Junior Associate – Legal Services, NOVA8
The opportunity
We are looking for someone at the start of their career – someone who brings curiosity and ambition rather than experience.
We are looking for an exceptional individual to work at the heart of NOVA8's UK & Europe operation, working directly alongside senior leadership to build the next phase of the business.
NOVA8 is a Chambers-ranked alternative legal services platform – an ALSP – working with international businesses and leading in-house teams. The legal market is changing quickly and new models are emerging that combine talent, technology and flexible legal capability in different ways. We are building one of those platforms.
This is a business role, not a legal one. No legal qualification or background is required or expected.
Think of it as a founder-associate role for someone at the very start of their career. A first role, but not a typical one.
What you will do
You will work closely with our senior team on the things that actually move the business forward:
* Building our global lawyer network – identifying and engaging the right legal talent for specific client mandates and platform roles
* Spending time with general counsel and senior legal teams to understand what they need
* Helping shape how we take the platform to market
* Working through the practical challenges that come with scaling a modern legal business
This is not a support role. You will be expected to take responsibility for real work from day one.
This will be a hybrid role, with time required each week onsite in the West Midlands and occasional travel to London and other parts of the UK when required.
Salary is competitive and commensurate with experience, with a performance-related element as the role develops.
What we are looking for
The criteria for this role are straightforward: curiosity, intellectual rigour and commercial awareness. Everything else is secondary.
We are not looking for someone with years of legal market experience. We are looking for someone at the very beginning of their career who wants to build something.
We are open to individuals who haven't followed the obvious path – those coming from adjacent fields or who have simply developed a sharp interest in how businesses grow and markets evolve.
A genuine curiosity about the legal services market is an asset. A law degree is not a requirement.
If you ask good questions, figure things out and are comfortable taking responsibility earlier than most roles tend to allow, we want to hear from you.
What this is not
This is not a graduate programme. There is no rotation, no cohort and no structured syllabus. We are looking for an individual we can invest in and develop over time – someone who wants to play a meaningful role in building a business and who is looking for something with more responsibility and genuine proximity to decision-making than most early-career roles tend to offer.
How to apply
If that sounds like you, reach out directly.
Please send your CV along with a short note, in your own words and based on your personal experience, on what you think is changing in the legal services market and why it matters.
Peter Workman
Head of UK & Europe – NOVA8