The Private Wealth team at Womble Bond Dickinson has a well-deserved reputation for delivering the highest quality legal advice and outstanding client service to individuals and their families. Whilst proud of our 200 year heritage, we are innovative, dynamic and ambitious, and now seek to grow our Private Wealth Disputes team. We're keen to hear from lawyers in Leeds and Newcastle, or those in London looking to make a move to the North.

Our national team is highly rated in Chambers & Partners and Legal 500. Most members of the team are STEP, ACTAPS or CIOT qualified and benefit from high quality learning and development support, with clearly expressed career development programmes in place at all levels of qualification.

The Team

The Private Wealth group is made up of lawyers, accountants and financial advisers operating from Edinburgh, Bristol, Leeds, Newcastle and London, providing services to individuals, families and trustees across the UK and beyond. Naturally, our clients expect first-rate legal advice; but that is just the starting point. Our ability to deliver seamless advice from our multi-disciplinary team is a distinctive proposition, but we also work well alongside clients' other professional advisers, adding value by using our depth of knowledge and experience to help our clients achieve their aims. Whether landowners or entrepreneurs, old money or new, the themes remain the same: we seek to develop a thorough understanding of our clients' circumstances, needs and aspirations and then use that understanding to help them navigate the legal and financial landscape to their best advantage.

Private Wealth has always been at the core of the firm's practice – it is one of our key sectors – and the combination which formed Womble Bond Dickinson provides a great international stage for our practitioners.

Our Private Wealth Disputes teams works across our Newcastle, Leeds and London offices, acting for a cross-section of clients in all manner of trust and probate disputes.  Our work includes disputes regarding trustee decision making; trustee direction and blessing applications; the contested removal of trustees and personal representatives; construction, rectification and recission applications; proprietary estoppel claims; disputed Wills; 1975 Act claims; statutory Will applications in the Court of Protection; TLATA claims, and professional negligence claims in relation to Wills, trusts and probate.

The role

The role is ideally suited to an experienced private client disputes lawyer with the energy and vision to build on our market-leading position.  Whilst having the drive and ambition to develop and grow their own practice, the successful candidate will also benefit from the opportunity to support a number of established client relationships. This is a great opportunity for anyone presently working in any part of the UK looking to base themselves in the North East or Yorkshire.

The candidate

To be successful in this role you'll need as a minimum:

• A legal qualification with 3+ years post admission experience
• A track record of handling high value private client litigation such as will validity claims, the removal of executors and trustees, financial provision claims, disputes between trustees and beneficiaries and proprietary estoppel claims
• Experience of attending business development and networking events
• Your own network of contacts
• Experience of supervising and mentoring more junior fee earners would be advantageous, but is not a pre-requisite.

Ideally you'll be ACTAPS qualified (or already working towards the qualification) and be a member of ConTrA and/or STEP

We continually work hard to create an open culture that sets us apart from other firms. Our culture gives us much more of a human feel, emphasising that we're more than just suits!

As signatories to the Mindful Business Charter, it's important to us that our people are able to maintain healthy and happy lives, both in and out of work. We have a number of resources and initiatives designed to support health and wellbeing and we're very happy to talk flexible working.

Through our DEI initiatives we create an environment in which difference is valued. We have an Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Group, led by our Board Sponsor, which works with our colleague networks (we currently have firm supported networks for race, ethnicity, and cultural heritage, LGBTQ+, disabilities, neurodiversity, families, and women's career development and we're in constant dialogue with our people about how we expand our networks to better support everybody). Find out more about DEI at WBD here. We encourage applicants from all social backgrounds, ethnicities, disabilities, gender identities and sexual orientations.

We are committed to ensuring our recruitment process is inclusive and accessible to all. If you have a disability or long term condition and need us to make any adjustments to give you the best possible recruitment process, please let us know by contacting the recruiter on the right hand side of this page. Please also let us know if you need this job advert or the application form in a different format.

We will offer an interview to candidates with a disability or long-term condition who meet the minimum criteria for this role. You can opt into this scheme within the application form. Your response to this question is only used for this purpose, is only visible to the recruitment team and is not used for data monitoring. 

We are an in-house recruitment team and will always aim to fill our roles directly in the first instance. If you're an agency, please click here for ways that you can work with us.