Solicitor

Company: Shakespeare Martineau
Closing date: 12/01/2022
PQE: 3 years +
Term: Permanent
Working hours: Full-time
Team: Residential Development
Location: Birmingham, Leicester or Solihull
Specialism: Land
Let us introduce ourselves…

It’s the people at Shakespeare Martineau that make us so special. By understanding what our people want, giving them the support they need, recognising everyone’s contribution and realising the unique power of teams, together we win.   As a firm we are focused on proactively building and developing diverse teams, bringing different backgrounds, personalities and perspectives together. We play to our strengths, pushing ourselves to be consistently better than yesterday and deliver amazing solutions for our clients. We empower our teams with a high degree of individual responsibility; we self-manage and encourage everyone to be responsible for their own learning, knowing it makes us even better at what we do!    

We believe in trusting our people to make the right decisions for themselves, from when and where you work, to how you dress; we focus on outputs.  

Want to find more about our amazing benefits?

Meet the team

It’s about more than just providing an excellent service, it’s about building friendships and long term relationships. Our residential development team are open, honest and jovial and enjoy what they do.

Neil Gosling heads the team. He has acted for the majority of the country’s top 10 national house-builders as well as for significant institutional landowners, private builders and developers. He has enviable experience in dealing with all aspects of the acquisition and disposal of consented and unconsented land, strategic land, consortium-led purchases and complex multi-phase mixed-use regeneration schemes.

The opportunity

Would you like to work with a wide range of clients, from national PLCs to small local developers? Would you like to be part of a dynamic, forward thinking team and have excellent quality work?

This is a great opportunity for someone who enjoys client facing work, loves variety and getting stuck in, in this role you will have exposure to hands on experience from day one. 

You will support senior members of the team on complex development land acquisition and disposal work, including strategic land option and promotion agreements, carrying out title reviews and due diligence. You will also manage your own case load, which will include land transfers and infrastructure agreements. You will act for a range of clients including real estate developers, promoters, landowners, and affordable housing providers.

Your key duties will include:

  • reviewing and reporting to clients on title documents and search results
  • negotiating real estate documents, such as sale and purchase agreements, deeds of easement, transfer documents etc.
  • running some files from start to finish
  • drafting and negotiating infrastructure documents
  • supervising paralegals
  • handling enquiries efficiently
  • working with a team of experienced lawyers on a broad range of acquisition work
  • working as part of a team on larger scale deals and running your own caseloads of matters

Skills and experience you will have:

  • 3-5 years’ previous experience of real estate work, including running files from start to finish
  • ideally your experience will include residential development land acquisition work
  • experience of drafting property documents
How we work

We embrace agile working and offer a blended approach to where and how we work.

We appreciate that people have different needs and preferences and we’re keen to be flexible, after all, we value what you do, not where you do it.

We have hubs in Birmingham, Leicester, London, Milton Keynes, Nottingham, Solihull, Stratford-upon-Avon and Sheffield. This role will be predominantly home based with travel as required into Birmingham or one of our other West Midlands hubs 

Additional information

Please be aware, for some vacancies, where we receive high numbers of applications we may need to bring the close date forward.

Due to the nature of the work undertaken, confirmation of employment will be subject to a variety of checks which will be carried out once an offer of employment is accepted. Details of the checks can be found here.

 

Equal opportunities

Shakespeare Martineau is a committed equal opportunities employer. We seek to attract, develop and retain talented people from a diverse range of backgrounds and cultures. We value and respect individuality and encourage a culture within our business where people can be themselves and be valued for their strengths and experiences. Everyone who either applies to or works for the firm is treated equally, regardless of their gender, age, ethnic origin, nationality, marital status, sexual orientation or religious beliefs.