Vacancy: Senior Solicitor – Edinburgh

Assist the Head of Office and be part of a team delivering high quality specialist advice and representation to legally aided clients in predominately housing (evictions, disrepair, mortgage repossession, homelessness), benefits and debt matters.

The Edinburgh team is involved in high impact work that tackles homelessness and inequalities. Therefore, in addition to managing your own complex and varied caseload, appearing at court/tribunals and instructing counsel in Court of Session cases, you will have the opportunity to be involved in CLAO’s strategic project work including our innovative homeless helpline which provides direct legal advice to people rough sleeping.

You will also work closely with external advice and support providers to help triage and refer certain cases, where appropriate, to our duty solicitor service as required, and provide second tier advice and training on our core areas of casework, exploring opportunities for strategic partnership working to maximise our service impact.

The successful candidate should have significant civil court experience, ideally within our core work areas, and be passionate about using their legal skills to improve the lives of as many people as possible. Comprehensive training will be provided to support you with this important work as required.

You will generally be required to work from the Edinburgh office a minimum of two days a week, subject to business needs. From time to time, you may also need to travel to geographic locations covered by our other offices.

About Civil Legal Assistance Office (CLAO)

CLAO is a network of publicly funded court solicitors and support staff employed by the Scottish Legal Aid Board (SLAB). We help people with their civil law problems by providing advice and representation to legally aided clients within our core areas of work. In addition, we operate a referral service to other providers of legal assistance and offer second tier support and training to advice organisations. Our work involves developing partnership links and project work with local and national organisations operating within the geographical areas we cover.

CLAO is part of SLAB’s Client Legal Services Directorate, which also includes the Public Defence Solicitors’ Office (PDSO) and Solicitor Contact Line (SCL) making us Scotland’s largest multi-disciplinary legal aid practice and a unique place to work.

How to apply

Full details about the role and online application are available on our recruitment portal (external link).