IT Incident Manager

Dinsmore is seeking an IT Incident Manager at its Cincinnati, OH location. The IT Incident Manager is accountable for restoring technology services quickly, consistently, and with minimal disruption to client service, attorney productivity, and firm operations. This role leads incident management across the firm and has direct responsibility for the Service Desk, ensuring responsive, professional support for attorneys and business professionals across all offices and working arrangements. The position coordinates major incident response, provides clear communications during time-sensitive events, protects confidential and privileged information, and uses service data to improve technology reliability and the user experience in a deadline-driven legal environment.

Responsibilities

• Develop, own and continuously improve the firm’s incident management process in alignment with ITIL practices, firm priorities, and the expectations of a client-service organization
• Lead major incidents from declaration through service restoration, coordinating technical teams, vendors, firm leadership, office administrators, and business stakeholders
• Set incident priorities based on attorney and staff impact, affected offices or practices, client commitments, court and filing deadlines, transaction closings, security risk, and contractual or regulatory obligations
• Maintain clear command, escalation, and decision-making structures during high-impact incidents
• Provide timely, concise updates to firm leadership, attorneys, business professionals, office contacts, and affected practice groups while protecting sensitive technical and client information
• Ensure incident records contain accurate timelines, actions, decisions, affected services, business and client impact, workaround information, and resolution details
• Facilitate post-incident reviews, identify corrective actions, assign accountable owners, and track commitments through completion
• Identify recurring incidents affecting legal workflows or critical platforms, including document management, time entry, billing, email, collaboration, remote access, identity, litigation support, and practice applications
• Maintain major incident procedures, contact lists, communication templates, vendor escalation paths, and office-specific contingencies
• Lead the outsourced Service Desk and remain accountable for daily operations, service quality, and professional standards across the firm’s offices and remote workforce
• Set performance expectations with third party Service Desk provider
• Serve as an engaged operational leader by monitoring support queues, triaging high-impact issues, coordinating escalations, and intervening when business risk or an attorney or client deadline requires expedited attention
• Ensure consistent intake, categorization, prioritization, troubleshooting, escalation, documentation, and closure of incidents and service requests
• Build a high-touch service culture focused on responsiveness, plain-language communication, follow-through, and respect for the time pressures of legal professionals
• Define and maintain support procedures, knowledge articles, standard work, call scripts, and escalation criteria for core legal and enterprise technologies
• Partner with applications, infrastructure, security, training, and innovation teams to improve first-contact resolution and reduce disruption to legal work
• Analyze user feedback, ticket trends, service levels, abandonment rates, reopen rates, attorney-impacting incidents, and resolution quality to drive improvement
• Maintain after-hours, weekend, and on-call support arrangements appropriate for court deadlines, deal activity, travel, remote work, and the firm’s geographic footprint
• Develop dashboards and reporting on incident performance, major incidents, Service Desk demand, service levels, attorney and staff experience, office trends, and improvement actions
• Use service data to identify operational risks, capacity needs, training opportunities, automation candidates, and service improvements
• Work with service owners and project teams to define support models, escalation paths, operational acceptance criteria, knowledge requirements, and readiness standards for new or changed services
• Participate in business continuity, disaster recovery, cybersecurity incident, and crisis management activities
• Perform other duties, responsibilities, and special projects as assigned

Requirements

• Calm, structured leadership during high-pressure and time-sensitive events
• Strong judgment, prioritization, and decision-making based on business and client impact
• Ability to communicate technical issues clearly
• High-touch client-service orientation with consistent ownership and follow-through
• Ability to influence and coordinate work across practices, offices, administrative departments, and technical teams
• Strong analytical skills and the ability to use service data to identify trends and improvements
• Demonstrated organizational skills, attention to detail, and effective use of time
• Ability to plan and prioritize work in a fast-paced, deadline-driven environment
• Flexibility and willingness to adjust to changing support needs, incident demands, and scheduling requirements
• Sound discretion when handling privileged, confidential, security-sensitive, and client information

• Bachelor’s degree in information technology, business, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience
• Minimum of five years of progressive IT service management, Service Desk, or technical support experience
• Demonstrated experience leading major incidents in a complex, distributed, highly available, and deadline-driven environment
• Strong knowledge of incident management, Service Desk operations, escalation management, service communications, and IT service management platforms
• Working knowledge of enterprise and legal technologies, including identity, endpoint, network, collaboration, cloud, security, document management, time and billing, remote access, and practice-specific applications
• ITIL Foundation certification preferred; HDI, advanced ITIL, service management, or relevant technical certifications are beneficial
• Availability to lead or coordinate critical incidents outside normal business hours