Back to Job Search

Commercial Litigation Paralegal

Commercial Litigation

Bristol, Exeter or Plymouth

Apply now

Are you an ambitious and motivated individual looking for an opportunity to progress your legal career in a leading, dynamic UK law firm where you will be valued from day one?

We have an exciting opportunity for a Paralegal to join our Commercial Dispute Resolution team. If you’re keen to work with a highly collaborative team and to gain invaluable exposure to a range of exciting clients, this could be the ideal opening for you.

You’ll support a large commercial team of legal professionals and eventually assume responsibility for the progression of cases from introduction to conclusion, all the time growing your own career with a leading law firm.

We are looking for candidates to demonstrate a desire to work within Commercial Dispute Resolution, and a genuine interest in developing a career with us at Foot Anstey. You will be based at either our Plymouth, Exeter, Bristol, or Southampton offices, closely supporting the partners and the wider Commercial Dispute Resolution team.

At Foot Anstey, our people, are at the very heart of our business. You will be working in an agile and non-hierarchical environment, being a valued member of the team delivering solutions focused work for our clients. 

What you’ll do

The purpose of the role is to be a key part of the Dispute Resolution team. You will work across a wide variety of matters from banking and finance disputes, recoveries work, commercial disputes, regulatory disputes, data protection, contentious insolvency, data protection and corporate disputes – and in fact most commercial disputes that you could think of.

You will work as part of a friendly and supportive team who will train and help to develop your skills. As you gain experience, you will assume responsibility for your own case load and be expected to progress your cases from introduction to conclusion. You will have client contact and you are encouraged from an early stage to take part in developing your client relationships. You will also be responsible for supporting senior fee earners on their own cases, helping with discrete tasks or larger projects across the team.

A large part of your role will be to:

  • Engage in pre-action correspondence with third parties
  • Pursue claims, drafting pleadings and witness statements and instigating and monitoring enforcement actions
  • Negotiate and document settlements
  • Take instructions from clients and regularly keep them updated
  • Provide assistance to fee earners with a similar caseload
  • Carry out legal research 
  • Collate evidence
  • Brief Counsel, attending conferences and assisting in drafting/amending legal proceedings and witness statements
  • Support the team with any specific business development and marketing activities

What we’re looking for

This role is not like other paralegal roles. You will be given a high level of autonomy and responsibility, including running your own cases and developing your own client relationships. Ideally, you will have:

  • Paralegal experience with knowledge or experience of commercial dispute resolution ; however, previous experience is not essential as training will be given
  • Ability to demonstrate commercial awareness and business aptitude
  • A methodical approach with an extremely high level of attention to detail, content, and presentation of work
  • Confident commercial/business communication skills and an ability to reassure and act professionally at all times
  • Ability to collaborate
  • Excellent IT skills with an in depth knowledge of MS Outlook, Word and Excel
  • Great time management and organisational ability
  • Highly flexible approach and the ability and desire to flourish in a team environment

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, please do speak in confidence with a member of the Talent Acquisition Team. Contact us at [email protected] and we will come back to you as soon as we can.

What our colleagues say

“The Commercial Litigation team at Foot Anstey is a fantastic and supportive team to work with. No two days are ever the same and the work that you do is varied and diverse. This can range from preparing court proceedings, preparing trial bundles to negotiating a settlement. Whilst the role can be challenging at times there is always someone that you can ask for advice and support.” Adam Davies, Paralegal.

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

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 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.

Apply for this Job


Select one or more
Hold down the Ctrl (windows) or Command (Mac) button to select multiple options.

When you apply to a job on this site, the personal data contained in your application will be collected by the Foot Anstey Group (comprising Foot Anstey LLP and Enable Law) (“Controller”), which is located at Salt Quay House, 4 North East Quay, Sutton Harbour, Plymouth, PL4 0BN and can be contacted by emailing [email protected]. Controller’s data protection officer is James Treloar, who can be contacted at [email protected]. Your personal data will be processed for the purposes of managing Controller’s recruitment related activities, which include setting up and conducting interviews and tests for applicants, evaluating and assessing the results thereto, and as is otherwise needed in the recruitment and hiring processes. Such processing is legally permissible under Art. 6(1)(f) of Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (General Data Protection Regulation) as necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by the Controller, which are the solicitation, evaluation, and selection of applicants for employment.

Your personal data will be shared with Greenhouse Software, Inc., a cloud services provider located in the United States of America and engaged by Controller to help manage its recruitment and hiring process on Controller’s behalf. Accordingly, if you are located outside of the United States, your personal data will be transferred to the United States once you submit it through this site. Because the European Union Commission has determined that United States data privacy laws do not ensure an adequate level of protection for personal data collected from EU data subjects, the transfer is subject to appropriate safeguards (the standard contractual clauses). You can obtain a copy of the standard contractual clauses by contacting us at [email protected]. 

Your personal data will be retained by Controller for whichever is the shorter of the following two options: i) a period of up to 365 days or ii) as long as Controller determines it is necessary to evaluate your application for employment.  You can choose to allow the Controller to retain your data beyond this time frame if you opt-in to a longer retention period. Under the GDPR, you have the right to request access to your personal data, to request that your personal data be rectified or erased, and to request that processing of your personal data be restricted. You also have to right to data portability. In addition, you may lodge a complaint with an EU supervisory authority.

Careers at Foot Anstey

Find out more