AVP, Claim Legal Operations

The position provides oversight, leadership, direction, and monitoring of outside counsel to optimize claim outcomes, ensure the provision of superior legal services in the representation of policyholders. Defines and maintains a fit-for-purpose legal services delivery model that drives work to high-performing counsel. Responsible for maintaining a right-sized, right-skilled panel of firms with geographic and line of business/area of practice coverage. Establishes procedures to increase consistency of application of AmTrust billing and litigation management guidelines for all counsel retentions. Supports utilization of analytics to inform counsel selection including measures of performance, quality and feedback. Serve as a strategic advisor to claims, underwriting and data & analytics helping to connect legal outcomes to business impact. Support enterprise objectives and upholds AmTrust's mission, vision, values, and standards of excellence in litigating claims. Maintains a solid understanding of AmTrust's mission, vision, and values. Upholds the standards of the AmTrust organization.

This position will ideally require hybrid attendance in one of our AmTrust claim locations.

Outside Counsel Strategy

Establish criteria for panel counsel selection, tiering and specialization.
• Determine optimal scope and makeup of approved panel law firms to ensure geographic, jurisdictional and subject-matter coverage aligned to claims volume and risk.
• Work with all lines of business to develop and implement approach to enhance the identification and management of panel law firms.
• Hold RFPs, periodic panel reassessments/refreshes and market benchmarking initiatives.
• Establish strategy to promote outside counsel awareness and utilization of AmTrust preferred claim legal vendors.
• Define expectations for counsel quality and performance outcomes and map strategy for comprehensive counsel review, corrective action and cadence to remove/remediate underperforming counsel.
• Identify and implement plan to minimize all third-party risks related to outside counsel including information security, legal, regulatory and financial.

Data/Analytics and Expense Management

• Evaluate opportunities to improve predictability of ALAE across all categories of expense including exploration of alternative fee arrangements.
• Leverage advanced litigation technologies, tools and data analytics to improve efficiency across claim litigation lifecycle.
• Drive predictable budgeting and forecasting to align legal spend levels to claim complexity and exposure.
• Develop and track KPI for legal expense management related to panel utilization/success, performance and outcomes, expense management, guideline compliance.

Business Partnership and Litigation Strategy

• Collaborate with claims leadership on litigation strategy, and align counsel management expectations to lines of business and complexity models.
• Develop procedures to ensure utilization of counsel consistent with AmTrust enterprise objectives.
• Extract and communicate to stakeholders actionable business intelligence about law firm utilization, performance and outcomes.
• Monitor and report on trends in claim litigation
• Lead change management initiatives that impact legal service delivery and improve outcomes across the claim litigation lifecycle.
• Serve as business lead for legal technology implementations, enhancements and integrations to streamline, improve utility and consistency of use.

Leadership and Team Development

• Lead and develop counsel management, legal bill audit and claim legal operations teams
• Establish clear roles, accountability and operating procedures.
• Drive continuous improvement and innovation.
• Foster a culture of performance, transparency and partnership.

• Juris Doctor from Accredited Law School
• State Bar licensed attorney
• 12+ years in practice of law with focus on insurance defense, complex civil litigation; 10 years' experience in leadership roles of escalating responsibility supervising multiple attorneys.
• Significant experience handling insurance defense litigation for multiple insurance carriers.
• In-depth knowledge of claim litigation, insurance business operations, legal and regulatory environment.
• Ability to deliver difficult messages and communicate with honesty and transparency to customers and internal business partners
• Demonstrated leadership and mentorship experience with a legal team including attorneys and other legal staff.
• Superior communication, interpersonal and client relationship management skills.
• Strong organizational skills, project leadership skills and attention to detail.
• Comfortable leading through organizational change in fast-moving environment.
• Demonstrates advanced understanding of litigation strategy and execution for multiple lines of insurance and jurisdictions.
• Embraces changes; invites feedback related to performance and deals constructively with criticism.
• Proven track record of earning and keeping the trust of clients and colleagues.
• Entrepreneurial spirit and focus on customers as shown though courage to pursue new and unprecedented opportunities and unique ways to reach goals.
• Commitment to ethics, integrity and transparency.

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AmTrust Financial Services offers a competitive compensation package and excellent career advancement opportunities. Our benefits include: Medical & Dental Plans, Life Insurance, including eligible spouses & children, Health Care Flexible Spending, Dependent Care, 401k Savings Plans, Paid Time Off.

AmTrust strives to create a diverse and inclusive culture where thoughts and ideas of all employees are appreciated and respected. This concept encompasses but is not limited to human differences with regard to race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, culture, religion or disabilities.

AmTrust values excellence and recognizes that by embracing the diverse backgrounds, skills, and perspectives of its workforce, it will sustain a competitive advantage and remain an employer of choice. Diversity is a business imperative, enabling us to attract, retain and develop the best talent available. We see diversity as more than just policies and practices. It is an integral part of who we are as a company, how we operate and how we see our future.