Back to Job Search

Contentious Trusts and Probate Lawyer

Charities & Private Wealth Disputes

Exeter, Bristol, Southampton, Manchester (flexible)

Apply now

Contentious Trusts & Probate Lawyer

We are looking for a specialist Contentious Trusts and Probate Lawyer to work in our dynamic and fast-growing Charities & Private Wealth Disputes team. The team deals with inheritance disputes for a nationwide private client base and for national charities. We are ranked in tier 1 for private client contentious probate in the South West in the Legal 500, as well as tier 1 for Charities (Legacies) UK-wide in Chambers. This is a great opportunity to work with a high calibre client base from the outset. In this role you can expect flexible hybrid working to meet the changing needs of the clients and the wider business.

What you’ll do

You will have your own busy caseload from the start, taking responsibility for all aspects of contentious trust and probate work. You will work closely alongside a team of specialist lawyers and benefit from trainee and paralegal support. Our contentious probate lawyers sit within a wider team of over 30 people that has evolved to meet the needs of its charity clients providing dispute resolution, estate administration and legacy income management. We also collaborate with our colleagues in our wider Private Wealth Sector including agricultural, mental capacity, tax and family teams for the benefit of our private clients.

You will be working within an innovative environment where being proactive and forward thinking on behalf of our clients is actively promoted. We use bespoke technology solutions and legal design to interact with our clients in order to deliver an exceptional service.

What we’re looking for

You can readily demonstrate solid experience as a genuine specialist in contentious trusts and probate, with experience of running your own caseload.  You will understand and appreciate some of the considerations and issues our clients face, with a commercial and pragmatic outlook to providing appropriate and well-informed advice. You will be a true team player and positive and approachable in supervising colleagues supporting you.  You will have ACTAPS and/or STEP qualifications, or we will be willing to support you with this.

We consider ourselves to be a high performing, welcoming and inclusive team, and your first-class communication skills will enable you to become a key member, gaining the trust of a broad range of internal and external stakeholders. In this role, you will have exceptional opportunities to develop strong and lasting client relationships, and you will be personally motivated and enthusiastic about this prospect, with a view to building or extending your profile in this complex and challenging area of law.

As part of an ambitious and enthusiastic team, we will support you to engage in or lead a range of business development opportunities in order to continue developing your profile and progressing your career over time.

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

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, or anything else, please do speak in confidence with a member of the Talent Acquisition Team: [email protected]

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 Oxford and Manchester.

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 through our Business Skills Academy and Digital Skills Academy 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