Team Leader/Practice Manager

Staffordshire County Council is a modern, progressive, and forward-thinking authority that is ambitious and empowers its employees to be courageous and innovative in their approach.

Staffordshire Legal Services is a large in-house corporate legal team, offering a significant breadth of experience and expertise. We support and retain our lawyers, trainees and support staff by offering a wide variety of work, an extensive benefits package and offering training and mentoring to aide progression. We want everyone to enjoy their work, feel challenged and appreciated for what they do, and positively contribute to making a difference to the lives of the people of Staffordshire. People are often unaware that Legal Services support the Council to fulfil every function when delivering its agenda and priorities, in addition to the Staffordshire pension fund, and a wide range of external clients. This keeps the work interesting, challenging and often high value and high profile.

We genuinely recognise the benefit of achieving the right work life balance and our extensive package of benefits support this. Lots of organisations offer this however our staff survey reliably informs us that our work ethos truly delivers this. Our package includes a generous holiday entitlement, increasing significantly with service, and an additional annual leave purchase scheme. Flexible and term time only working, agile working, employee travel and entertainment discounts, a local government pension scheme, optional car lease scheme and a staff parking discount scheme. We also offer family friendly polices such as maternity, adoption, paternity, and parental leave.

We are seeking an experienced and enthusiastic Team Leader and Practice Manager to join our Service. You will work closely with the Legal Services Manager and the Legal Management Team to ensure that a high quality legal practice management, budget management, IT and administrative services are maintained.

• You will lead and manage our Legal Business Officers team and will possess strong administrative, managerial and leadership skills.
• You must be friendly and approachable but have the ability to command respect and ensure that practice management tasks are completed to target. A positive ‘can do’ attitude, strong initiative and the ability to work successfully with a diverse range of people, including senior managers, internal client officers and external clients is key, as well as enjoying working as part of a mutually supportive wider Service management team to achieve our common goals and objectives
• Demonstrating a comprehensive understanding of the work done by the Council in this area
• Managing the Legal Business Team and supervising and mentoring staff and coordinating and delegating cases/tasks to achieve service delivery
• Adherence to and leading on the Legal Services Unit’s quality standards (Lexcel) in order to maintain professional standards
• To handle confidential data sensitively and securely in accordance with policy
• To lead on the strategic introduction of new systems to be developed for the future of Legal Services and a website to showcase our expertise.

• The successful candidate would be expected to already have a background and experience of Legal Practice Management either in a local authority/public sector setting, an in-house business environment or a private law firm such that you will have a well-developed understanding of legal practice operations and compliance, legal financial and budget management and the day-to-day challenges that come with running a busy legal practice
• An ability to clearly, confidently and effectively communicate
• Meticulous attention to detail 
• Effective time management, prioritisation skills and an ability to work under the demands of competing pressures
• An ability to delegate work in order to generate capacity.
• A vision for the Legal Services Unit of the future and to talk compellingly about how to develop the systems to support and enable the team to deliver efficiently and effectively.
• Experience and knowledge to ensure that the team are Lexcel compliant and to be instrumental in gaining accreditation of Lexcel or similar quality standards.

If you are unsure if your skills and experience are suitable for this role or for an informal chat please contact Paula Dalton or Wendy Lofthouse, Deputy Legal Services Managers paula.dalton@staffordshire.gov.uk / wendy.lofthouse@staffordshire.gov.uk .

We are no ordinary county council:

Our Values:

The core of who we are as an organisation. Just like we all have personal values that shape our thoughts and behaviour, organisational values drive how we think and act collectively.

Our values were created and shaped by colleague feedback and national best practice and they sit at the heart of People Strategy:

We have a real sense of community spirit that brings our people together. This feeling of belonging means we are all connected to what we do and take pride in the difference we make every day for Staffordshire people. We are ambitious and our sights are set firmly on a better future.

We look forward and race ahead - that goes for your career too. 

Our benefits:

We recognise that it is our employees that are central to everything we do. We aim to create a supportive working environment where employees can achieve their full potential and achieve a healthy work-life balance. 

In addition to your salary, as a member of staff, you will have access to a range of benefits.

Our recruitment process:

As an Authority we are committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children and young people/vulnerable adults and expect all staff and volunteers to share this commitment.

Staffordshire County Council is an equal opportunities organisation and Disability Confident employer. We encourage applications from all background and communities

As part of our commitment as a Disability Confident employer, a Silver Award Armed Forces employer and our commitment to supporting care leavers - we offer a guaranteed interview as long as your application meets the minimum criteria for the post.