Corporate Associate/ Senior Associate
Corporate
Plymouth, Exeter or Bristol
Apply nowWhat you'll do
We have an exciting new opportunity for a motivated and enthusiastic Corporate Associate or Senior Associate (ideally 2 + PQE) to join our Corporate team led by Matthew Stoate. Working directly with Chris Worrell and a portfolio of large Corporate clients, you will be based from Plymouth, Exeter, or Bristol with a blend of home and office working available. This is an excellent opportunity to work as part of an innovative and collaborative team, with a focus on supporting large Corporate clients as they acquire, dispose of, and restructure their assets/ subsidiaries.
With our larger Corporate clients adopting a range of group development activities as they seek to grow, you will have the opportunity to gain experience across a broad spectrum of corporate work, with encouragement and supervision from Chris and the wider team. In addition to M&A and strategic investments, you will develop your skills to help guide clients and their internal teams as they develop their group development processes and toolkits. You will also be encouraged to work with our client solutions team to devise the right technology solutions to meet the needs of clients, using your understanding of their business strategy and direction. Day to day, you will align yourself with clients and their internal teams, working to understand their business goals in order to advise and support them across a range of corporate transactions. Possessing a genuine interest in how businesses work, you will often work on a repeat basis for clients and have the opportunity to build rapport and foster important relationships. Working effectively as an extension to the client's internal team, you will invest in understanding the business and the team in order to effectively support them through the acquisition and integration cycles.
From the outset, you will benefit from the right balance of independence to work confidently on your own matters, combined with the support and supervision from senior colleagues to enable you to continue developing your skills and knowledge as you to progress. In return for your commitment and motivation, we will offer you excellent career development opportunities, along with a combination of structured and flexible learning and development options to suit you as you progress. Through access to our Business Skills Academy, you'll benefit from all the support you need to develop your confidence, networking and client facing skills, whilst continuing to develop your technical skills. By working together, we'll ensure you have the right environment to flourish to help you achieve your longer-term career ambitions.
If you're enthusiastic about business development – both for the team and the firm more widely – we will actively support and encourage you to engage in profile building and networking activities from the start, as we do with all our lawyers. We're passionate about partnering with clients to really understand what they want to achieve and how we can support them in this in order to build long lasting and rewarding relationships with them. We'll encourage you to increase your commercial understanding of clients' contexts through relevant insights and shared expertise to enable you to offer practical advice at the right time, on an ongoing basis.
What we're looking for
You will be seeking to join a growing and entrepreneurial Corporate team where we take our work, but not ourselves, seriously. With an impressive client list and ambition to continue building new and lasting client relationships, you will play an active role in the continued success and growth of our team. You may be an Associate seeking to work with larger and more complex clients, or a Senior Associate wanting to work more collaboratively with in house teams and their Finance, Commercial and HR colleagues. Ideally, you will have gained experience working on multiple transactions for individual clients and are naturally curious about what makes a business 'tick'. You are motivated to understand the bigger picture for our clients, and keen to play your part in realising their longer term business ambitions, moving beyond individual M&A transactions towards broader group development focussed activities. You possess strong and proven rapport building and communication skills, being skilful in establishing and deepening trusted relationships with clients and generating lasting and significant connections with key client and internal contacts. You are enthusiastic to understand the commercial context of their business and know how to gain confidence in order to provide the right advice and service at the right moment in alignment with their short, medium and longer term goals.
Our team promotes a collegiate and collaborative culture, and we will expect you to engage and support less experienced members of the team in your work, delegating and supervising tasks to ensure that work is done at the right level whilst allowing you to focus on more complex matters. Teamwork is important to you and to us, and you know how to get the best from the people around you whilst maintaining high standards. You will be a strong communicator with experience of supporting colleagues in their development and possess the resilience to work under pressure by organising yourself effectively to meet deadlines as needed.
In return for your commitment and focus, we will provide you with the genuine scope to fast track your career within a team with a proven track record of developing and progressing its lawyers. We are proud to say that we do not operate glass ceilings, so your career progression will be entirely based on merit and under your control. Even better, the quality of work you will have access to is not connected to your location, so if you are the best person for the client, then you will work with them.
If you have any questions or would like to discuss this role, please contact our Recruitment Team via email in the first instance, and we will come back to you as soon as we can: [email protected]
Why Foot Anstey?
As one of the UK's fastest growing law firms, we believe in helping our clients and people achieve their ambitions, unlocking new and exciting opportunities. Our team of business and legal advisors are motivated by understanding clients' goals and collaborating with them and other advisers to deliver the right solutions at the right time. We are on an exciting journey to become our clients’ most trusted advisor, enabling them to achieve their ambitions, and we think how we do it is just as important as what we do. Our values guide the way we act, every day, from the way we operate as a business to how we treat our colleagues and clients:
- collaboration over convention
- championing aspiration
- being refreshingly human
- embracing entrepreneurial spirit
- delivering integrated thinking
We're proud to have grown from a high-street firm to a significant regional and national player working with leading brands and individuals predominantly across six key sectors: Retail & Consumer, Financial Services, Energy & Infrastructure, Media & Entertainment, Developers and Private Wealth. Our strategy of gaining market share through meeting clients' needs, investing in and developing high quality talent and using technology and innovation to enhance our services has led to significant growth. We now operate from seven bases: Truro, Plymouth, Exeter, Taunton, Bristol, Southampton and London.
Our people are critical to our success. We work hard to help our employees achieve their aspirations through offering meaningful careers with balanced rewards, which have been carefully designed to focus on personal wellbeing. Wellbeing matters to us and our people enjoy a range of benefits which we think are a bit special, such as the weekly Lifestyle Hour to use as you wish, and our Family Hour option which makes a day of annual leave go so much further across the year.
Being forward thinking, we are continually offering opportunities for support and professional development through our Business Skills Academy and Digital Skills Academy. We believe in empowering each other to achieve and strive to create a progressive and inclusive working environment where everyone can feel valued and rewarded. Understanding that being flexible makes us stronger, we actively encourage a variety of working patterns for most of our vacancies, dependant upon the needs of the team, and over 40% of our employees have a permanent flexible working pattern.
Throughout the pandemic, most of our people have been working on a flexible, remote basis, and as we work towards a 'new normal' we anticipate a gradual return to our offices over the upcoming months in line with Government guidance.
The recruitment process
Your time is precious and we fully appreciate what goes into applying for one of our roles. As such, we strive to acknowledge your application immediately and respond within 7 days regardless of outcome. We review applications on a rolling basis and don’t use closing dates for our roles as a result of this. Once shortlisted, we typically undertake a two stage interview process, and naturally much of this is done via Microsoft Teams, though some in person interviews and meetings are beginning to take place. Our Recruitment Team will support and guide you throughout the process, ensuring you receive ample information about us and the role.
Creating a diverse and inclusive workplace is central to our business, and essential to delivering our strategy, so we were delighted to be awarded the National Equality Standard in 2018 and to successfully renew this in 2021. It is right at the heart of our priorities. This goes beyond our policies – it’s something we consider across everything we do, from the make-up of our client teams, encouraging staff to reach their potential, through to our leadership.
We are committed to ‘powering your ambition’, which defines and sets us apart as a firm. It means that we aim to support our clients and our people to achieve their goals, regardless of background, gender, race, beliefs, sexuality or other non-work related factors. We champion aspiration and encourage it in everyone that works with us. As such we actively encourage applications from all suitably qualified people, regardless of any characteristics protected by law. If you apply for this role you are encouraged to answer the diversity and social mobility monitoring questions. The answers you provide will remain entirely anonymous and confidential and will in no way impact your application.
We're looking forward to hearing from you.
Foot Anstey. Powering Your Ambition.