Description
UK Job Description
Manage a delivery team in Reed Smith Legal Solutions (RSLS) of lawyers and paralegals based in London and Global Solutions Leeds (GSL), primarily delivering litigious document review and litigation support capabilities to Reed Smith’s clients either in support of practice group teams, or direct to clients. Provide a range of legal support to case teams and clients, project management, supervision, training and coaching to the team where necessary. Support and collaborate with the wider management team, HR/recruitment, legal engineers and analysts. Drive the transition of new work into the team and the continuous improvement of work performed by the team. Manage the UK team’s interface with the India offshore resourcing pool. Note: this job description is generic and therefore, is not an exhaustive list of duties and responsibilities.
The Firm
Reed Smith is a global law firm with more than 1,700 lawyers in 30 offices throughout Europe, the Middle East, Asia and the United States.
Operating as one global partnership, we represent leading international businesses from FTSE 100 corporations to mid-market and emerging enterprises; advising clients on cross border transactions, international commercial disputes and regulation. We specialise in industries including financial services, life sciences, health care, energy and natural resources, entertainment and media, shipping and real estate.
We all share a common culture, with core values supporting the firm’s commitment to add value, achieve excellence, and promote professional development. London is our largest office with approximately 700 people, including over 350 fee earners across the full range of commercial practice areas. Consistent with the firm’s strategy, the office has grown significantly over the past five years. Key to this growth has been our ability to successfully integrate new hires into our business and give them a platform to flourish. We place a huge significance on listening to our people and incorporating their ideas wherever possible.
Responsibilities
Responsibilities will include, but are not limited to:
- Managing client facing service delivery work, including document review projects, general litigation tasks, ensuring delivery to high standards of quality and efficiency including deployment of best practice and technology-based solutions.
- Being the link between Reed Smith case teams and eDiscovery managers in London and the team in GSL.
- Being the primary day to day interface with the firm’s offshore flexible (doc review) resourcing capability in India.
- Analysing daily demands and organising/allocating resource for various matters as appropriate.
- Ensuring any additional resource used from the offshore team is used efficiently and supervised, keeping all relevant teams informed on resourcing needs and with view to avoiding wasted costs.
- Supervising doc review and litigation team members with their day to day delivery work, providing instructions, feedback and training to them when needed. Also supporting them with their admin responsibilities and ensuring relevant accesses and operational support is in place for the team.
- Ensuring all necessary templates, checklists, guidelines and training materials have been created and kept updated and organised.
- Producing fee estimates for large projects and tracking/monitoring against agreed budgets.
- Liaising with relevant teams to ensure profitability on billable matters.
- Producing, monitoring and analysing regular review statistics and reports to advise case teams on the progress of reviews and other projects and forecast projections.
- Assisting case teams with drafting of Review Protocols and other instructions to the team.
- Working closely with eDiscovery managers to create and design tailored workflows and strategies for doc reviews especially considering TAR and AI assisted review models and advocate best practice to case teams.
- Working closely with eDiscovery managers to also ensure that doc review workspace features such as coding layouts, reporting tools/dashboards, required saved searches, amongst others, are precisely set up to ensure an efficient process from start to finish.
- Conducting effective and comprehensive scoping of all requests and projects at the outset to ensure best practice solutions are adopted at all stages (including technology) and resourcing needs are understood in advance to ensure agreed deadlines are met. Continue to monitor these throughout the life of a matter and ensure changes to resourcing, workflows and processes are dynamically adopted where needed to facilitate high quality and efficient delivery.
- Liaising with legal engineers to ensure the most efficient and technology-assisted solutions are adopted on all requests wherever possible.
- Ensuring an efficient QC structure is followed to maximise accuracy and quality on all matters.
- Capturing and measuring all improvement and efficiency methods implemented on each project.
- Capturing feedback on all projects from case teams and promptly acting on any improvement suggestions/constructive feedback as needed.
- Liaising with other team managers to ensure best resourcing practices are followed across the team and overall team utilisation is maximised with limited waste.
- Ensuring the team are adhering to their time recording duties promptly and accurately.
- Liaising with analysts/reporting teams to assist with the accurate execution of billing, invoicing and other reporting requirements.
- Working closely with HR/recruitment team and other managers to follow established processes and protocols to progress internal promotions/hire new intakes for the team.
- Nurturing, directing and developing the team professionally, through team check ins, 1 to 1 meetings, performance reviews, and individual development plans where needed, sharing honest feedback as appropriate.
- Drafting and producing case studies and other regular reports as required, including marketing materials.
- Leading the team to develop tech skills by encouraging them (and yourself) to undertake Relativity certification exams.
- Building strong relationships with key stakeholders, managers and case teams to maintain growth and development of services.
- Taking an active role within the GSL legal management team and proactively consulting/developing/supporting with general operational matters as needed.
Key Skills, Attributes And Experience
- Ideally 5+ years’ pqe as a solicitor including at least 3 years of document review management experience (including strong Relativity platform experience).
- Experience of building credibility and trust with a diverse and challenging business stakeholder group
- Demonstrable experience of driving improvements in the performance of legal teams.
- Experience in people management.
- Experience with Relativity and other document review/ litigation related technology platforms.
- Superb case/project management skills, attention to detail, and the ability to meet tight deadlines without sacrificing quality of client service.
- Leadership skills necessary to lead, motivate and develop teams.
- Experience of driving improvement in performance of using technology and process improvement techniques.
- Resilience under pressure and motivated by accountability and the desire to meet or exceed objectives and deadlines.
- Excellent interpersonal and communication skills and the ability to build relationships with legal teams.
- Comfortable and capable of working proactively in a global organisation.
- Reliable, meets deadlines and anticipates problems.
- Takes personal ownership of self-improvement.
- Strong influencing and business development skills.
- Fluent in standard MS Office applications and ability to quickly master new software.
- Excellent organisation and time management skills and ability to work on multiple matters concurrently.
Education
- Bachelor's degree, law degree equivalent
- Qualified Solicitor
- Process improvement qualification (e.g. Lean Six sigma) an advantage although full training will be given
- Relativity Review Management Specialist accreditation preferred
At Reed Smith, we welcome direct applications either in response to one of our advertised vacancies or on a speculative basis. Please click on the “Apply Now” button to submit your details and we will be in touch.
No search firms/agencies please.
Reed Smith's success depends heavily on the effective utilization of qualified people, regardless of their race, ancestry, religion, colour, sex, age, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, disability, veteran's status, or any characteristic protected by law. As a firm, we adhere to and promote equal employment opportunity for all.
We are committed to making all stages of our recruitment process accessible to candidates with disabilities or long-term health conditions. If you have a disability or a long-term health condition and require adjustments to be made for you within the recruitment process, please contact a member of the Recruitment team. For more information on our approach to diversity and inclusion please visit our website .