The Senior Manager - Legal Rates & Billing Operations will lead the Firm’s annual rate implementation process as well as oversee the maintenance of rates. This role is responsible for ensuring the timely sign-off on new client rate agreements set by the Pricing Strategy Team, accurate review and capture of timekeeper rates, and updating of rates as matters progress to completion.
This leader will set strategy for rate implementation technology, optimize process and efficiency across Centers and Markets, streamline workflows, improve the end-user experience and contribute to downstream efficiency and revenue realization. Baker McKenzie is modernizing the service of its business professionals to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of how it delivers client services.

SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE:

• Extensive experience in legal pricing interpretation and implementation, including understanding and adhering to client terms and outside billing guidelines
• Extensive experience in client/matter data management and knowledge of key legal billing components, including intake, billing, matter management, eBilling, collections and reporting
• Extensive legal, or similar, experience, with a deep understanding of how matters/cases are opened, legal/finance information is collected, and information passed downstream for billing and collections
• Experience leading and managing large cross-border legal billing teams in Markets and Service Centers
• Knowledge of Intapp and other legal technology such as SAP, 3E or Elite Enterprise
• Experience in business leadership roles, with a focus on rates implementation and process improvement in the legal, accounting or consulting industries.
• Experience driving business transformation, and experience in managing custom development projects with agile methodologies
• Extensive leadership experience with projects requiring business sponsorship and budgeting, as well as cross-border oversight and communication in varying geographies and languages
• Impressive communication skills with both team members and internal business constituents, and comfortable mediating between stakeholder needs, business objectives, and technical feasibility
• Excellent collaboration skills and comfortable with an agile and iterative development process that includes accepting and managing feedback from various stakeholders
• Affiliative, respectful, with strong presentation skills that influence with fact, reason and vision; trustworthy, and dependable
• Relationship building, gaining consensus, and adoption methods; continued drive for excellence and high quality, despite frequent iterations, changes in priority, scope and stakeholders
  Location: Chicago
  Reports to: Director of Global Billing and Collections
  Direct reports: Managers of various sub-teams
  Travel requirements: Occasional travel to meet program needs to support initiatives from any global location (up to 15% at crucial peak times).
  Position type: Center Services
  Development framework: Senior Manager

ABOUT US:

At Baker McKenzie we are different in the way we think, work and behave. With our team of 13,000 people, including over 6,500 locally admitted lawyers, in over 70 offices worldwide, we have a passionately collaborative community of 60 nationalities and are committed to world-class career development to everyone in every job at every level. Baker McKenzie can offer you both the uncompromising commitment to excellence expected of a top firm paired with a passionately global and genuinely collaborative working environment.

Rates Management:

• Responsible for all aspects of legal billing rates interpretation and implementation
• Work closely with the Billing & Collections Leadership team to design and maintain processes that will lead to faster delivery to clients, fewer errors and associated rejections/write-offs and easier efforts in collecting outstanding accounts receivable
• Oversee the implementation of client-specific rates, including exception rates and alternative fee arrangements

Strategic Leadership:

• Lead global, multi-dimensional, multi-year projects from conception to completion, including defining and driving strategy, translating strategy into business plans, defining delivery strategy development and implementation, and partnering with senior stakeholders to secure executive sponsorship and drive initiatives to completion

People Management:

• Manage and maintain a team of approximately 20 business professionals across the Firm’s Service Centers in Belfast, Buenos Aires, Manila, and Tampa to deliver key parts of legal billing, pricing interpretation and implementation, understanding and adhering to client terms and outside billing guidelines and client/matter data management

Process Improvement:

• Deploy solutions for business-critical needs
• Demonstrate the ability to quickly assess unfamiliar situations and provide remediation advice, including modifying standard processes to address issues longer term
• Build action plans for quality and production issues identified from reporting and ongoing monitoring, including the establishment of a quality management system that ensures all team members receive constructive feedback, with a view to continuous improvement and excellent service delivery
• Ensure accuracy and consistency of rate data across systems. Support the implementation of People data into rate-setting logic

Stakeholder Engagement:

• Serve as the primary point of contact for rate-related inquiries from internal stakeholders and clients
• Collaborate with senior leadership, partners, and key stakeholders to align rates, technology and process initiatives with business needs, including developing regional and global communication strategies, sharing roadmaps, in-flight progress and measurements and benefits of success
• Maintain high customer satisfaction levels across all stakeholder groups, including Partners, associates, secretaries and in-market teams

Performance Monitoring:

• Establish metrics and KPIs to measure the success and impact of the operation

Project Management:

• Oversee implementation of Rates solutions, ensuring projects are delivered on time, within scope, and on budget