Legal Support Manager (Secretarial Manager)

Position Summary:

The Legal Support Manager leads and develops the firm's legal practice and administrative support team, ensuring attorneys and practice groups receive consistent, high-quality support. This role is a working managerial role that owns staffing, workflow, training, and performance management for legal practice assistants, executive assistants and the Resource Center. Partners closely with Human Resources, and firm administration to align legal support services with the firm's operational and client-service standards and needs.

Key Responsibilities:

• Supervises, schedules, and evaluates the performance of LPAs and Resource Center (Opensity) support across assigned practice groups or offices.
• Recruits, onboards, and trains new legal support hires in coordination with Human Resources.
• Designs and maintains workload distribution and legal support coverage models and manages overflow support during peak periods.
• Provides support as needed to attorneys.
• Leads and manages the firm's LPA mentoring program, partnering with LPAs and HR to match mentors and mentees, set program goals, coordinates development opportunities, monitors engagement, and evaluates outcomes to support onboarding, professional growth, retention, and career development.
• Conducts monthly meetings with legal support team.
• Develops and enforces administrative procedures, style guides, and quality standards for correspondence, filings, client meetings and document production.
• Serves as the primary point of escalation for attorney-legal practice assistant staffing conflicts, performance concerns, and workflow issues; escalates to Director or Senior Manager when appropriate.
• Manages the LPA to attorney ratio and maintains real time up to date documentation of firmwide pairings.
• Conducts regular one-on-ones, performance reviews, and coaching sessions; manage progressive discipline in partnership with HR.
• Identifies training needs and recommends internal or external training on firm systems-including document management, new matter intake, and calendaring-and emerging technologies, such as AI-assisted drafting and transcription tools.
• Monitors attendance, timekeeping, PTO requests, and overtime for the legal support team, ensuring compliance with firm policy.
• Partners with HR on compensation reviews, job description updates, promotions, and workforce planning.
• Manages legal support-related budget items, including overtime, temporary staffing, and equipment/software needs.
• Supports special projects such as office moves, practice group reorganizations, or firm-wide administrative initiatives.
• Maintains up-to-date knowledge of firm and HR policies as they apply to non-exempt business professionals.

Qualifications & Experience

Required Qualifications

• Seven to Ten years of legal secretarial or administrative support experience, including 2 plus years in a supervisory or team-lead capacity, ideally within a law firm or professional services environment.
• Demonstrated experience managing a team of 10 or more across multiple practice areas and locations.
• Strong knowledge of legal document formatting, filing procedures, and litigation and transactional law firm workflows, with the ability to provide hands-on support as needed.
• Proficiency with Microsoft Office, document management systems (e.g., iManage, NetDocuments), and familiarity with Aderant, ChromeRiver, and InTapp is highly preferred.
• Excellent interpersonal, coaching, and conflict-resolution skills.
• Strong organizational skills with the ability to manage competing priorities across multiple attorneys, practice groups and jurisdictions.

Education:

• Bachelor's degree preferred, equivalent supervisory or management experience considered in lieu of a degree.

This is an onsite role and the salary ranges for this position vary depending on the geographic location and other factors such as experience, internal equity, market data, and job-related considerations. The range for this position is from $115,000 - $140,000, with offers contingent upon the various factors. The firm's compensation strategy includes not just a base salary but also comprehensive benefits such as healthcare, paid time off, discretionary merit bonuses, life and disability insurance, retirement plans and tailored learning opportunities.

Eversheds Sutherland (US) LLP is committed to promoting diversity and inclusion within our Firm and in the larger legal profession. We believe that diverse skills, knowledge and viewpoints make us a stronger firm. Eversheds Sutherland (US) LLP maintains a policy of affording all employees and applicants equal employment opportunities without regard to actual or perceived race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, lactation and related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender (including gender identity, gender expression or being transgender), national origin, age, disability, genetic information, marital or familial status, domestic violence victim status, ancestry, amnesty, citizenship status, ethnicity, military and veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. Unlawful discrimination, harassment and retaliation will not be tolerated in any of the Firm's offices or any other work-related setting. Qualified individuals with a disability may request a reasonable accommodation in order to apply for a position or to enable them to perform the essential functions of a position for which they are otherwise qualified. EEO.