities
Overall knowledge and information management
- Primary contact for lawyers regarding knowledge resources, supporting our knowhow specialists
- Develop and maintain knowledge resources, helping to ensure the practice’s needs are met
- Raise and maintain awareness of and deliver training on knowledge resources
- Manage and develop the central knowledge area of the intranet, including adding links
- Primary contact for issues with Knowledge Bank software, including supporting contract renewal
Printed resources
- Manage resources, including suggesting/ordering on approval, cataloguing, indexing, notifying
- Horizon scan for new resources that might be useful and liaise with relevant lawyers
- Manage journal renewals, including passwords, editions, and missing pages
- Manage new subscriptions, renewals, and cancellations
- Check invoices against goods received and add details to Simple Little Library System
Online resources
- Support renewals, analysing usage and ensuring resources reflect current practice areas
- Liaise with lawyers and suppliers to resolve content or access issues
- Password management and IP authentication set up
- Horizon scan for new resources that might be useful and liaise with relevant lawyers
- Set up trials and demonstrations of potential new resources
- User maintenance, including passwords, IP authentication, distribution groups, alerts
- Key contact for regarding use of relevant resources, keeping up to date with new tools
- Work with depts to scope and arrange bespoke training on new tools
- Respond to requests for articles from e-mail alerts
Training
- Design and deliver induction training for new joiners
- Create and maintain relevant guides including on catalogue searching and signing out a book
- Create and maintain a guide to key knowledge resources for each practice area
- Maintain awareness of relevant MBL training courses and flag to relevant lawyers
Additional duties
- Ensure CLA/NLA licences are renewed and reflect business needs, dealing with copyright issues
- Attend regular meetings of dept knowledge specialists
- Respond to any other knowledge resource requests and undertake enquiries
- Assist with projects as required
Specific tasks may change over time – we will support you to be adaptable as we continue to meet our clients’ needs.
About our culture
- A one firm approach means working together and improving to achieve common goals and to provide a consistent Bates Wells experience.
- As a values-driven firm we show commitment to our clients, our people, the environment and society. We take into account the Climate Emergency and Biodiversity Crisis in developing our business strategy.
- We want to have a positive impact on our people who are our greatest asset so that they can have a positive impact on others. Purpose is baked into our partnership deed.
- We promote a strong work/life balance with at least 25 days holiday with the opportunity to buy more and a ‘Summer in the City’ early finish.
- We have an agile and hybrid working environment – this means you might sit next to a different colleague every day or choose to work from our rooftop garden if you are in the office.
- Our benefits and wellbeing package includes firm matching pension contributions, private medical insurance plus a medical benefit cash plan, discretionary bonus arrangements, life assurance, subsidised gym memberships, lifestyle discount scheme and a firm-wide profit-sharing scheme.
- Everyone gets a bonus if there is one - a proportion of the LLP profit is distributed to our people when we exceed our financial thresholds.
About our Risk and Compliance team
We are a very supportive and passionate team – our aim being to ensure that we comply with all relevant laws and regulations, protect the firm and our colleagues’ professional integrity, and support colleagues so that we can provide an excellent service to clients. We have embedded a culture of openness across our firm which means that our colleagues involve us in all manner of issues that arise throughout the course of their work. The firm has grown significantly in recent years and sees the positive benefit of investing in our team to help deliver high standards of client care, efficiencies through improved processes, centralisation of core compliance functions and the delivery of solutions to address the ever changing legal and regulatory landscape.
As a team we get an immense sense of achievement from seeing each other develop and flourish:
- sharing responsibilities on interesting firm wide projects (of which there are many);
- being generous with our time and knowledge to help other team members advance their own careers;
- exploring different career pathways that suit individuals rather than just fitting people into a defined role;
- promoting a learning culture across the firm, not just answering the questions we are asked but giving our colleagues the tools to find the answers themselves;
- showing our colleagues the real human impact of the decisions that they take and the things we ask them to do; and
- promoting our culture of openness and transparency.
Most importantly, we really enjoy our work and value each other. Whilst it might sound a cliché, we want our colleagues across the firm to find us accessible, friendly, supportive and knowledgeable. Always listening and not judging them when things go wrong.
How to find out more about us
Don’t forget to review our website (https://bateswells.co.uk) and ask around about us to find out more and whether we’re the right fit for you.
Contact:
If you have any questions about this vacancy or require any reasonable adjustments to be made to the process due to a disability, please email:
Rosie Waters (r.waters@bateswells.co.uk) |
