Director of Client Success

Sweet James•Newport Beach, CA

12d

About The Position

Sweet James Accident Attorneys is hiring its first dedicated client experience leader to own and improve the client journey across a personal injury case, from retention through settlement disbursement. The role begins with diagnosing the current experience by mapping the journey, analyzing attrition, complaint, and review data, and interviewing employees and clients. The Director will establish a baseline, identify gaps, and recommend priorities. The Director will then design the client experience operating model and build or rebuild client-facing teams, including potentially a function that monitors client relationships across the case journey. This includes defining roles, handoffs, service standards, metrics, and escalation paths; hiring, training, and leading teams; and creating reporting and early-warning systems to identify and resolve client concerns. The role works across attorneys, case management, settlement, accounting, and regional offices, ensuring client communications comply with professional-responsibility rules under attorney guidance. The position reports to the Managing Partner of Pre-Litigation. The Director has authority to change how client-facing work is organized and is accountable for results. Sweet James describes itself as a rapidly growing, AI-powered personal injury firm based in Orange County, California, with a collaborative, fast-paced environment and opportunities for professional growth.

Requirements

At least 8 years building and leading customer success, customer experience, or customer service teams, including direct management of people and managers.
Demonstrated experience establishing a team or function from scratch or rebuilding an underperforming one, with the ability to explain the changes and outcomes.
Experience defining customer experience metrics, creating supporting reporting, and managing teams against those metrics.
Experience designing and refining roles, processes, service standards, and escalation paths for a customer-facing organization.
Personal experience managing and resolving high-stakes customer escalations.
Ability to define strategy from an ambiguous mandate, prioritize, and execute with limited direction.
Fluency in customer experience practices such as journey mapping, voice-of-customer programs, service recovery, and tiered support models.

Nice To Haves

Experience in a start-up or rapidly scaling environment where the function was built as the business grew.
Experience in a regulated or professional-services setting, such as legal, healthcare, or financial services, where customer communications have compliance constraints.
Experience serving consumers in high-stress, high-stakes situations rather than business-to-business accounts.
Comfort working directly with customer relationship management or case-management data, such as Salesforce.

Responsibilities

Map the end-to-end client journey and assess its baseline, gaps, and priority improvements through data analysis and interviews with staff and current and former clients.
Analyze client attrition, complaints, and reviews to inform recommendations.
Define the client experience strategy, operating model, roles, handoffs, service standards, and escalation paths across case stages.
Rebuild existing client-facing teams or establish new teams, including hiring, training, and day-to-day leadership.
Define client experience metrics, build reporting, and use results to pilot, measure, and improve initiatives.
Create early-warning mechanisms and escalation routing to identify, assign, track, and resolve client concerns on time.
Partner with attorneys, case management, settlement, accounting, and regional office leaders to align client-facing changes with case operations.
Ensure client communications operate within law-firm professional-responsibility rules under attorney guidance.