Client Services Manager

Department: Client Services Reports to: Director of Process Operations Direct Reports: Client Services Coordinator Classification: Full-time, Exempt Location: Office Our client is a multi-state law firm representing national and regional banks, automobile financing lenders, hospitals, medical service providers and other lenders and financial institutions. Their clients hire them to resolve consumer and commercial debts in a professional and respectful manner.

Position Summary The Client Services Manager is the firm’s primary day-to-day point of contact for assigned creditor clients and is accountable for the health of those relationships. The role owns client communication, performance reporting, requirement management, and escalation resolution, and works across collections, suit preparation, litigation support, compliance, and accounting to make sure the firm delivers what each client contract and operating manual requires. This is a client-facing operations role, not a legal role. It does not involve the practice of law or the provision of legal advice; case strategy and legal determinations remain with firm attorneys. Success is measured by client retention and placement volume, accuracy and timeliness of reporting, performance against contractual service levels, and the speed with which client issues are resolved and prevented from recurring.

Key

Responsibilities Client Relationship Management

• Serve as the named relationship contact for assigned client portfolios, handling routine inquiries, requests, and correspondence with professional, timely, and well-documented responses.
• Plan and lead recurring client touchpoints, including weekly or monthly operational calls and quarterly business reviews; set agendas, prepare materials, capture commitments, and follow through to closure.
• Maintain a current client requirements matrix for each account covering placement criteria, suit approval thresholds, settlement authority, contact and payment restrictions, reporting formats, and turnaround expectations; distribute changes to affected departments and confirm implementation.
• Anticipate client concerns and raise them internally before they become client complaints; keep firm leadership informed of relationship risk, satisfaction signals, and volume trends.
• Build working relationships across each client organization, not just with the primary contact, so continuity survives turnover on either side. Performance Reporting and Analytics
• Develop and maintain reporting templates and recurring queries so monthly production is repeatable and not rebuilt each cycle.
• Track each client’s contractual service levels and scorecard metrics, flag trends before thresholds are breached, and coordinate documented remediation with the responsible department manager. Placement Onboarding and Portfolio Management
• Coordinate intake of new placements and file transmissions, including data mapping, field validation, exception handling, and confirmation of receipt and load.
• Work with the technical team to resolve transmission failures, data quality issues, and format changes; communicate status and expected resolution to the client without waiting to be asked.
• Manage account-level client requests including recalls, closures, holds, media and document requests, balance and interest adjustments, disputes, bankruptcy and deceased notifications, and service member status.
• Coordinate remittance reporting and invoicing with accounting; research and resolve payment posting, fee calculation, and reconciliation questions.
• Support onboarding of new clients and new portfolio types, including operating manual review, workflow configuration requirements, reporting setup, and internal training on client-specific rules. Escalations, Complaints, and Audit Support
• Own client-forwarded escalations end to end: acknowledge quickly, investigate the underlying account and process history, document findings, and deliver a written response within the client’s required turnaround.
• Route consumer complaints and regulatory or attorney general inquiries to Compliance promptly and supply the account history and operational context needed for response.
• Support Compliance during client audits and examinations by gathering operational data, coordinating departmental responses, and tracking client-facing commitments made in corrective action plans.
• Identify recurring escalation themes and drive root cause correction with the responsible department rather than resolving the same issue repeatedly. Internal Coordination and Team Leadership
• Supervise, train, and develop client services staff; set clear expectations, distribute portfolio coverage, and maintain documented backup coverage for every account.
• Maintain standard operating procedures for client services workflows, response templates, and reporting production.
• Translate client requirements into concrete process and system changes with collections, suit preparation, litigation support, and technology; verify that changes are implemented and hold.
• Contribute to requests for proposal, capability presentations, and prospective client due diligence, including firm profile materials and reference reporting.
• Identify, evaluate, and adopt artificial intelligence and automation tools that improve the speed and quality of client work - including reporting production, account history research for escalations, data analysis, and drafting of client materials - and move successful pilots into documented routine use.
• Apply and enforce the firm’s standards for AI use in client work: human verification of every client-facing figure, response, and deliverable before it leaves the firm; no entry of consumer or client data into unapproved tools; and confirmation with Compliance that a client’s contract, operating manual, and subprocessor or confidentiality terms permit the intended use. Required

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree, or an equivalent combination of education and directly relevant experience.
• Five or more years in client services, account management, or operations within consumer collections, consumer finance, creditor-rights law, or a comparable regulated servicing environment.
• Two or more years managing external client relationships with accountability for performance reporting and issue resolution.
• Demonstrated ability to prepare and present performance results to sophisticated client audiences, including written analysis and formal review presentations.
• Advanced Excel skills, including pivot tables and lookup and aggregation functions, with proven comfort working in large operational data sets.
• Working familiarity with the consumer protection framework governing third-party collections, sufficient to recognize when a client request requires Compliance or attorney review.
• Strong written and verbal communication and the composure to deliver unfavorable results and difficult answers directly.
• Proven organization and follow-through across many concurrent client commitments with competing deadlines.
• Demonstrated openness to artificial intelligence adoption and a commitment to building and maintaining working AI literacy. The firm is actively applying AI to operational and reporting workflows, and this role is expected to learn these tools, apply them to client work, and lead staff through the change rather than wait for it.

Preferred

Qualifications

• Experience in a multi-state collections law firm or with a national creditor, debt buyer, credit union, or fintech lender.
• Familiarity with Collection Master / CM-SQL or a comparable collections case management platform; ability to read or write SQL queries is a significant advantage.
• Experience with client file transmission methods and data mapping, including secure file transfer and client portals.
• Working knowledge of creditor-rights litigation workflow from demand through suit, default judgment, and post-judgment remedies.
• Experience preparing quarterly business review materials and responding to requests for proposal.
• Hands-on experience applying AI or machine learning tools to reporting, client communication, or back-office operations, including prompt development, output validation, or workflow integration.
• Prior supervisory experience. Competencies
• Ownership of the answer - closes the loop with the client rather than forwarding the question internally and waiting.
• Numerical credibility - checks figures before they leave the building, because one bad number costs more trust than a bad month.
• Candor with clients - explains a miss plainly, with the correction attached.
• Cross-departmental influence - gets operational change from teams that do not report to this role.
• Pattern recognition - treats the third identical escalation as a process defect, not a third escalation.
• AI curiosity with judgment - looks for client work that should stop being done by hand, and knows that nothing reaches a client unverified regardless of what produced it.

Working Conditions

• Primarily office-based with standard business hours; extended hours during month-end and quarter-end reporting cycles, client reviews, and audits.
• Periodic travel for client meetings, business reviews, and industry conferences.
• Successful completion of a background check and any client-mandated screening or onboarding requirements.
• The firm is an equal opportunity employer. This description outlines the general nature of the position and is not an exhaustive list of duties; responsibilities may be modified as business needs require.

Benefits Salary Range: 90,000 to 95,000 per year Benefits: 401(k) - short waiting period - company match up to 6% PTO Parking Dental Insurance Health Insurance Life Insurance (Company Paid) Life Insurance Permanent (Voluntary) Long Term Disability Short Term Disability Vision Insurance