Divisional President & COO - Nationally Scaling Professional Services Platform

Position: Divisional President & COO - Nationally Scaling Professional Services Platform
Reports To: President
Location: United States — Fully Remote
Travel: Ability to travel once per quarter to Phoenix or as needed to ensure operational consistency and cultural alignment across nationally scaling regional locations.

Chamberlain Advisors is conducting an executive search seeking an experienced Divisional President & Chief Operating Officer for our direct client, a rapidly growing, tech-enabled professional services platform operating in a high-volume, regulated legal vertical with scaling operations throughout the United States. Serving as the Divisional President and day-to-day operator of the law firm, you will partner closely with the Founder & CEO, the President, and the executive leadership team to translate aggressive multi-year growth targets into daily execution. You will be the executive ultimately accountable for the operating engine of an enterprise scaling toward 1,500+ employees inside the law firm — installing accountability across credentialed professionals, building the talent acquisition engine that fuels growth, and owning the case lifecycle from intake through settlement. This is not an architect seat: the firm is not seeking a process re-engineering consultant or transformation lead. It is seeking the person who runs the business and holds the people accountable. The successful candidate brings world-class people management at scale, the rare combination of warmth to earn the trust of trial attorneys and the edge to drive accountability through direct conversations, and demonstrated experience operating in messy, build-and-scale environments where the operating playbook is being installed, not maintained. Data fluency is required. People authority is non-negotiable.

Core Profile: alignment with the following is required to get you in the conversation

• Owner/Operator Accountability: You have personally run a large, complex operation end-to-end as the executive ultimately accountable for results — President, GM, COO, or Divisional President with full P&L ownership and direct accountability for margin, unit economics, and bottom-line growth. You are comfortable in messy, execution-heavy environments where the operating playbook is being written and rewritten on the fly, and you have run day-to-day operations through periods of rapid 2–3x year-over-year growth, institutional transition, and integration of recently acquired entities.
• World-Class People Management of Credentialed Professionals: You have directly led frontline workforces of 1,000+ employees through multi-tier management structures (Supervisors, Managers, Regional Leads, Performance Coaches) and have held high-status, credentialed professionals — trial attorneys, partners, senior physicians, senior engineers — accountable through influence, credibility, and data rather than authority alone. You possess enough warmth to earn their trust and enough edge to tell them directly when their numbers are not where they need to be, while securing their buy-in to fix it. You operate effectively through a regional or hub-and-spoke management model, coordinating with market-level leaders on day-to-day legal execution while owning enterprise-level operating performance.
• Builder of the Operating Layer: You have stepped into roles where the operating layer was thin, inherited, or missing entirely, and personally built or rebuilt the leadership team beneath you. You have a track record of installing performance management standards in environments where formal accountability previously did not exist, including with credentialed professionals. You have owned or directly sponsored the build-out of a high-velocity talent acquisition engine capable of supporting 30%+ year-over-year headcount growth without sacrificing quality, and you are comfortable making early-tenure decisions about which inherited leaders to develop, upgrade, or replace.
• Data-Fluent Decision-Making & Capacity Translation: You lead with data and follow with conversation: you walk into every difficult discussion having already reviewed the numbers, and you know exactly what to say. You interpret granular KPI dashboards and use data-driven advocacy — rather than anecdotal evidence — to drive strategic pivots in marketing partnership, case acquisition, and resource allocation. You translate marketing investment changes into corresponding operational capacity decisions across the case lifecycle, and you understand the levers behind a people-heavy service business model and how to move them to drive margin and profitability.
• Executive Influence & No-Ego Culture: You bring high EQ and the versatility to partner with elite legal talent one hour and motivate frontline contact center staff the next — with equal credibility and zero hierarchy. You provide strategic Founder Leverage, taking operational weight off the founders' shoulders so they can focus on the big picture. You have zero tolerance for ego or sharp elbows and bring a steady, high-trust presence to a firm that takes its no-jerks culture seriously. Your executive presence is assertive when the situation demands it, collaborative by default, and backed by the numbers.

Core Responsibilities & Scope of Work:

Running the Business (The Quarterback)

• Day-to-Day Operational Ownership: Serve as the firm's operational anchor — the person the CEO, President, ELT, and Board look to for the question "what's actually happening in the operation right now?" and "what are we doing about it?"
• Operating Cadence & Visibility: Lead rigorous weekly and monthly Business Review meetings focused on metric-based accountability and own the operating rhythm that keeps the enterprise aligned around the firm's scoreboards.
• Decision Rights & Accountability: Establish clarity on what is owned centrally vs. at the market level, escalation paths, and cross-functional dependencies — so the organization can run fast without bottlenecking through the CEO or President.
• Attorney Accountability: Partner with firm leadership to hold trial attorneys accountable to fee production and case velocity — with warmth, directness, and data. This is the capability that most COO candidates lack; it is required here.

People Leadership & Organizational Execution

• Direct Reports: Lead the leaders of intake, claims verification, pre-litigation, litigation, litigation paralegals, case managers, settlements, and medical records — plus the regional Managing Attorneys responsible for day-to-day legal execution in each market.
• Right People, Right Seats: Evaluate every inherited direct report in the early months of tenure; partner with the CPO and the President on which leaders to develop, upgrade, or replace, and execute those decisions with discipline and care.
• Frontline Workforce Leadership: Lead a multi-tier, multi-thousand-person frontline workforce through Supervisors, Managers, Regional Leads, and Performance Coaches — maintaining accountability and engagement as the firm scales toward 3,000+ employees.
• Performance Management Standards: Install enterprise-wide performance management standards across attorneys, paralegals, and operational staff. Reverse-engineer scoreboards from firm goals and own the cadence that holds the layers accountable to them.
• Talent Acquisition Engine: Sponsor and accelerate the recruiting engine required to support aggressive headcount growth. Own the velocity and quality of attorney, paralegal, and operational hiring against plan.
• Executive Mentorship: Coach business unit leaders to strengthen strategic decision-making and professional autonomy, while keeping all leadership actions aligned with growth objectives.

Legal Operations & Case Lifecycle Management

Intake & Claims Verification

• Intake Operations & Contact Center: Own the daily conversion funnel from marketing-generated lead to litigation-ready inventory — including the contact center that signs cases — ensuring growth in marketing spend translates to capacity without margin leakage.
• Case Routing Logic: Own the intake decisioning that determines which cases the firm keeps in-house vs. routes to external referral partners, ensuring case mix aligns with firm strategy and capacity.
• Marketing-to-Operations Feedback Loop: Own the feedback conversation back to the marketing function on case mix and quality, with the claims verification team serving as the firm's first signal on incoming case integrity.

Pre-Litigation Operations

• Throughput Velocity: Track case velocity metrics across pre-litigation, paralegals, and medical records to pinpoint stagnant inventory and proactively reassign resources to move cases efficiently through the settlement pipeline.
• Workflow Standardization: Establish unified standards for medical record retrieval, demand drafting, and negotiation to maintain consistent quality across markets.
• Bottleneck Elimination: Identify root causes of rework in file preparation and partner with platform/technology leadership on solutions that eliminate manual workarounds.

Litigation Operations & Settlement

• Friction Reduction: Act as the primary blocker-remover for trial lawyers by managing administrative and logistical hurdles so they can focus on high-value legal execution.
• Capacity Planning: Translate marketing investment changes into corresponding headcount plans across claims verification, pre-litigation, litigation, and settlements. Partner with litigation leadership on data-driven staffing models that anticipate hiring needs against case volume and attorney utilization.
• Settlement Execution: Own the settlements function and ensure consistent execution across the closing phase of the case lifecycle, protecting fee realization and client experience.

Distributed Operations & Acquisition Integration

• Distributed & Offshore Operations: Lead the firm's distributed operating model, including a large owned-and-operated offshore back office that supports intake, claims verification, settlements, and medical records — without sacrificing quality, accountability, or culture.
• Acquisition & Market Integration: Direct the integration of newly acquired entities and newly opened markets into the firm's operating model and culture — ensuring a unified enterprise identity across regions while respecting the distinctions between centralized HQ ownership and market-level Managing Attorney ownership.
• Cross-Functional Synthesis: Translate between legal, technical, financial, and operational teams so that complex requirements become clear, actionable execution plans across both centralized and decentralized layers of the firm.

Financial Stewardship & Unit Economics

• P&L Oversight: Exercise comprehensive P&L responsibility for the law firm. Ground every operational initiative in unit economics and margin protection.
• KPI Discipline: Build and monitor the KPI dashboards that make the firm's operational and financial health visible to the ELT in real time — and use them to drive the hard conversations rather than as ends in themselves.
• Budgetary Control: Manage department heads to specific budgets; proactively identify financial risks and drive the reallocation decisions that protect the bottom line.
• Strategic Analysis: Translate metrics like intake conversion, case quality, and attorney utilization into strategic pivots in marketing partnership, case acquisition, and resource allocation.

Platform & Technical Partnership

• Business Stakeholder for Platforms: Serve as the primary business voice for enterprise platform investments (e.g., case management, contact center, CRM) — partnering with the business enablement function to ensure each build maps to how the operation actually runs.
• Data Integrity: Own the operational data quality the firm needs to manage by metrics. Partner with the data analytics function to ensure the law firm's data is structured, clean, and trustworthy.
• Automation & Cycle Time: Sponsor the automation investments that eliminate manual workarounds and compress case cycle times — judged by operator outcomes, not dashboard elegance.
• Operator Intuition Over Process Theater: Treat systems and dashboards as tools for the operator rather than the endpoint; prioritize agile execution over exhaustive perfection.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Business, Operations Management, Finance, or a related field is required; an MBA is highly preferred but may be substituted by a significant operational track record.
• Minimum of 15–20+ years of progressive operational leadership experience (President, GM, COO, Divisional President, EVP Ops, or equivalent) where you personally owned the outcomes.
• Direct experience leading 1,000+ frontline employee workforces in high-volume, regulated, people-heavy service environments (e.g., personal injury / plaintiff law, insurance claims, healthcare RCM, mortgage servicing, auto finance, debt settlement, multi-unit service businesses).
• Proven ability to hold elite, high-status professionals accountable — trial attorneys, partners, senior physicians, senior engineers — through influence, credibility, and data rather than authority alone.
• Demonstrated track record of building or rebuilding the operating layer beneath you — including hiring functional leaders, installing performance management standards, and standing up the talent acquisition engine that fuels growth.
• Demonstrated track record of reducing attrition and maintaining engagement in 1,000+ person frontline workforces under high-burn, high-volume conditions.
• Full P&L ownership with demonstrated impact on margin, unit economics, and bottom-line growth.
• Experience integrating recently acquired entities or denovo locations into a unified operating model and culture.
• Experience building and leading multi-tier management structures (Supervisors, Managers, Regional Leads, Coaches) where accountability flows through the layers — including coordination with market-level leaders.
• Experience leading distributed and offshore service teams in an owned-and-operated (not BPO) model preferred.
• Advanced proficiency in serving as the primary business stakeholder for enterprise-level platform investments (case management, contact center, CRM) and ensuring technology maps to how the operation actually runs.
• Proven ability to interpret granular KPI dashboards and use data-driven advocacy — rather than anecdotal evidence — to drive strategic pivots in marketing partnership, case acquisition, and resource allocation.
• Vertical and horizontal executive presence — assertive when the situation demands it, collaborative by default, and backed by the numbers.

About Our Client
Our client, TopDog Law, is a nationally scaling, fully integrated personal injury law firm that is redefining the industry through world-class marketing, exceptional legal talent, and industrial-scale operations. Over the past three years, they have grown 2–3x year-over-year by aligning strategy with high-velocity execution, and they are now applying that same innovation to case management and infrastructure as they expand across the country. This is not a legacy law firm; it is a high-performance "rocket ship" intentionally designed for impact and growth, moving away from traditional models toward a standardized, high-trust, and no-ego culture. Our client is currently building the sophisticated systems and teams required for national scale without sacrificing quality or accountability, offering a unique opportunity for leaders to shape the firm’s operational future rather than just maintaining the status quo. They are assembling a team of exceptional leaders who thrive in fast-moving environments and take pride in building a world-class enterprise from the ground up.

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