The posting
Wilson Sonsini is the premier legal advisor to technology, life sciences, and other growth enterprises worldwide. We represent companies at every stage of development, from entrepreneurial start-ups to multibillion-dollar global corporations, as well as the venture firms, private equity firms, and investment banks that finance and advise them. The firm has approximately 1,100 attorneys in 17 offices: 13 in the U.S., two in China, and two in Europe. Our broad spectrum of practices and entrepreneurial spirit allow exceptional opportunities for professional achievement and career growth.
The Director of Support Services owns end-user support services for the firm, with direct accountability for the outsourced Service Desk, deskside support technicians across the firm's 17 offices, the Technical Training group, and technical communications. This role is directly responsible for day-to-day support for all firm attorneys and business professionals, from first contact through resolution.
The ideal candidate is a hands-on support services leader who prioritizes the end user experience and knows how to run a high volume, multi-location support operation with discipline. This person combines strong operational leadership with a customer first mindset and excels at bringing resources together to execute shared goals. This leader will maintain a customer focused delivery approach, operate with urgency, and prioritize responsiveness, quality, and consistency of support across every office.
This position is available as hybrid or fully virtual work schedule.
Key Responsibilities
Responsibilities include but are not limited to:
Service Desk & Deskside Support Operations
- Own day to day performance of the outsourced Service Desk, holding the vendor accountable to contracted SLAs, quality standards, and cost targets.
- Directly manage deskside support technicians across the firm's 17 offices, ensuring consistent coverage, response times, and service quality regardless of location.
- Standardize support processes, ticket handling, and escalation paths across the Service Desk and deskside teams so attorneys and business professionals receive the same quality of support in every office.
- Use ticket data, reporting, and analytics to identify trends, reduce recurring issues, and drive support performance improvements.
- Serve as the executive escalation point for support issues that are not resolved at first or second tier, driving them to resolution quickly.
Customer & Stakeholder Experience
- Build and maintain strong, trusted relationships with attorneys, business professionals, and internal stakeholders, serving as a primary point of escalation and advocacy for support services.
- Ensure high satisfaction with support services across the firm through proactive engagement, structured communication, and effective issue resolution.
- Act as the voice of the end user internally, translating recurring support issues into concrete service gaps and improvement opportunities.
- Oversee onboarding and technology enablement for new attorneys and business professionals so they are productive quickly.
Technical Training & Communications
- Direct the Technical Training group, ensuring training content and outputs are high quality, professional, polished, and keep pace with the firm's technology needs.
- Experience owning a technical training function, including curriculum development, content design, and delivery methods (in person, virtual, self service).
- Responsible for the development and execution of comprehensive communication strategies and tactics to engage employees in support of business initiatives.
- Provide oversight of technical communications, ensuring outages, deployments, technical changes, and known issues are communicated clearly and include the necessary related materials.
- Partner with the Technical Training group to build resources that help fill gaps identified by Service Desk ticket trends.
- Experience partnering with practice groups or firm leadership to identify training priorities tied to new technology rollouts.
Support Operations Governance
- Drive compliance with internal governance models and quality standards across all support teams.
- Engage as a key stakeholder in the incident management process for support related outages affecting end users.
- Set staffing, scheduling, and coverage models across offices and time zones to match support demand, including peak periods, offsite events and after-hour needs.
- Benchmark support operations against industry standards and implement best practices into the firm's support model.
- Demonstrated accountability for a support services budget, including vendor contracts, staffing costs, and tooling expenses.
People Leadership
- Hire, coach, and develop high performing support resources, fostering accountability and a continuous growth mindset across all teams.
- Establish group expectations, workload balance, and coverage across offices that sustain team optimization and reliability.
- Support talent development, succession planning, and effective workforce utilization across the support organization.
- Identify and address knowledge and skill gaps within the teams.
- Track record of setting team goals, performance standards, and accountability measures that improve service outcomes.
Requirements
- Must be self-driven with a natural tendency to take ownership and independently execute work to completion.
- Must have a positive can-do attitude and proactively engage with leadership as an advocate for end users.
- Proven experience directly managing multiple technical groups to produce exceptional support services across multiple locations and time zones.
- Strong command of support operations fundamentals, including SLA management, ticketing systems, escalation models, and staffing/coverage planning.
- Demonstrated success managing outsourced support vendors, including holding vendors accountable to contracted performance.
- Experience identifying technical support and training gaps and implementing user-facing solutions.
- Familiarity with AI enabled support tooling and a track record of driving automation adoption within a support function.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with experience communicating support performance to senior stakeholders.
- Strong leadership skills, including hiring, coaching, and performance management of support personnel.
Education & Experience
- Bachelor’s degree in information technology, business administration, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 8+ years of progressive experience in end user support leadership, including managed services and geographically dispersed support teams.
- Experience with ServiceNow or equivalent ITSM platform.
- Experience in a law firm or professional services environment preferred.
- Track record of leading organizational change within a support or service delivery function.
- Familiarity with legal industry applications preferred.
- Accustomed to providing "white glove" support experience as standard practice.
- ITIL certification, Lean Six Sigma or related certifications a plus.
The primary location for this job posting is in Palo Alto, but other locations may be listed. The actual base pay offered will depend upon a variety of factors, including but not limited to the selected candidate’s qualifications, years of relevant experience, level of education, professional certifications and licenses, and work location. The anticipated pay range for this position is as follows:
Palo Alto, New York, San Francisco: $208,250 - $281,750 per year. Austin, Boston, Boulder, Century City, Delaware, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, San Diego, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and all other locations: $187,850 - $254,150 per year.
The compensation for this position may include a discretionary year-end merit bonus based on performance. We offer a highly competitive salary and benefits package.
Benefits information can be found here. Equal Opportunity Employer (EOE).
