The Firm
Stevens & Bolton is one of the largest firms in the South outside London and is independently recognised as one of the UK's leading national law firms with top quality clients and excellent work.
The working atmosphere in the firm is positive, supportive, relaxed but professional, and we pride ourselves on a taking a practical, considerate and collaborative approach with both clients and colleagues.
We want everyone at the firm to be happy and fulfilled in their career. We provide opportunities for continuous learning, growth and development. We also recognise that lawyers value the ability to work flexibly - we have agile working policies to facilitate flexible working and all lawyers have laptops and iPhones as standard issue.
The Role
We are looking for technically strong, personable, versatile, commercially minded and ambitious lawyers to pursue a career in restructuring and insolvency with us in the long term.
We have one of the strongest restructuring and insolvency practices in the South outside London, which is highly rated both in Chambers and Legal 500. The team is a fast-growing and dynamic group consisting of 10 lawyers carrying out a high quality and varied diet of restructuring and insolvency work, including formal appointment work, security enforcements, consensual restructuring outside insolvency, distressed asset sales (inside and outside a formal insolvency), advice to directors of troubled companies and insolvency-related litigation.
We often collaborate with our finance colleagues when resourcing refinancing projects and, together, we constitute the finance, restructuring and insolvency department. The finance practice covers acquisition/leveraged finance, real estate finance, asset based lending, trade finance, venture debt and corporate cross-over debt products.
We also have significant international reach, with well-established links across the world with tried and tested partner firms located in and/or acting for international clients from the following jurisdictions, where there is an English restructuring and/or insolvency nexus: all EU territories, Australia, the US, Japan, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa.
Recent work highlights include acting for insolvency practitioners at KPMG, EY, Mazars, RSM, BDO and Quantuma; on restructuring assignments, in the insurance and consumer finance sectors (UK and cross border) and on distressed credits in sub-Saharan Africa; and representing creditors for some of the recently failed high-profile companies such as Steinhoff, Carillion, Conviviality and House of Fraser, as well as in the Boris Becker bankruptcy.
Training and knowledge management is first class. Like the firm as a whole, the team environment is friendly, supportive and relaxed and all team members have the opportunity to do interesting and challenging work and to participate in business development, knowledge sharing, training and CSR/pro bono initiatives.
There is plenty of opportunity for the right associate to build a career in this fast developing practice group.
An associate who recently joined the team, comments: “The work is varied, City style and high quality, often with City firms acting on the other side. The team is collegiate, as is the firm as a whole, with huge learning opportunities. There is little hierarchy and the open door policy means that you always feel welcome. You can work on anything from recovering assets in a bankruptcy case to a huge restructuring with a loan portfolio of £250 million. You are given the opportunity to work on your own files and to be the face of the transaction/case, but at the same time always with the appropriate partner support. A work-life balance is really encouraged, the partners have families and want to go home too!”
Qualifications and Experience
We are looking for a part-time lawyer (4-10 PQE). We want strong team players with good inter-personal skills, who have a commercial approach and excellent technical, communication and negotiation skills.
We offer excellent supervision, coaching and training, but we encourage all team members to take responsibility at an early stage and to want to be stretched and challenged. An appetite for business development will be a definite advantage.
The firm's job page is here