DESCRIPTION

This role is an opportunity to develop a technical leadership role, leading a small client-focused team of lawyers.
You will handle a caseload of predominantly High Court cases, have direct responsibility for a small team of handlers and assistants, and be responsible for the technical quality of the work produced by your team, undertaking any supervision and peer reviews required.
You will be required to oversee and lead our Fraud Team. You will be responsible for growing the team’s capabilities, building and maintaining strong relationships with both established and new clients, and driving business development efforts to ensure the continued success and expansion of our Fraud Team.
Aside from technical excellence and attracting work, a key part of the role is the leadership, motivation, engagement and technical development of those team members. The role also includes the need to interface with sophisticated senior claims handlers in long-standing insurance clients and responsibility for enhancing and developing Keoghs profile as well as your own as you work towards attracting more work in your own right.
Having established strong relationships with existing clients, you will continue to attract work in order to grow and develop your team.
The Lead Lawyer will be responsible for ensuring through peer review, training and supervision that robust, technical strategies are employed across all counter-fraud matters as well as ensuring that all KYO strategies understood and followed throughout the team. The Lead Lawyer will be pivotal in feeding back outcomes to the Partners and key client contacts.
The post holder will be responsible for supporting the handlers in delivering the best possible outcome for clients on counter-fraud cases whilst also ensuring cases are progressed in a commercially sound and economical manner.
A key part of this role is ensuring that cases which are better suited to being handled in our specialist counter-fraud team are identified and flagged appropriately. The post holder will be expected to support the design of best practice handling documents for counter-fraud cases.

SKILLS, KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERTISE

• An agreed handling authority of at least £100,000.
• Experience of supervising others, with a strong track record of progressing supervisees.
• Positive, confident and enthusiastic
• Excellent listening, verbal and written communication skills
• Excellent inter-personal and client care skills and experience of building relationships with clients.
• Ability to prioritise work, keep to deadlines and work under pressure
• Ability to win the trust and confidence of others
• Ability to maintain concentration and pay attention to detail
• Driven to achieve with a track record of achieving all objectives
• High level of experience of handling non-delegated counter-fraud cases, with an agreed handling authority matching the requirement of the work
• Ability to analyse trends and devise and implement strategies designed to deliver market-leading results.
• Ability to lead a team and to ensure those within the team have enough of the appropriate work.
• Ability to motivate those within the team and beyond to achieve their targets and objectives.
• Ability to foster engagement with the Keoghs Shared Values within the team and wider office, leading by example.
• Ability to develop the technical skills of those within the team.
• Excellent communication skills, not only to enable the lead to conduct meaningful, formal reviews of progress against technical and financial metrics but also such that the lead is able to identify any issues as they arise and to provide appropriate support to team members either in respect of wellbeing or performance.

Strategic excellence:

• Devising and implementing case strategies that deliver the best possible outcome for our clients.
• Thorough consideration of evidence throughout the life of the case, considering the impact on case strategy.
• Identifying and escalating any cases appropriate for complex consideration and referral.
• To ensure that all counter-fraud cases are flagged appropriately on Tracker so that accurate MI is captured for the following:
• The number of fraud instructions from clients
• The number of cases that are converted to fraud
• The type of fraud that we’re seeing
• Fraud savings

Technical Excellence:

• Supervision and peer review of all handlers in your team.
• Make full use of the firm’s Case Management System in progressing files from receipt to closure.
• Triaging and allocating new files to handlers with appropriate expertise.
• Delegate appropriate work to team members and ensuring assistants have enough of the appropriate work to achieve chargeable hours targets.
• To ensure compliance with the LSNI code of conduct.

Client excellence:

• Building and developing partnerships with clients to deliver their strategic goals.
• Ensuring maximum customer satisfaction on all cases dealt with in your team.
• Ensuring compliance with all internal and client SLA’s
• Ensuring accurate and timely completion of all client and internal MI
• Achieve both client and internal KPIs
• Ensuring that all bills are delivered accurately and in accordance with client SLA’s.
• Improve fraud kick out rates
• Increase the profile of the Northern Ireland Counter-Fraud team
• Oversee delivery of quarterly counter-fraud newsletter to clients

Leadership:

• Leadership, motivation, engagement and technical development of the team to ensure achievement of objectives.
• Taking responsibility for identifying any issues which arise around wellbeing or performance and addressing those issues with support from the Team Leader.
• Regular communication with the team, including but not limited to setting objectives and personal development plans, checking in monthly to confirm they are on track both in terms of performance and technical progress, ongoing conversations and performance reviews.
• As you grow and develop your team, contributing to the recruitment and probation process.

Financial and cultural excellence:

• Achieve objectives and financial targets
• Adhere to Keoghs Values