Apprentice - Paralegal - Castle Point Borough Council
Castle Point Borough Council
Fixed Term (2 years), Full Time
National minimum wage based on age
Location: Castle Point
Closing Date: 2nd April 2025
Why Castle Point? Castle Point Borough Council is a statutory body responsible for employing nearly 350 staff, and delivering over 150 council services, both statutory and for the community's well-being and benefit. Castle Point Borough Council aims to provide high-quality and financially sustainable services while prioritising outstanding customer service, transparency in decision-making, and promoting local democracy. Additionally, the council seeks to transform, modernize, and improve its performance, as well as support and enable the communities within its jurisdiction to be strong, healthy, and thriving.
Our values: Trust, Respect, Improving and Learning, and Customer Focus
Job purpose
Working as part of the Legal and Democratic Services, you will deliver effective and high-quality support to a range of services. You will deliver administration activity for the legal and local land charges team as well as dealing with legal cases and local land charges searches. This will include providing legal and administrative support, carrying out research and drafting legal documents and forms.
Our apprenticeship programme will give you a practical introduction to working in a local government legal environment. Working effectively as part of legal and democratic services for the Council, you will deliver a quality service, to agreed targets, in line with policies and procedures. Our apprenticeship is Paralegal – Level 3.
Key Responsibilities
1. Provide support to the legal and local land charges teams.
2. Respond to customer enquiries, by phone, email or face-to-face, in a timely manner, to deliver high quality service.
3. Carry out legal and support tasks in one or more of the fields of planning, housing, licensing and conveyancing or any other function (including preparing court bundles) within the scope of the service, ensuring all tasks and responsibilities are completed to agreed timescales with a high standard of accuracy.
4. Carry out a range of legal duties as allocated to include dealing with routine legal enquiries by way of telephone and correspondence, obtaining and recording key dates (including hearing dates) and writing letters, under the supervision of the senior lawyer and Ensure all tasks and responsibilities are completed to agreed timescales with a high standard of accuracy
5. Creating new case files, managing and updating active files and closing cases as appropriate within the scope of your specific work
6. Liaise with officers and managers in other departments, keeping them informed of progress of cases and taking any other appropriate measures to ensure continued client satisfaction
7. Manage information including maintaining document and IT systems, record & archive management and confidential file disposal. Effectively updated including creating new case files, managing and updating active files and closing cases as appropriate within the scope of your specific work.
8. Responsible for tracking and logging progress updates, to ensure milestones are met.
9. Identify opportunities for new ways of working to deliver continuous improvement.
10. Specific individual and shared targets and objectives are defined annually within the performance management framework.
The Experience You Will Bring
11. Educated, or predicted to achieve, Paralegal Level 3 (Equivalent to A Level)
12. Ability to develop skills and experience within the workplace
13. IT literate and willing to train on in-house systems
14. Ability to appropriately handle confidential and sensitive information
15. Ability to deliver effective, administrative duties across a range of services
16. Excellent attention to detail
17. Ability to multi-task and manage competing priorities
18. Experience of working effectively as part of a team
19. Experience of effective communication with a range of individuals
Castle Point Borough Council is proud to be a disability confident Leader. We’re committed to interview all disabled applicants if they meet the minimum requirements of the job. We’re also committed to interview all veterans and care leavers, who meet the minimum requirements of the role for which they are applying. Please speak to our Recruiters if you require any reasonable adjustments during the process.
Castle Point Borough Council is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children and vulnerable adults and expects all employees and volunteers to share this commitment.