[Remote] Director, Platform Data Operations
Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Briefly supports forward-thinking law firms by streamlining back-office operations and providing experienced functional leadership. The Director of Platform Data Operations will establish shared data standards across member firms, govern data quality and migrations, consolidate processes, and build cross-firm portfolio reporting in Power BI. The role partners with transformation, architecture, finance, operations and IT leaders to drive adoption and enable self-service reporting.
Responsibilities
- Define and own the enterprise data taxonomy across all firms, including matter structure, client hierarchy, practice groups, timekeeper classifications and financial reporting dimensions, and establish standards that apply regardless of the underlying system so that Aderant and Clio data can be compared at portfolio level
- Document the mapping from each firm's current values to the shared standard and maintain the enterprise data dictionary covering key entities across Aderant, Clio, iManage, Paylocity and Power BI, including definitions, owners, permitted values and system of record
- Operate the data governance change process, covering requests, impact assessment, approval, versioning and communication to the firms
- Establish data stewardship at each firm and arbitrate requests for firm-specific exceptions, documenting every exception granted
- Maintain a single inventory of core business processes at each firm, with a firm owner and a central owner identified against each
- Design the shared version of core processes, including intake, matter opening, billing and onboarding, and sequence their rollout across the firms
- Identify duplicated effort and tooling across firms and quantify the savings available through consolidation
- Own data quality across all system migrations, defining validation criteria and holding sign-off before each cutover
- Conduct pre-migration data audits at each firm and define remediation plans before migration begins, including data discovery for firms with unstructured environments where local drive inventories and fragmented general ledger systems leave no clean source
- Lead remediation of legacy data, including de-duplication, cleansing, reclassification and backfill, so that historical reporting remains usable
- Design and build the cross-firm portfolio reporting capability in Power BI, connecting Aderant Intelligence, Clio Grow, Paylocity and iManage, covering matter economics, utilization, realization, headcount and firm performance
- Develop self-service reporting so that firm administrators and managing partners can access data without analyst support for every query
- Document data lineage and transformation logic for audit and compliance purposes
- Partner with the Technology Trainer so that training materials and standard operating procedures reflect the shared taxonomy and reporting capability, and deliver ongoing enablement to the staff who create and code records daily
Skills
- Bachelor's degree in business, information systems, analytics, finance or a related field, or equivalent professional experience
- Demonstrated experience supporting multiple brands, entities or operating companies from a single shared platform
- Experience consolidating fragmented tools, vendors or data into a single system that was adopted in practice
- Hands-on experience building and owning a business intelligence environment, including the underlying data model rather than dashboards alone
- Power BI preferred; Looker or Tableau considered
- Working familiarity with legal practice management systems such as Aderant, Clio, Elite or ProLaw, and with document management data models such as iManage Cloud
- Experience designing a classification or taxonomy structure and driving its adoption across independent teams
- Working proficiency in SQL, with the ability to profile, reconcile and quality-check datasets drawn from multiple source systems
- Working knowledge of legal practice management data models, including the relationship between matters, clients, timekeepers and billing records
- Strong analytical skills, with the ability to work in transaction-level detail without losing the strategic frame
- Ability to build consensus across independent firms and secure adoption of shared standards without direct authority
- Ability to communicate effectively with both senior legal leadership and administrative staff
- Meticulous documentation habits and a disciplined approach to versioning and change control
- Sound judgment in applying consistency standards against legitimate firm-specific requirements
- Ability to manage concurrent workstreams across multiple firms and simultaneous system migrations
- Minimum six years of experience in operations, program management, business systems or data governance roles, preferably within an acquisition-driven or multi-entity environment
- Preferred: personal ownership of a legal data migration covering matter data, billing history, trust accounting or timekeeper records; legal data standards including LEDES and UTBMS; data governance frameworks such as DAMA or DCAM; Azure Data Factory, Databricks or equivalent ETL and pipeline tooling; chart of accounts harmonization in a multi-entity consolidation
Benefits
- The position is also eligible for an annual incentive of 10 to 15 percent of base salary, tied to program delivery milestones and individual performance.
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