Legal Project Manager

Barnes & Thornburg LLP•Dallas, TX

14d

About The Position

Barnes & Thornburg's Legal Operations team is responsible for partnering with firm leadership, attorneys, and other personnel to develop creative pricing solutions, foster development and integration of legal practice innovations, implement project management techniques, and install scalable data capture processes to meet the needs of client business objectives. The Legal Project Management team focuses on providing support to engagement teams in order to facilitate the provision of legal services to the firm’s largest clients. The Legal Project Manager will report to the firm’s Director of Legal Project Management.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree required, prior experience in a paralegal or practicing attorney role, preferred.
The position will involve significant contact with lawyers, BT leadership and firm clients, and will require excellent interpersonal, customer service and communication skills.
Must be highly organized, self-starter (will get some direction but also needs to be able to work independently).
Must be able to have and give opinion, even if opinions are not accepted and acted upon (everyone is part of the team).

Nice To Haves

prior experience in a paralegal or practicing attorney role

Responsibilities

Works as a Legal Project Manager on key engagements as defined by the firm. This includes providing embedded project management support to matter teams, monitoring budget to actual reporting, monitoring scope and resource planning, facilitating task tracking, providing client ready reporting, and acting as a liaison for the team to the client’s legal operations contact.
Define client relationship and legal project management strategy, goals, and related deliverables in conjunction with the matter/engagement leadership.
Tracking and monitoring progress against the anticipated scope of work and established budgets and partnering with the Pricing team to update, if needed. Also tracking progress of work plans, milestones, legal outcomes, and alternative fee agreements, reporting on same and attending to follow-up items.
Interacting with, and serving as a resource to the leadership of matter and engagement teams.
Learns about Firm’s systems and data; applies understanding of financial concepts, problem solving skills and a strong client service orientation to navigate and apply - 2 - systems and data in ways that benefit the Legal Project Management group and lawyers.
Identifies issues and opportunities and proactively raises them with the appropriate member of the team; tracks issues through resolution and documents lessons learned.
Partners with other staff support departments to resolve issues and contribute to process improvement, development of SOPs and stream-lined service delivery.
Partners with other members of the Legal Operations team to develop and provide educational content to the firm’s lawyers.
Assists with inter and intra departmental projects as needed and performs other work-related duties, as assigned. Liaises frequently with the Accounting and Client Growth teams.
Conduct after action reviews and contribute to discussion of lessons learned and identify templates for future use.
Developing, maintaining, and/or updating various information tracking systems, including for example via Microsoft Word, Excel, SharePoint, file-sharing platforms
The employee must be able to perform all essential job duties and responsibilities of this position satisfactorily and as outlined, with or without reasonable accommodations. Reasonable accommodation requests may be accommodated, absent undue firm hardship.