Reach – Legal Project Manager – 3-6 months

Description
Ashurst Reach - Legal Project Manager - 3-6 months - Sydney
Due to increased demand, we have an exciting opportunity for an experienced Legal Project Manager to join the Ashurst Advance team for a 3-6 month contract role.

About The Role
Our Legal Project Managers at Ashurst are part of our Legal Operations team, sitting within Ashurst Advance. Their role is to help to drive greater efficiency, transparency and certainty in legal matters through the provision of effective project management support.

Your role will involve working closely with clients, Partners, lawyers, and your Ashurst Advance colleagues to apply Project Management methodologies to live matters.

The team also offers a LegalOps Consulting service which helps clients outpace operational change and find creative risk mitigation solutions for a range of matters.

As a result of continued growth and demand for the service, we are currently looking to hire a Legal Project Manager to support a range of our practice groups. Depending on the specific legal experience and skills you bring you will help to implement and enhance the practice group's adoption of legal project management and continue to build cohesive collaboration between the practice group and Ashurst Advance.

This role combines practical project management support, strategic growth leadership, and stakeholder/client relationship management.

Main responsibilities

• Working closely with clients, partners, lawyers and business support staff to design and manage the efficient delivery of legal services. Primarily this will involve legal matters but will also include some internal firm projects and initiatives to further drive efficiency and profitability. All these activities will be in close collaboration with colleagues in the legal practice groups, Ashurst Advance, Ashurst Consulting, and business development teams.
• Establishing yourself as a trusted specialist with the Partners and lawyers locally and globally.
• Providing legal project management advice and support to partners and matter teams on large and complex legal matters. Some specific tasks may include:
• Support Client Relationship Partners and Business Development with pitching through the provision of high-level scoping, scheduling, resourcing and pricing expertise.
• Support the Responsible Partner by working in consultation with the client, legal team and support services to prepare detailed matter plans and cost estimates.
• Manage the matter teams and third parties to successfully deliver the legal objectives and agreed deliverables.
• Develop and manage project trackers for large volume legal reviews such as due diligence and discovery.
• Implement and manage RAID/RASCI logs.
• Plan and manage communications as part of the matter team.
• Track progress against matter plans, budget and agreed KPIs, alerting relevant stakeholders promptly to variances and recommending changes and developing contingency plans where necessary.
• Arrange post-closing matter reviews and lessons learned exercises.
• Work in collaboration with the other teams, Expertise and other business support staff to implement a range of initiatives to improve efficiency and profitability.

About You

• Demonstrable experience of project management in consultancy or professional services firms including experience working within the legal industry.
• Experience of the whole project lifecycle of ;egal matters covering scoping, scheduling, costing, resourcing, communications, quality and risk.
• Excellent client facing skills with a track record of establishing and maintaining effective relationships with stakeholders at all levels.
• Excellent presentation, written, communication and interpersonal skills.
• Advanced organisational and influencing skills, flexibility of style, attention to detail and ability to multi-task in a fast-paced, high pressured, detail-oriented environment.
• High degree of initiative and independent judgment with excellent troubleshooting, decision-making and follow-through skills.
• Excellent IT skills, in particular Microsoft Project, Excel and PowerPoint.
• APM, PMP, PRINCE2 or equivalent project management certifications.
• Experience working with virtual teams in a global environment is desirable.
• Membership of a professional PM body is desirable.
• Financial literary/understanding of financials and performance metrics is desirable.

About Ashurst Advance
Ashurst Advance is a global leader in the delivery of innovative and digitally enabled legal services. Leveraging our deep experience across delivery, managed services, digital, legal operations and flexible resourcing, we work seamlessly with our legal advisory and risk consulting teams to provide fully integrated solutions to address our client's most complex legal challenges.

Our market leading offering has been globally recognised including:

• Band One in Chambers NewLaw (Global LPO)
• Most Innovative Law Firm, APAC & Europe (FT Innovative Lawyer Awards)
• Most Innovative Firm Headquartered outside Asia-Pacific (Financial Times APAC Innovative Law Awards)
• Innovation in the Business of Law: ClientSolutions (Financial Times APAC Innovative Law Awards)

To find out more please visit our website .

About Ashurst Reach:
Ashurst Reach is Ashurst's dedicated flexible legal resourcing platform which provides the firm's clients and Practice Groups within the firm with access to a high quality talent pool of lawyers and paralegals. We understand that our clients need access to highly qualified lawyers and paralegals, often at short notice and/or for short periods, whether that be to meet internal client demands, backfill leave, provide cover during recruitment or to assist with specialised projects. We deliver a seamless, fast and trusted solution to these issues.

Ashurst Reach is an integral part of the firm's NewLaw division, Ashurst Advance. Our focus is solving our clients' business problems through optimal efficiency, cost effectiveness and digitally innovative legal service delivery.

Why join Ashurst Reach?
Ashurst Reach offers our alumni, clients and other top-tier lawyers and paralegals the flexibility to choose how they work. Together we realise your professional goals in a flexible and supportive environment, providing you with career ownership and rewarding opportunities both in-house and within the firm.

We work with a pool of talented, Reach Legal Consultants, across a broad range of specialties. We strive to engage with legal consultants who are technically-savvy and commercially-focused while also being creative and adaptable, thriving in new environments.

There are several benefits of working as a consultant with Ashurst Reach:

• Flexible career options - r eceive greater variety, choice and control over how and when you work, balancing career goals and lifestyle.
• Personalised service - c ollaborate closely with Ashurst Reach to realise your professional goals.
• Top-tier support - h ave the backing of a truly global firm with a reputation for high performance, a wealth of industry experience and a refreshingly open and diverse culture.

What to do now:
If you have the skills and experience for this role please apply and we will be in touch to discuss your application. If you want to find out more about this role or working with Ashurst Reach generally, please email Fiona Craig, our Talent Manager, at

Due to the volume of applications received, we will only respond to successful applicants.