Executive Director- Law Firm

Executive Director / Integrator (Law Firm)

Trusts & Estates
· Estate Planning
· Elder Law
· Transactional (New Jersey & New York)

Location:
North New Jersey (Relocation assistance available)

Salary: $+ per year

Our client is a successful, fast-growing law firm with offices in New Jersey and New York and a strong focus on trusts and estates, estate planning, elder law, and a heavy transactional practice. The firm is at an inflection point: demand is strong, the partners have a clear vision for where the firm is going, and the business is ready for its next stage of significant growth.

What they need now is the person who turns that vision into reality. This is an integrator role — the operational leader who takes the partners' direction and converts it into systems, people, and results. You will own how the firm runs and how it grows, build the infrastructure a larger firm requires, and be the person the hard problems stop with.

If you have hit the ceiling managing someone else's well‑run office and you are ready to build and own one, this is the seat. This is not a role for someone looking to maintain a well‑run office. It's for an operator who wants to build one.

Take ownership of how the firm operates and scales, translate the partners' vision into concrete plans, build the systems and team to deliver on it, own the growth as if it were your own, and be where problems get solved rather than escalated.

• An ownership seat. You own outcomes, not a task list. The firm's growth becomes your number to carry.
• A building role. Much of what the firm will need at its next size doesn't exist yet. You'll invent and build those processes — not just document the ones already in place.
• The integrator to the partners' vision. They generate direction and ideas; you make them real, and you protect the organization's focus when there are more ideas than capacity.
• Open-ended and ambiguous by design. There is no daily playbook for “help take this firm to the next level.”

• A caretaker or “keep the trains running” position.
• A defined nine-to‑five with a fixed scope and a predictable task list.
• A role where staff conflicts, broken processes, and and tasks that fall through the cracks get routed up to the partners — you are where those land and get resolved.
• An SOP‑writing job. You'll design the systems, not just write them down.

• The firm’s capacity to grow: building the staffing, workflows, and systems that let it scale without breaking, and identifying what needs to exist before the firm hits its next size.
• Execution of the firm's growth plan: translating the partners' goals into concrete initiatives, owning the outcome, and reporting progress honestly, including when it's behind.
• People: hiring, developing, and holding staff accountable; building a culture of ownership; making the hard personnel calls rather than tolerating problems.
• Operations end to end: financial and billing oversight, vendor and consultant relationships, technology and case‑management systems, and the administrative function.
• Client experience as the firm scales: ensuring service quality holds (and improves) as volume grows.
• The problems: staff conflict, a process that breaks, a client issue, a task that fell through the cracks somewhere in the firm. These stop with you.

• You run toward problems other people escalated or route around.
• You build. You can point to something that didn’t exist before you (a process, a system, a function) that you created, ran, and improved (including the parts that broke the first time).
• You carry the goal home. Open-ended targets motivate you; you don’t need the dopamine of a cleared task list to feel you’ve done your job.
• You manage up well. You can make a trade-off visible to a busy founder (“here’s what slips if we do this now”) and protect the team’s focus without being a yes-person and without picking fights.
• You’d rather own an ambiguous outcome than execute a clear assignment.
• You’re versatile but disciplined about it. You’ll step into any non‑legal seat to get something done in a pinch, but you build so the seat doesn’t stay…