POSITION SUMMARY
Barnes & Thornburg is seeking a Settlement Operations Manager to join the firm's product liability and mass torts resolution practice. The Settlement Operations Manager works across all of the practice’s resolution programs and is responsible for the systems, protocols, data integrity, and reporting standards for the team.
The Manager is responsible for how settlement work is executed day to day: designing and standardizing intake, tracking, quality assurance, and reporting procedures under the direction of the attorneys managing the matters; serving as a subject matter expert on the team’s case management platform; and translating the practice's needs into requirements for firm technology personnel and outside platform vendors. The role is intended for someone who has worked as a mass torts or settlement paralegal and has since moved beyond individual case and docket support and reporting into coordinating systems, building procedures, and standardizing practices across teams.
This person is expected to know where any piece of information lives on any matter, to understand how each tort's structure and system configuration differ. The Settlement Operations Manager reports to the partners and attorneys overseeing the firm's mass tort settlement matters, and works in a coordinating capacity with the lead paralegals on each settlement team, with responsibility for settlement operations protocols. This is an attorney support role; decisions, oversight, and ownership of the settlements themselves remain with the attorneys managing the matters.
ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES
· Settlement Support: Provide high-level technical and administrative support to the attorneys managing the firm's mass tort settlements, including claim and case data management, tracking, reporting, and quality control functions across the settlement lifecycle.
· Cross-Matter Systems Expertise: Serve as the practice's primary subject matter expert on the team’s case management and settlement tracking systems as applied to mass tort resolution. Maintain working knowledge and documentation of how each tort is configured, where configurations diverge, and what the system can and cannot do for each workstream.
· Protocols and Standardization: Design, document, and maintain the intake, data entry, tracking, and reporting protocols used by the settlement teams, at the direction of the attorneys managing the matters. Work with the lead paralegal on each team to standardize practices where possible and to document deliberate variations where standardization is not appropriate.
· Quality Assurance: Administer the quality assurance process for settlement data. Define what is tested, build and run recurring QA and exception reporting, issue findings to the responsible settlement teams, and track remediation through to closure.
· Claims Intake: Lead intake of case and claim information, including coordination with plaintiff's firms on claimant data submission, format, and completeness, and reconciliation of submitted inventories against firm records.
· Data In and Out: Administer the import, export, batch update, and reporting workflows the settlement teams depend on. Identify where new capability is needed and define what it has to do.
· Requirements and Build Partnership: Serve as the practice's translator to firm technology personnel and to outside platform vendors. Define business requirements and the reasons behind them, participate in design discussions, perform acceptance testing, and confirm that delivered functionality is usable by the teams in practice.
· Systems Synchronization: Maintain alignment of claim and settlement data across firm systems and third-party administrator portals. Conduct recurring cross-platform validation to ensure accurate tracking of claimant status, documentation, and payment milestones, and drive resolution of discrepancies.
· Financial Tracking: Maintain settlement payment tracking as a system of record, so that the status and history of settlement payments, tax documentation, and administrative expenses can be answered from the system rather than from the individual who processed a given item, and ensure those records are complete and audit ready.
· Lien Resolution and QSF Coordination: Coordinate and report healthcare, lien resolution, and QSF data with settlement administrators, lien resolution vendors, and clients, and track satisfaction of the conditions precedent to distribution of settlement funds.
· External Coordination: Serve as an administrative and data point of contact for settlement administrators, lien resolution vendors, and plaintiff's counsel regarding claim status, data submissions, and discrepancies, under attorney supervision.
· Training and Enablement: Train lead paralegals, settlement team members, and new staff on protocols and system use. Build and maintain reference documentation and job aids so that practices survive turnover.
· Other General Duties: Perform other duties related to settlement operations as assigned.
EXPERIENCE, SKILLS AND ABILITIES REQUIRED
· Bachelor's degree and 5+ years of relevant experience in mass torts, complex litigation, settlement administration, insurance claims, or a comparable high-volume claims environment. Paralegal certification is a plus, but is not required.
· Demonstrated experience building, documenting, or standardizing processes across multiple teams or matters, as distinct from supporting a single case or matter.
· Significant experience with legal case management, claims, or CRM systems, such as Case Manager Pro, Litify, or Filevine, or with other SQL- or database-backed claims and litigation platforms, including a working understanding of how relational case and claim data is structured.
· Working knowledge of settlement administration mechanics, including claimant inventories, releases, lien resolution, QSF administration, and payment tracking.
· Advanced Excel skills (e.g., pivot tables, lookups, data validation) and the ability to build, interpret, and maintain recurring reporting.
· Proven track record managing high-volume data and identifying inconsistencies across large medical and claims datasets and legal documentation.
· Proficiency in, or a strong aptitude for, emerging legal AI tools for document review, data extraction, and reporting.
· Excellent organization, detail orientation, problem-solving, and time management skills, with the ability to work independently and as part of a fast-paced, high-performing team.
· Demonstrated ability to handle and manage confidential and sensitive information with discretion and professionalism.
Preferred
· Experience at a settlement administrator, lien resolution provider, qualified settlement fund administrator, or third-party claims administrator.
· Experience designing quality assurance or audit procedures for claims or case data.
· Experience training or coordinating staff across multiple teams without direct reporting authority.
WORKING CONDITIONS
1. Normal law office environment with minimal exposure to excessive noise, dust, extreme temperatures, or other adverse environmental conditions.
2. Must have the ability to work under pressure and manage multiple concurrent workstreams.
3. This position requires regular interaction with attorneys, legal staff, firm technology personnel, and outside parties, and may require periodic travel to firm offices to work directly with settlement teams.
The Settlement Operations Manager must be able to perform all essential duties and responsibilities of this position with minimal supervision, satisfactorily and as outlined, with or without reasonable accommodation. Reasonable accommodation requests may be accommodated, absent undue firm hardship.
This job description is intended to describe the general requirements of this position. As such, it is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of job duties or responsibilities required in this job. Subject to firm needs, duties and responsibilities of this position may change at any time, on a temporary or permanent basis, and with or without notice.
Equal Employment and Opportunity Statement:
Barnes & Thornburg is committed to equal employment opportunity in both principle and as a matter of policy. We will recruit, hire, train, promote, compensate and provide benefits to all applicants and employees without regard to ancestry, sex, race, color, ethnicity, national origin, gender, age, religion, religious creed, mental and/or physical disability, medical condition, military and/or veteran’s status, genetic information, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, or any other basis protected by applicable federal, state and local laws. This policy applies to all recruiting, hiring, promotions, upgrades, layoffs, compensation, benefits, terminations and all other privileges, terms and conditions of employment. The firm complies fully with all federal, state and local equal employment opportunity laws.