We have an exciting new opportunity for a motivated Associate or Senior Associate to join our Corporate team led by Matthew Stoate. Working directly with Chris Worrell on a portfolio of Corporate clients, you will be free to work from any of our Bristol, Southampton, Guildford, Plymouth or Exeter offices 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 Strategic Corporate clients on all elements of their Group Development including designing and delivering bespoke acquisition and disposal programs, associated restructurings, and wider related work.

What you'll do

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, playbooks and toolkits. You will also 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 work closely 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 and related activities. Possessing a genuine interest in how businesses work, you will often work for repeat clients and have the opportunity to build rapport and foster important and longstanding 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 looking to take a step up 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 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. 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.

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 28 days’ annual leave (plus a day in your birthday month), private medical insurance (eligibility applies) 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.

For further details of our benefits packages, please visit the link attached – Our benefits | Foot Anstey

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, or anything else, please do speak in confidence with a member of the Talent Acquisition Team: [email protected]

Why Foot Anstey?

As one of the UK’s fastest growing law firms, Foot Anstey believes 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 solutions.  By becoming our clients’ most trusted advisor, we are enabling them to achieve their ambitions. How we do it is just as important as what we do. Our values define the way we act with our clients and one another every day, and because of this we think our culture and environment sets us apart.

Over our history we’ve grown from a high-street firm to a significant regional and national player working with leading brands and individuals predominantly across seven key sectors: Private Equity, Retail & Consumer, Energy & Infrastructure, Islamic Finance, Developers, Private Wealth and Charities. 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 nine locations: Bristol, Southampton, Exeter, Plymouth, Truro, Taunton and London, as well as a ‘hub’ bases in Manchester, Guildford and Oxford.

Our people are central to our success, in every part of the business. We actively support our employees to achieve their aspirations through offering meaningful careers with balanced rewards, which have been carefully designed to focus on personal wellbeing. We offer continual opportunities for support and professional development through our Business Skills Academy and Digital Skills Academy and believe in empowering each other to achieve and strive to create a progressive and inclusive working environment. Being forward-thinking, we are open to discussing flexible working patterns for all of our vacancies, with over 40% of our existing employees having a permanent flexible working pattern. In addition, our impressive suite of flexible benefits will enable you to prioritise what matters most to you.

Creating a diverse and inclusive workplace is integral to delivering our strategy, and we were delighted to be awarded the National Equality Standard for a second time. We consider this to be right at the heart of our priorities and goes way 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 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 may be encouraged to answer our diversity and social mobility monitoring questions, so please be reassured that any answers you provide will remain entirely anonymous and confidential and will in no way impact your application.

Foot Anstey. Seriously Ambitious.