Legal Project Manager

Legal Project Manager

DLA Piper is, at its core, bold, exceptional, collaborative, and supportive. Our people are the backbone, heart, and soul of our firm. Wherever you are in your professional journey, DLA Piper is a place you can engage in meaningful work and grow your career. Let's see what we can achieve. Together.

The Legal Project Manager works to maximize results and increase profitability for practice groups by performing financial analysis, management reporting, budgeting, resource management, and expense control. The Legal Project Manager supports the firm's practice management efforts. These efforts include: analyzing firm, practice group, client, and matter financial information; collaborating with multiple internal departments to encompass a variety of tasks related to pricing and profitability analysis; responsible for developing, implementing, and coordinating practice and legal project management platforms and tools, training lawyers to use those tools, and implementing best practices in matter management.

Location: This position can sit in any of our U.S. offices and offers a hybrid work schedule.

Responsibilities:

• Prepares financial information for an assigned practice group(s). Examines accounting and financial records to ensure data accuracy and to develop reports on monthly performance. Regularly meets with the Practice Group Leaders, financial personnel, and practice group director to review and discuss results and maintain positive financial control.
• Provides technical expertise in preparing reports and summaries, creating and maintaining templates, analysis, cost findings, and management briefings. Analyzes and reports practice group and firm metrics and compares financial and operational performance against internal and external benchmarks. Identifies trends in financial performance and provide recommendations for improvement.
• Understands law firm economics and our firm's financial system and related financial tools to train partners, attorneys, and practice groups on law firm economics and the Firm's Matter Management methodologies.
• Performs annual budgeting analysis and prospective modeling to predict period-end performance and determines the impact of proposed initiatives.
• Assists Service Delivery leadership in coordinating tasks with the analyst-level resources and provides direction and work product review as needed.
• Assists in developing strategic plans and ensures that the strategic planning process stays on track. Undertakes special projects in support of the Firm's strategic initiatives.
• Collaborates with Business Intelligence and IT on the development of client-level and matter-level progress reports.
• Actively seeks opportunities to improve processes, create efficiency, and automate tasks.
• Other duties as assigned.

Desired Skills:

• Proven ability to synthesize and analyze financial data and prepare reports to assist in making project management and pricing-related decisions and making risk assessments.
• Strong communication skills and ability to successfully consult, collaborate, and inspire confidence and trust with the firm's senior partners, lawyer-leaders, and staff leaders.
• Outstanding organizational skills. Demonstrated ability to manage multiple high-level priorities in a fast-paced changing environment to successful conclusion in a timely manner.
• Advanced proficiency in MS Office suite applications, specifically MS Excel and spreadsheet/database applications; Experience with PowerBI preferred.
• Ability to work well as part of a team.

Minimum Education: Bachelor's Degree in Business Administration, Finance, Accounting