Your Role
and What You'll Be Doing
The successful candidate will be required to attend an office with 2 anchor days per week in the office and 3 days from home, this is a great way to maintain meaningful connections with colleagues, get the support you need from your team and also the flexibility that enables you to have a good work life balance. As part of this role you will be expected to travel across our Birmingham, Manchester and Sheffield offices.
Irwin Mitchell is a large full-service law firm which provides a centralised client onboarding and complaint handling service to support legal teams who are engaging clients with the firm. First impressions count and the Client Onboarding and Client Care team has a key role in setting the high standard of onboarding and complaint handling service that our clients expect of Irwin Mitchell. The Head of Client Onboarding is responsible for leading c. 60 colleagues across 7 expert teams who open client matters, support client funding, conduct conflict, Client Due Diligence (CDD) and Anti Money Laundering (AML) checks and deal with client complaints.
The role holder will have excellent leadership skills to set strategic plans and then lead, manage, and supervise all the team’s activities in a what is a highly complex regulated environment. Collaborating closely with our General Counsel team, the role holder will ensure regulatory compliance and will have a strong understanding of the regulatory background that predicates many of the complex on-boarding issues experienced in large law firms. This role will require significant stakeholder engagement and a commercial and practical approach to deliver to the exacting standards required. The role holder will also have joint accountability with the GCT team in setting and delivering the strategic plans of the department.
What You’ll Be Doing
Horizon scanning and working with Group Counsel Team and other stakeholders across the Group to ensure commercial, regulatory, technological, and operational changes are effectively managed within the team.
Creating and owning the delivery of the client onboarding and care operational strategy to ensure the team support the growth of IM Group and continually enhance our approaches to compliance, client experience and end-to-end efficiencies.
Work closely with the Group Counsel Team to understand and contribute to the creation of new policies and procedures and/or review existing policies and procedures. Following impact assessment implement all policies and procedures required to maintain regulatory compliance within the teams.
Create a positive, ethical, quality driven working climate that attracts, retains and motivates a diverse group of high performing employees who are experts in areas such as matter inception, conflicts, CDD and AML.
Deliver the business strategies that maximise operational performance across the teams – including quality, speed, and regulatory compliance.
Set and deliver comprehensive goals for the onboarding teams in line with business priorities, culture, principles, and purpose.
Operationalise existing and new regulatory changes in the most efficient and effective way
Leadership and management of workflows, workloads, and prioritisation of activity to ensure the teams deliver a compliant and quality driven speed of service for all activities.
Constantly reviews operational performance data and supports their teams to achieve their measures, ensuring all barriers to delivering excellent operational performance and regulatory compliance are identified and removed.
Build and maintain motivated and skilled teams through effective leadership, development, mentoring and coaching.
Ensure the right number of skilled people are available at the right time to deliver the required operational and regulatory performance.
Ensure that all teams achieve and maintain technical accreditation and ensure all training and coaching needs are regularly reviewed and met.
Uses knowledge and data to challenge current assumptions and drive change.
Actively engages with legal teams at all levels to support them to deliver their accountabilities in respect of conflicts, CDD and AML, complaints, and funding.
Build and manage excellent relationships with key internal stakeholders such as the Group Counsel Team and Partners across the LLP. Work closely with senior business leads, including Directors of Legal Services, GCT, CFO and Risk Team, providing regular updates where needed.
Influence and support the budget setting process ensuring understanding and buy in from the operations team.
Work closely with Group Counsel Team on more complex cases, identify risks & escalate where required to resolve on-boarding regulatory due diligence requirements.About You
Strong prior client and matter on-boarding experience, including expert knowledge of Client Due Diligence (CDD) and Anti Money Laundering (AML) regulation.
Strong operational management experience in leading a high-volume complex area to meet quality, speed, and regulatory objectives.
A strong customer focussed background.
Excellent knowledge of legal and regulatory rules impacting Law firms when onboarding and monitoring clients including conflict checking, file opening, CDD and AML.
Experience and understanding of technologies used for CDD and AML as well as process improvement.
Knowledge and use of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint within the working environment.
Proven leadership skills in managing a high volume, complex operation with the ability to prioritise and deliver against deadlines.
Must demonstrate a proven ability to motivate, coach and develop people.
Must be able to demonstrate the ability to devise, contribute and successfully deliver against a business strategy.
Strong Influencing skills and negotiating and prior management / stakeholder engagement experience.
Concern and commitment to quality.
Able to identify, drive and embrace new ways of working and innovation.
Must be able to display initiative and take ownership of unfamiliar issues to move things forwards.Our Benefits - What We Can Offer You
25 days holidays as standard plus bank holidays - You can ‘buy’ up to 35hrs of extra holiday too
Generous and flexible pension schemes.
Volunteering days – Two days of volunteering every year for a cause of your choice (fully paid)
Westfield Health membership, offering refunds on medical services alongside our Aviva Digital GP services.
We also offer a wide range of well-being initiatives to encourage positive mental health both in and out of the workplace and to make sure you’re fully supported to work in a way that best suits you. This includes our Flexible by Choice programme which gives our colleagues more choice over how they wish to work subject to role and client requirements.
We have recently been ranked in the Best Workplaces for Wellbeing for Large Organisations for 2023!
Our responsible business programmes are fundamental to who we are and our purpose. We’re committed to being a diverse and inclusive workplace where our colleagues can flourish, and we have established a number of inclusion network groups across our business to support this aim.
Our commitment to Social Responsibility, community investment activity and tackling climate change is a fundamental part of who we are. It’s made up of four strands: Our People, Our Community, Our Environment and Our Pro Bono.
