Back to Job Search

Planning & Environment Lawyer

Planning and Environmental

Southampton

Apply now

As part of our ongoing success, we are seeking a motivated and enthusiastic Planning Lawyer (NQ – 4 PQE) to join our highly regarded Planning & Environment team, based from our Southampton office with flexible home working available based around client and business need. This is a superb opportunity for you to develop your career in a supported and encouraging team, with high calibre clients and a variety of interesting work.

What you'll do

In this varied new role, you will be working with lead Partner Christian Silk and Southampton-based Associate, Marianne Ironside, to play an important role in contributing towards the growth of the Planning & Environment team with a focus on our core Developer and Energy & Infrastructure sectors. Based from our Southampton office, you will be working with experienced and senior lawyers on a variety of complex matters, increasing your confidence, skills and independence over time. Day to day, you can expect your work to encompass the full range of planning and environmental consenting and other associated consenting regimes, with a focus on strategic and advisory work.

We are proud to be working with pioneering and ambitious household name clients across the Energy & Infrastructure sector, with whom you will be working directly to deliver an exceptional advisory service, deepening existing relationships and extending business opportunities. In addition, our Developers sector has a considerable presence within our Southampton office, enabling you to work collaboratively with an impressive range of high calibre lawyers from top regional and city firms. We're actively engaged at the forefront of the market with initiatives such as net zero, supporting and advising our clients on emerging priorities and technologies as they develop.

The Planning & Environment Team is fully integrated with our highly successful Real Estate offering, and we consider that our size presents enormous opportunity for flexibility in terms of the types of work we seek to undertake for our clients. We pride ourselves on our team's agility to respond to the clients' and target sectors needs, which aligns with our wider firm culture around sector development. You will be actively encouraged to engage with business development opportunities if this is something which interests you, including contributing towards bids and tenders with lawyers from other teams and practice areas. We enjoy working together to generate new business opportunities, in an environment where everyone has the opportunity to contribute and collaborate.

What we're looking for

You might have just qualified, or be about to, and possess a keen interest in planning within an inhouse, public sector or private practice environment. You will have already gained some experience of working on a variety of planning matters, either as part of your training contract, or since qualifying, and are seeking to expand your skills and knowledge whilst being supported by an experienced team. We are keen to enable you to take on responsibility for dealing with high quality, high value work with increased independence over time, and will be afforded high levels of responsibility from the outset. By working together, we'll ensure you have the right environment in which to flourish in order to achieve your longer-term career ambitions.

Whilst not essential, you may already have some understanding or experience of the housing developer sector. Our team handles a variety of open market, affordable, Registered Provider, and Private Rental Sector housing developments, which presents opportunities to work with well-known National House Builders, Registered Providers and investors. Any experience within Energy & Infrastructure would also be desirable but by no means essential.

Being motivated and enthusiastic about planning and environmental law, you will have the opportunity to collaborate with lawyers who share a genuine enthusiasm for the ambitions of our clients and are deeply embedded within key networks across our target sectors. By focussing on our collective networks, presence and profile in the Developers and Energy & infrastructure sectors, you will be ideally positioned to begin developing your own reputation over time as a client facing technical expert. We're genuinely excited about opportunities to work innovatively with our clients in the future, building upon our well-established Environmental practice, which encompasses advisory work aligned with achieving net zero, decarbonisation, carbon and natural capital trading schemes and ESG.  

Being a team player is essential as we are proud of our highly collaborative environment, with a growing, well-structured, close-knit team and we enjoy working together at all stages with an environment where all questions and ideas are encouraged.

Our offer to you

In return for your efforts, you can expect considerable scope for personal as well as professional development. We encourage people to engage with our popular and well supported coaching and mentoring programmes, which connect you to people right across the firm and at every level. We create space for mental and physical wellbeing with our weekly Lifestyle Hour, along with private medical insurance for all lawyers, 28 days annual leave and a sabbatical you can take every 5 years. You can also buy holiday, managing your benefits flexibly using our sophisticated portal to configure your total reward offer according to what you value most. As part of this, you can make ongoing or one-off donations to our charitable foundation and access our CSR programme where you can engage with community-based initiatives (as a team, or individually) twice a year, to give something back where you feel it matters.

Successful applicants will be required to complete a pre-employment screening process which includes a financial integrity check and a DBS check. If you wish to discuss any issues or questions in connection with this, please do speak in confidence with a member of the Talent Acquisition Team. Contact us at [email protected] and we will come back to you as soon as we can.

Apply for this Job


Select one or more
Hold down the Ctrl (windows) or Command (Mac) button to select multiple options.

The Equality Act 2010 generally defines a disabled person as someone who has a mental or physical impairment that has a substantial and long-term adverse effect on the person's ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities.

When you apply to a job on this site, the personal data contained in your application will be collected by the Foot Anstey Group (comprising Foot Anstey LLP and Enable Law) (“Controller”), which is located at Salt Quay House, 4 North East Quay, Sutton Harbour, Plymouth, PL4 0BN and can be contacted by emailing [email protected]. Controller’s data protection officer is James Treloar, who can be contacted at [email protected]. Your personal data will be processed for the purposes of managing Controller’s recruitment related activities, which include setting up and conducting interviews and tests for applicants, evaluating and assessing the results thereto, and as is otherwise needed in the recruitment and hiring processes. Such processing is legally permissible under Art. 6(1)(f) of Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (General Data Protection Regulation) as necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by the Controller, which are the solicitation, evaluation, and selection of applicants for employment.

Your personal data will be shared with Greenhouse Software, Inc., a cloud services provider located in the United States of America and engaged by Controller to help manage its recruitment and hiring process on Controller’s behalf. Accordingly, if you are located outside of the United States, your personal data will be transferred to the United States once you submit it through this site. Because the European Union Commission has determined that United States data privacy laws do not ensure an adequate level of protection for personal data collected from EU data subjects, the transfer is subject to appropriate safeguards (the standard contractual clauses). You can obtain a copy of the standard contractual clauses by contacting us at [email protected]. 

Your personal data will be retained by Controller for whichever is the shorter of the following two options: i) a period of up to 365 days or ii) as long as Controller determines it is necessary to evaluate your application for employment.  You can choose to allow the Controller to retain your data beyond this time frame if you opt-in to a longer retention period. Under the GDPR, you have the right to request access to your personal data, to request that your personal data be rectified or erased, and to request that processing of your personal data be restricted. You also have to right to data portability. In addition, you may lodge a complaint with an EU supervisory authority.

Careers at Foot Anstey

Find out more