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.