Manager of Business Intelligence

Fried Frank Business Services Opportunities•New York, NY

3d•$170,000 - $200,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Fried Frank is seeking a Manager of Business Intelligence to lead the firm's BI and reporting function. This is a player-coach role where the individual will manage a team of two BI developers/analysts, setting priorities, managing the reporting backlog, and ensuring quality technical delivery, while also personally building and maintaining Power BI reports and datasets. The firm is transitioning from legacy SSRS reports on a SQL Server backend to Power BI, with a further transition to Microsoft Fabric. The core mission is to drive this modernization, simplify the reporting landscape (currently over 200 financial reports), and identify opportunities to consolidate or retire reports while maintaining or improving service levels. The role will also explore AI-assisted reporting capabilities like Microsoft Copilot for Power BI/Fabric to enhance self-service access for non-technical users. Familiarity with Elite 3E's data model and experience in legal or professional services are strongly preferred.

Requirements

7+ years of progressive business intelligence/reporting experience, including at least 2 years in a lead, supervisory, or mentoring capacity.
Hands-on expertise in Power BI: report and dashboard design, DAX, data modeling, and Power Query.
Strong SQL Server/T-SQL skills, including the ability to write and optimize queries against a relational backend.
Familiarity with SSRS, sufficient to understand and evaluate legacy reports during migration.
Demonstrated experience rationalizing or simplifying a reporting environment — consolidating, retiring, or standardizing reports and data models.
Experience managing a small team while remaining personally hands-on as an individual contributor.
Strong backlog management and stakeholder prioritization skills.
Bachelor's degree in a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice To Haves

Experience in legal or another professional services environment, ideally with exposure to Elite 3E or a similar practice/financial management platform — strongly preferred.
Working knowledge of Azure data services (Azure SQL, Microsoft Fabric capacity and workspace concepts) sufficient to operate effectively within the firm's cloud data platform — deep Azure infrastructure or architecture expertise is not required, as that is owned by the Enterprise Architecture and Development teams.
Experience with Microsoft Fabric or willingness to build that expertise quickly.
Microsoft Power BI Data Analyst (PL-300) certification; Microsoft Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate (DP-600) certification is a strong plus given the firm's Fabric roadmap.
Experience with, or strong interest in, AI-assisted BI tools such as Microsoft Copilot for Power BI/Fabric, and an understanding of how to prepare semantic models to support natural-language querying effectively.

Responsibilities

Manage and develop a team of two BI professionals — setting clear priorities, providing technical guidance, and holding the team accountable for quality delivery.
Own the BI/reporting intake and backlog process: triage new requests, prioritize against business value and modernization strategy, and set realistic delivery timelines.
Balance personal hands-on delivery with management responsibilities — this role is expected to remain a working BI developer, not purely a supervisor.
Lead the ongoing migration of legacy SSRS reports to Power BI, and subsequently to Microsoft Fabric where appropriate, exercising judgment about which reports genuinely warrant migration versus retirement.
Conduct a comprehensive review of the firm's report catalog — starting with the 200+ financial reports — to identify opportunities to consolidate, simplify, or retire reports where appropriate.
Define and maintain lightweight report governance (ownership, lifecycle, naming, deprecation process) to keep the reporting environment well-organized as it evolves.
Simplify and standardize underlying data models and semantic layers to minimize duplicated logic across reports and support a leaner, more maintainable reporting architecture.
Evaluate and pilot AI-assisted reporting capabilities such as Microsoft Copilot for Power BI/Fabric — including natural-language querying and AI-assisted report generation — to expand self-service access to reporting for non-technical business users.
Prepare underlying semantic models (business-friendly naming, clear measure definitions, well-structured relationships) so they can effectively support natural-language querying and AI-assisted analysis.
Ensure AI-assisted and natural-language reporting respects the firm's governance requirements, including ethical walls, information barriers, and matter-level access controls, in partnership with the Data Strategy and Security teams.
Ensure the reporting environment — legacy SSRS, Power BI, and Fabric as it's adopted — remains highly available and performant throughout the transition.
Maintain or improve user-facing service levels (accuracy, refresh timeliness, usability) even as the underlying platform and report set change.
Establish validation practices to confirm migrated or consolidated reports match legacy output before cutover, so business users experience no degradation in trust or accuracy.
Personally design, build, and maintain Power BI reports, dashboards, and datasets, including complex financial reporting.
Write and optimize SQL queries against the firm's SQL Server backend and, increasingly, Fabric-based sources.
Partner with the Director of Data Strategy's team on the underlying data platform to ensure BI reporting is well-supported by upstream data structures.
Develop working familiarity with Elite 3E's financial data model, since most core financial reporting ultimately sources from 3E.
Partner with Finance and other business stakeholders to translate reporting requirements into well-designed, maintainable BI solutions.
Communicate clearly with both the technical team and non-technical business stakeholders — attorneys, practice group leaders, finance staff — about reporting capabilities, timelines, and tradeoffs.
Partner with the Director of Enterprise Architecture on architecture and design standards for the BI/reporting environment.