Personal Assistant - To Deputy General Counsel London, England
Job description
Personal Assistant - to Deputy General Counsel (News UK)
London Bridge - Onsite full time
The Team: The team advises the editors and journalists at The Times and The Sunday Times on legal issues arising before and after publication in a busy newsroom environment, managing issues as they arise and keeping the newspaper’s records on contentious matters.
Your Role: To provide a high level of secretarial and administrative support to the Deputy General Counsel (News UK/Editorial Legal Director (Times Media Legal) and the wider Times Media Legal team.
Day to day you will:
Diary management: Liaising with external lawyers, barristers chambers, Editors’ offices, journalists; News UK EAs, News UK and Times Media legal teams to schedule meetings.
Email Management: Monitor and manage email inbox - Ensuring matters are filed, escalated or processed as appropriate.
Calls: Take calls, respond to correspondence, direct queries and act as approachable and helpful ‘front of house’.
Paper File Management: Ensure the Legal Director’s paper files are organised and kept up to date. Ensuring the department files are maintained.
Admin Assistance: Expense claims, invoice payments, maintaining proper records, preparing agendas, correspondence, legal documents, itineraries and travel arrangements.
Misc: Obtaining information from internal departments including circulation figures and statistics. Using clipshare and internal systems to retrieve published articles.
Undertake any other duties that may be reasonably required.
What we’re looking for from you:
Background working within a legal field and ideally legal secretarial experience in litigation in a law firm at managing or senior partner level.
Demonstrable diary management experience.
Prioritising - Able to work under pressure to tight project deadlines in a fast paced and demanding environment. Adapting to conflicting priorities and prioritising tasks.
Experience of developing efficient and effective administrative systems.
Demonstrable experience of managing files and paperwork.
Excellent keyboard skills with a typing speed of at least 60 words per minute (copy typing). Proficient in MS applications i.e. Word, Excel and PowerPoint; Google mail, Google Documents and Google Sheets.
Confidentiality - Possesses an awareness of the importance of confidential information and how to deal with it; operates with a high level of personal confidentiality.
Able to work well unsupervised or within a team, demonstrating initiative and the ability to be proactive, whilst also being able to follow instructions and provide support to the Deputy General Counsel, Times Media Legal and the wider Times Media Legal team.
Can demonstrate confidence and resilience to overcome obstacles to deliver what is required. With excellent problem diagnosis and analytical skills; presenting problems clearly and having the ability to resolve issues effectively.
We are News UK: One of the leading media businesses in the UK and Ireland, our newsbrands include The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun, The Sun on Sunday and The TLS. Our national broadcast brands include talkSPORT, Times Radio, talkRADIO and Virgin Radio, and we have market-leading local radio stations across Ireland. In 2022 we launched TalkTV, a major new TV channel available to everyone across the UK, delivering a schedule of news, current affairs, entertainment and sport. Our world-famous brands provide news, analysis, opinion and entertainment to almost 40 million people each month. Spanning digital and print, audio and video, events and experiences, our brands are home to a plurality of opinion, representing the diverse communities we serve. News UK is wholly owned by News Corp.
Life at News: At News UK we believe our people are our heartbeat - they are the driving force behind our brands and we want the ways we work to enable people to thrive. Some of us work flexibly, in many different ways. We encourage you to talk to us about the flexibility you would like. We can’t promise to offer exactly what you want, but do provide multiple flexible working options. Many of us work in a hybrid way between one of the News UK & Ireland offices and remotely.
We champion diversity and inclusion, we strive to maximise and encourage every individual’s potential and ensure everyone feels valued. We support this through our Diversity Board, D&I strategy & training, creating more diverse content and our intern and apprenticeship programmes. We also have 8 employee-led networks; Cultural Diversity, News is Out, GenZ, Sustainability Champions, News for Parents, Women in Tech, News UK Christian Fellowship and we are awaiting the launch of our Women’s Steering Group.
We take pride in looking after our amazing talent at News UK supporting the Health and Wellbeing of our staff. We offer private medical insurance covering pre-existing conditions, discounted gym memberships, ClassPass at Home, weekly virtual HIIT, yoga and run club classes, and a ‘Bikes for Work’ scheme, as well as offering opportunities for physio/massage, counselling and legal support.
In addition we also offer:
A generous pension scheme with employer contributions of up to 5%;
25 days holiday and up to 4 volunteering days per year;
Maternity leave up to 18 weeks full basic salary & paternity leave up to 2 weeks;
Wide range of training available, plus full LinkedIn Learning access.
We want to ensure that everyone we meet has the opportunity to perform to their best when interviewing, so feel free to let us know, at any stage, whether you require any reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process, and we will do our best to accommodate.
News UK is an official partner of the Journalism Diversity Fund, founder of the Journalism and Disability Forum, and proud member of the Valuable 500. At News UK, we will continue to promote an inclusive and diverse workplace, to help people with visible and non visible disabilities create careers in media and aim to make our content accessible to all.
