Conflicts Analyst presso Pinsent Masons

Job Title: Conflicts Analyst

Location: Birmingham or Glasgow

About the Business: 

Here at Pinsent Masons we bring together the best people to get the job done. We’re naturally curious, constantly learning, listening, and growing. We’ll truly value your ideas. You’ll be joining an award-winning, hardworking and commercially minded team, where you’ll have the opportunity to work with leading experts and form meaningful relationships, while making a difference. You’ll get the opportunity to be involved in varied and challenging work. Working in an open and supportive environment, to deliver outstanding results. 

The Team:

Risk management and regulatory compliance are critical to our organisation and are increasingly complex. To meet these challenges, we have a dedicated General Councils Office. The General Counsel’s office comprises of a number of the New Business Solutions Team and it is staffed with more than 40 compliance professionals based in UK, Asia Pac, Middle East and Australia. Within the General Counsel’s Office, we have a dedicated Conflicts Team (alongside a dedicated AML Team). Our Conflicts Team sits across Birmingham and Glasgow, staffed with 8 Conflicts Analysts and 3 Senior Conflicts Analysts including, hybrid Compliance Analysts based in Hong Kong. The Conflicts Team ensures we comply with our legal, professional and regulatory obligations to meet our business needs. 

The role of the Conflicts team is to ensure Pinsent Masons complies with ethical obligations in particular conflicts of interest and confidentiality rules as well as other compliance issues related to lateral hire and bid clearances, new client/matters etc. By doing this we provide the highest standard of service to the business to protect the firm’s reputation, client relationships and maintain client confidentiality where necessary. 

The Role:

The purpose of this role is for Pinsent Masons to remain compliant with relevant legislative requirements while effectively managing commercial conflicts in alignment of the firm’s global strategy and policies. 

The role involves ensuring the firm complies with its legal and regulatory obligations in respect to conflict checks and other necessary regulatory checks on all new/existing clients and matters for all offices. The role will involve having an understanding of legal conflict and commercial conflicts, which will aid in making sure all relevant compliance controls and procedures are in place, ensuring that we prevent conflicts of interest and maintain client confidentiality.

Alongside running conflict checks, you will also be supporting on internal projects, wider training, and day-to-day administrative tasks (such as responding to queries on our internal mailbox).

Key Responsibilities  

• Reviewing new matters which are submitted by the business and running conflict checks on new clients and all relevant parties involved in a matter.
• Taking ownership of conflict checks throughout the entirety of the conflict checking process from the initial review through to matter record creation.
• Ability to clear low-medium risk conflict issues, as appropriate.
• Liaising with the relevant lawyers/partners and PAs in connection with queries arising from the conflicts request.
• Accurately analysing information returned via the systems (conflict searches, ownership searches etc) and identifying any potential conflict issues.
• Proactive autonomy on the focus of your capacity dependent on the current requirements of the workflow. Primary duties will include focusing on any urgent conflict check requests, assisting with any requests that have been handed over and managing the conflicts queue efficiently.
• Flagging and escalating potential conflict issues to the Conflicts Investigation Team with a clear and concise analysis of issues flagged and potential outcomes.
• Having a good understanding of the firm’s Conflicts System (Intapp).
• Developing an understanding of the firm’s client base.
• Arranging for the implementation of information barriers, where required.
• Assisting with the lower complexity, higher volume workflow where necessary.
• Managing the internal team inbox where we receive ad-hoc queries from the business. 
• Identifying additional high-risk factors such as sanctions and flagging to our internal Risk Team for review.
• Having an understanding of our Engagement Terms policies and liaising with the Client Team where necessary.
• Assisting with internal projects and other duties that may be assigned to fully meet the requirements of the position.
• Supporting the Senior Conflicts Analysts, Managers and Conflicts Investigation Team, as required.

Candidate Overview:

We are looking for candidates who ideally hold the following skills and experience: 

• Educated to bachelor's degree level (preferably law) or equivalent experience.
• Relevant professional qualification (desirable, not required).
• Proficiency in Microsoft Office applications (e.g., Outlook, Word, Excel).
• Conflicts Analysis experience or other relevant experience ideally in a law firm or other professional organisations, is preferable.
• Knowledge of Intapp Open or similar systems.
• Able to analyse conflict results and having an understanding of low/medium/high-risk issues.
• Knowledge and/or high-level understanding and ability to apply the SRA Standards and Regulation when dealing with conflicts of interest.

What can we offer you?

• Agile working (the opportunity to work from home, subject to  commitments)
• Carers’ leave (up to five paid days’ leave towards caring responsibilities) 
• 25 days’ annual leave entitlement and the opportunity to purchase or roll over 5 days.
• Contributory pension of up to 5%.
• Private healthcare policy 
• Death in service cover (4 x base salary).
• Eligibility to apply for an interest free season ticket loan, an interest free gym membership loan and/or an interest free rental deposit loan.
• Cycle to work scheme.

What happens next? 

Once your application has been submitted and reviewed, our Recruitment team will share the outcome with you by email. 

We typically hold two interview stages per vacancy providing the opportunity to meet two members of the hiring team at each stage. The first stage is typically conducted virtually and the second stage typically in person at the office in which the role would be based. However, we strive to remain flexible depending on the requirements of the role or the candidate. 

Our strength lies in our differences.

We are a Disability Confident and top Stonewall employer, a Valuable 500 member, a founding member of the Mindful Business Charter, signatory of the Race at Work Charter and a proud partner of Neurodiversity in Law. We encourage and value different ideas and styles of thinking. It’s with different perspectives that we’ll find solutions to our clients’ most complex challenges. It’s how we’ll deliver outstanding results today, and tomorrow. We want everybody attending an interview to be comfortable and able to fully demonstrate their experience and talents.