Direct Account Manager Jobs in Highland, IL (NOW HIRING)

The Client Account Manager serves as a strategic partner and primary point of contact for assigned partners, clients, and the firm’s administration and accounting teams. This highly collaborative role serves as an integrator across firm resources to ensure work is advanced efficiently by the appropriate teams. The Client Account Manager drives the client/matter lifecycle forward, from new business intake through billing, collections and outside counsel guidelines adherence, while working in close partnership with partners and internal stakeholders to ensure alignment at every stage. The role requires significant independence, professional judgement and proactive initiative, with a focus on optimizing partner effectiveness and supporting the business of running a successful practice. The position reports to the Director of Client Value and works closely with all operational departments across the firm.

Responsibilities

Relationship Management & Partner Support

• Build strong, trust-based relationships with assigned partners, serving as their go-to resource for client administration and billing matters and ensuring clear, consistent communication across internal teams.
• Serve as a point of contact for client legal operations teams, building relationships with legal ops professionals to streamline billing, compliance, and administrative processes and ensure alignment between the firm and client-side operational requirements.

New Business Intake & Matter Setup

• Manage the end-to-end new matter intake process, coordinating with partners, conflicts, legal assistants and billing teams to ensure timely matter openings in compliance with firm and client requirements.
• Communicate client-specific billing requirements, outside counsel guidelines, and best practices to partners and team members at matter opening and on an ongoing basis.
• Coordinate with partners and the professional development team to ensure appropriate and efficient staffing across all matters, flagging utilization or capacity concerns proactively.

Billing Operations & Compliance  

• Monitor and enforce compliance with outside counsel guidelines maintaining current best practices documentation, including timekeeping and time entry narrative standards, billing/e-billing protocols, AI usage requirements, and broader compliance obligations.
• Maintain comprehensive knowledge of client billing arrangements – including billing guidelines, rate agreements, and special fee arrangements – ensuring billing terms are accurately captured in firm systems, invoices are consistent with those arrangements before transmission, and the billing department has accurate information for new matter setup.
• Manage the billing process for assigned partners and clients, including reviewing and editing invoices for accuracy and compliance, coordinating with the billing team on edits and final invoice preparation, and ensuring timely distribution of invoices to clients.
• Collaborate with partners, clients and billing team to resolve invoice issues, including analyzing and reallocating charges, addressing rejected or adjusted invoices, managing appeals, processing write-offs and maintaining current records for each client and matter.
• Identify invoice rejection trends, perform root cause analysis, and implement corrective measures with partners and team members to reduce rejection rates over time.
• Track matter accruals against approved client budgets and alternative fee arrangements, identifying variances early and escalating potential overruns to partners.

Collections & Financial Management

• Proactively manage accounts receivable by tracking aged invoices, sending customary payment reminders and follow-up correspondence, maintaining a log of collection activity, and coordinating escalated or disputed collections with the accounting department.
• Collaborate with pricing team to analyze annual rate increase adjustments, prepare client proposals, support partner negotiations, and ensure accurate internal implementation of approved rate arrangements.
• Manage client fee arrangements, including new timekeeper rate submissions throughout year, ensuring compliance with agreed terms, monitoring approvals and resolving issues.
• Prepare and deliver regular reporting, updates, and analysis on work-in-progress, billing, collections and financial performance to partners.

Process Improvement & Matter Management

• Identify opportunities and drive process improvement initiatives with partners and internal teams to increase scalability, efficiency, leverage, and client service delivery.
• Support workflow management and matter coordination across the team as needed.
• Handle sensitive matters with discretion and strict confidentiality, exercising sound judgement in all partner and client interactions.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Business Administration, Finance, Accounting, or a related field
• Minimum of 5 years of experience in legal operations, legal billing operations, client operations, or a comparable role within a professional services or in-house legal environment.
• Demonstrated ability to build credibility and trust with senior professionals, and strong interpersonal skills.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to communicate financial information clearly to diverse stakeholders.
• Proficiency with legal billing and practice management systems (e.g., Aderant, Elite/3E, iManage, or similar platforms).
• Highly organized with strong project management skills; able to manage multiple priorities and deadlines across a portfolio of partners and clients simultaneously.
• Self-starter with a proactive, solutions-oriented mindset and the ability to work independently with minimal supervision.
• Experience in AmLaw 200 or large law firm setting preferred.