Solicitor

As West London’s leading law firm, IBB enjoys a reputation for representing significant clients in complex legal matters. Our practice areas span commercial, employment, charities, commercial and residential real estate, family, private client, and community legal services. The firm and its partners are ranked highly by independent legal guides Chambers & Partners and Legal 500

IBB’s Real Estate group covers a range of development and commercial property work with a number of partners ranked as leaders in their field. The New Homes Division is one of five teams within the group and is led by the Partner Shital Mehta. The team currently comprises of one partner, two senior solicitors, two solicitors, a Chartered Legal Executive, a Conveyancer, eleven legal administrators and a document assistant.

The New Homes Division focuses on understanding the needs of and listening to its national and regional/local house builder and residential developer clients at both a generic and individual level so as to deliver an exceptional bespoke tailored service.

The New Homes Division is part of a wider residential development team that also advises on the acquisition of residential development sites, infrastructure agreements and Housing Association disposals so as a firm IBB can offer a full and complete service to our house builder and residential developer clients. 

The Real Estate teams are located together at Capital Court in Uxbridge.

At a strategic level this post will support the New Homes Partner and the residential development partners in their ambitions to grow the volume of business and provide clients with a complete end-to-end service. At an operational level this role will be about working within the team to increase volumes of work in an orderly and profitable way.

The purpose of this role is to create an efficient effective new homes capability for IBB in line with an emerging opportunity to be a leading provider of these services to existing house builder clients.

The post-holder will be responsible for working within a chain of delegated responsibility for processing new homes disposals, and with responsibility for such sales and the legal aspects of contracts, title, exchange, completions and complex enquiries and including part exchanges and resale of properties purchased in part exchange.

The post-holder will supervise the entire process by delegating the non-legal administrative work to a team of legal administrators to ensure that the work is completed in line with the firm’s standards of performance; ensuring exemplary client care establishing trust and confidence through timely clear communications with the client; demonstrating commercial awareness and professionalism at all times.

1. Provide a high quality legal service to clients of the firm to include processing new and existing new homes instructions covering all aspects of individual plot sales disposals. Focus on the legal aspects of the transaction in accordance with the specified legal tasks within the workflows whilst supervising the legal administrator(s) on the administrative tasks.  Organise and delegate the work according to volumes and priorities.  Contribute to the new case management workflow setups and contribute/edit the standard documents for this area of work.

2. Manage team operations by: being responsible for the first line of communications with client sales teams; managing the team through the transition to greater volumes of work; being responsible for billing and administration processes in line with team procedures; taking responsibility for delegating work to the legal administrator(s) where appropriate; managing cash and disbursement control and working on ad hoc projects as and when required such as the introduction of a case management system to improve team productivity.

3. Develop your own self-organisational and interpersonal skills so that: work is prioritised and progressed as efficiently as possible; your Team Leader and the partners in the Group are sufficiently aware of your workload and specific issues which arise on your matters and you maintain a flexible and proactive approach to work and good working relationships with external institutions including clients, the land registry, search providers, lenders and any professional trade bodies.

4. To ensure that professional services provided by the team are of the highest quality, that client care standards are effectively maintained, and that work completed meets the appropriate standards. To ensure that the files are maintained properly and that matters are progressed in line with the firm’s standard up to and including billing and file closing.

Education

• A professional qualification – ideally you will be a member of the Institute of Legal Executives or a Licensed Conveyancer or a Solicitor.
• We will consider experienced, but non-qualified conveyancers too.

.Skills

• Experienced, non-qualified conveyancers will be considered.

• If qualified, a minimum of 2 - 4 years’ experience together with sound technical knowledge in residential property law.

• At ease with processing standard sale/purchase conveyancing instructions with a minimum level of supervision.

• Experience of dealing with high volume transactions and working under pressure
• Experience of delegating work and managing monitoring systems with the ability to provide supervision and support to junior team members. 
• IT literate with good working knowledge of Microsoft Office applications including Word, Outlook, Excel and PowerPoint and self-sufficient in using document management systems and the internet as s business tool.
• Able to take a flexible approach and work to tight deadlines whilst maintaining the highest quality standards and attention to detail