Our Agriculture, Farms and Estates team is one of the largest groups of rural lawyers in the UK, representing some of the country's biggest private landowners. With over 200 years' experience, we build long term relationships with our clients - based on trust and a deep understanding of countryside issues.

Our clients appreciate the quality, breadth and commerciality of our service, our industry insight, and the talent and passion of our people.

Led by Partner Simon Kirkup, our growing team has an exciting opportunity for a lawyer to join us in Newcastle, advising corporate and charitable bodies as well as significant private estates.  This is a genuine chance to join a highly motivated and supportive team with a wealth of relevant experience.

What will you be doing?

You'll work closely with lawyers in the wider Real Estate and Private Client teams, providing a broad range of real estate advice to clients with rural property. Your responsibilities will include:

• Buying and selling agricultural and sporting estates.
• Advising in relation to the sale of land for development – sales, options, promotion agreements.
• Advising in relation to a wide range of green energy projects.
• Advising on full range of landlord/tenant issues – in relation to agricultural, commercial and residential property.
• Advising lenders in relation to loans to the owners of agricultural property.

What does the ideal candidate look like?

You could be a qualified lawyer with experience of rural real estate work already or an experienced real estate lawyer looking to move into this specialist area. Requirements include excellent drafting skills, a sense of commercial pragmatism and the desire and ability to build strong long-lasting relationships with rural clients.

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

• A legal qualification with 3+ years' post-admission experience.
• Experience in an Agriculture or Real Estate legal team.
• Experience of acting for landowners on development projects or buying and selling land.

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, full-time or part-time working patterns.

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, 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 ED&I 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.