Washington, D.C.
San Francisco, California
Posted: 25-Apr-23
Location: Bethesda, Maryland
Type: Full Time
Categories:
United Educators (UE) provides liability insurance and risk management services to almost 1,600 members representing K-12 schools, colleges, and universities throughout the United States. With over 35 years serving education, we bring deep expertise to our members and focus on delivering an experience that leaves them feeling confident that we understand their needs and offer insights and solutions suited for their unique challenges. These sentiments are echoed in our employee culture, our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion enables us to better serve our members and fulfill UE’s mission. Currently, we are working in a hybrid-style environment.
Are you an experienced litigator who is also a strategic and innovative self-starter? Are you looking for new ways to use your legal skills to help drive operational efficiency and improve outcomes as part of the company’s talented and experienced Resolutions Department? The successful candidate must have excellent collaboration and execution skills, plus experience building and maintaining strong cross-functional relationships with legal business partners and customers. Solid understanding of and experience with legal processes and technology is required. This new position will report to the AVP Resolutions Operations and Litigation Management.
Responsibilities:
- Manage procedures for the engagement and management of outside counsel
- Conduct analysis and negotiation of law firm rate agreements
- Serve as primary point of contact for outside law firms
- Monitor and report on outside counsel and legal vendor spend, analyzing and providing recommendations for optimizing outside law firm engagements
- Review invoices to ensure compliance with counsel guidelines by outside law firms
- Establish and conduct law firm audit process
- Support DEI&B initiatives
- Legal Operations:
- In coordination with Department leadership, oversee programs to manage expense and performance of outside counsel
- Support department legal spend management initiatives
- Identify and implement efficiencies around legal invoice review processes
- Assist in the implementation, benchmarking and management of legal data and reporting
- Experience managing legal projects, driving successful implementations and change management
- Process improvement, innovation and automation skills and experience
Basic Requirements:
- Bachelor’s degree and J.D.
- Minimum of 5 years civil litigation and trial experience
- Familiarity with law firm pricing arrangements, rate agreements including AFAs
- Experience with one or more matter management / enterprise legal spend management platforms and reporting tools (CounselLink preferred)
- Strong analytical and decision-making skills and attention to detail
- Demonstrated strong written, verbal and presentation communication skills
- Comfort with Microsoft Office Suite
Additional Skills/Experience:
- Experience with rate negotiations and Alternative Fee Agreements (AFAs)
- Prior work in-house, in insurance and/or the education sector preferred
- Demonstrated capability to influence people and decisions, define and drive solutions and to anticipate and work to avoid problems
Benefits:
- A competitive compensation and benefits package
- Hybrid schedule - employees work in our office 2-3 days per week
- Work-life balance - like the service we provide to our members, we want our employees to feel assured, cared for, and enlightened
- Inclusive and supportive culture that embraces diverse ideas and opinions
