Director, Counsel Management

AmTrust Financial Services, Inc.

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

The position has responsibility across all aspects of outside counsel management to optimize claim outcomes, ensure the delivery of superior legal services in the representation of policyholders. The position will be responsible for managing the end-to-end process for counsel selection, engagement, onboarding and performance evaluation. The position has responsibility for negotiating and managing all hourly and alternative fee arrangements with outside law firms. The position will also administer measures of quality assessment which incorporate legal spend analytics to support a spend-optimization strategy. The ideal candidate will report into an AmTrust office on a hybrid model, 4 days per week.

Requirements

Juris Doctor from Accredited Law School
State Bar licensed attorney
7+ years in practice of law; 5 years’ experience in leadership roles supervising attorneys and other legal staff.
Prior experience handling insurance defense litigation for insurance carriers.
Skilled communicator across multiple levels of leadership, with customers and internal business partners.
Significant experience working across multiple applications/technologies.
Experience analyzing data and providing business insights to non-technical audiences.
Proven ability to manage multiple priorities in a fast-paced environment.
In-depth understanding of claim and claim legal operations.
Demonstrates advanced understanding of litigation strategy and execution for multiple lines of insurance and ability to adapt litigation understanding to multiple jurisdictions
Embraces changes; invites feedback related to performance and deals constructively with criticism
Proven ability to collaborate with internal stakeholders, business partners and external customers and vendors.
Commitment to ethics, integrity and transparency.

Responsibilities

Counsel Engagement and Management
Responsible for ensuring agreements are in place with outside firms regarding adherence to AmTrust litigation, billing and related guidelines.
Communicate changes to approved panel law firms to claim lines of business.
Support internal business partners through training and communication on best practices for working with outside counsel.
Serve as the AmTrust primary point of contact to coordinate and resolve all issues with outside counsel.
Work with internal business partners to implement third-party risk management strategies consistent with AmTrust enterprise strategy.
Expense Management
Negotiate and manage all outside counsel rate agreements.
Evaluate opportunities to implement alternative fee agreements.
Develop analytics to identify trends, cost drivers and improvement opportunities across all categories of legal spend.
Outside Counsel Performance Management
Define and measure performance expectations for outside counsel performance across all relevant aspects of performance (understanding of AmTrust objectives and expectations, technical expertise, responsiveness/communication, efficiency, predictability of cost/budgeting, results/execution).
Implement procedures to capture claim feedback about counsel performance at file closing.
Create scorecard of outside counsel performance for use by claim department.
Establish systematic file review process and conduct regular reviews for top panel firms