Operations Manager

Job Description: Operations Manager

Location: Remote

Reports To: President, BEC Legal Systems

Travel: Estimated 10-15%: periodic visits to the Cincinnati office, client site visits, and industry conferences (e.g., ILTACON)

About BEC Legal Systems

BEC Legal Systems has served the legal community for decades, evolving from its roots in Cincinnati, Ohio into a trusted provider of enterprise software for law firms and corporate legal departments nationwide. Our BEC CoreRelate Framework - including MatterLink, Docket Enterprise, LegalBar, and Assemble-It - helps legal teams manage attorney calendars, track matters, and automate document creation directly within the Microsoft Office environment they already rely on.

Our clients stay with us because our team knows their firms, their workflows, and their deadlines. As we modernize how we deliver service - new tooling, a real knowledge base, a disciplined project and SOW process, and AI woven into how the work gets done - we are hiring a leader to own both functions and make delivery and responsiveness a competitive advantage.

About the Role

As Operations Manager, you will lead BEC’s Support and Professional Services teams and own the client experience across both - from the moment a request arrives through to resolution, and from signed SOW through to delivered implementation. You will set the standards, cadences, and systems the two functions run on, and you will own the operational initiatives that bring them up to a consistent, measurable standard.

This is a leadership role with real operational build ahead of it and future leadership potential. BEC is a lean organization, so you will stay close to the work - reviewing tickets and projects, joining escalations, and meeting clients directly - while leading the team and the strategy.

Key Responsibilities

Support Operations

Establish a standing working rhythm with R&D covering escalations, release readiness, known defects, and at-risk clients - with agreed entry criteria, required information, ownership, and expected turnaround.

Implement support tiers, baseline response and resolution targets by severity, and a documented escalation checklist; track performance against them and report weekly.

Lead the assessment of the current support tracking system and determine the go-forward vendor - needs assessment, selection against business requirements, workflow configuration, implementation, and team training and change management.

Audit and consolidate internal documentation and Online Help into a single trusted source, prepared for AI-agent ingestion, with a defined ownership and update process so it does not go stale.

Build and maintain the operational reporting to measure volume, backlog and ticket ageing, response and resolution times, recurring defect clusters, and client-level and product-level trends.

Professional Services

Create and roll out a standardized project tracker giving consistent visibility of status, milestones, resourcing, and delivery risk across every active engagement.

Evaluate the current system’s capabilities from a Professional Services perspective and feed those requirements into the go-forward vendor decision, so one platform decision serves both functions.

Redefine the SOW process end to end so client requests are captured, scoped, approved, and tracked as they flow through Professional Services and Operations and into Finance and P&L reporting.

Develop knowledge transfer strategy across the team, identify skill gaps, and turn those findings into a development plan.

Client Health and Retention

• Act as Voice of the Customer, surfacing prirorities and risks to the leadership team.
• Develop a formal retention strategy and propose the resource plan required to execute it.
• Identify at-risk accounts from support and delivery signals, close the loop on NPS and survey responses, and drive proactive outreach.

Team Leadership and Operational Strategy

Manage, coach, and develop the Support and Professional Services teams through regular 1:1s, ticket and project reviews, and structured feedback; set clear expectations and build a culture of ownership and continuous improvement.

Serve as the escalation point for the most complex or most sensitive client situations, including issues raised by firm administrators, IT directors, and managing partners, and keep clients informed through outages, defects, and long-running issues.

Drive practical adoption of AI across both teams - drafting client responses, triaging and routing incoming tickets, summarizing threads, surfacing knowledge gaps, and accelerating documentation - and audit AI-assisted output for accuracy and tone before it reaches a client.

Own a defined improvement initiative each quarter - automation, deflection, QA scoring, self-service content, delivery efficiency - with a stated outcome and a measurable result.

Work closely with R&D, Cloud Ops, Sales, and Finance to align the two functions around shared client and commercial outcomes.

Core Competencies

• Legal workflow fluency: Brings a working understanding of how our clients use BEC and uses it to interpret requests, assess severity, and represent the client’s reality. Understands the needs of a docketing team, paralegal, or legal assistant, and earns the trust of our user base by speaking to their reality.
• Operational leadership: Leads two distinct functions at once, balancing day-to-day delivery with the strategic initiatives that improve it, and knows when to step in personally and when to let the team own it.
• Process and playbook building: Creates repeatable structure - tiers, SLAs, escalation paths, project tracking, SOW and documentation standards - and manages adoption in a small team.
• Commercial and financial literacy: Comfortable with scoping, billing, commission design, and how service work lands in P&L reporting; partners credibly with Finance and Sales.
• Data-driven decision making: Uses ticket, project, and client data to assess performance, identify trends and risk areas early, and make the case for change.
• AI fluency and judgment: Uses generative AI tools to improve speed and quality of service work, and applies the judgment to know where AI output needs verification before a client sees it.
• Client communication: Writes and speaks clearly and professionally to sophisticated legal-industry clients, particularly in challenging situations and senior-level conversations.
• Cross-functional influence: Works effectively with R&D, Cloud Ops, Sales, and Finance, aligning them around shared client outcomes.
• Adaptability and resourcefulness: Operates effectively in a lean, close-knit organization, balancing daily delivery with building in a resource-constrained environment.
• Success Metrics: First 6 & 12 Months

First 6 Months

• Complete onboarding into BEC’s product suite (MatterLink, Docket Enterprise, LegalBar, Assemble-It, CoreRelate Cloud, and CoreRespond).
• Complete an audit of the current support and delivery operation - open backlog, ticket ageing, active engagements, recurring issue clusters, and data quality - and begin closing the most significant gaps.
• Weekly internal Support cadence running, covering aged tickets, queue audit, and escalations; standing Support-to-R&D cadence established and agreed with R&D leadership.
• Support tiers, baseline SLA targets by severity, and the escalation checklist published, adopted by the team, and reported weekly.
• Assessment of the support tracking system complete - covering both Support and Professional Services requirements - with a go-forward vendor recommendation.
• Standardized project tracker live across all active engagements.
• Knowledge base audit complete, with a consolidation plan for AI-agent ingestion.

First 12 Months

Support and Professional Services running on the go-forward system of record, with archive access to historical data retained and both teams fully trained.

Consistent performance against published SLA targets, with a demonstrated improvement in first-response and resolu