Personal injury case manager job description template: duties, requirements and pay range

A personal injury case manager posting has six working parts: duties, qualifications, skills and software, pay and benefits, schedule, and how to apply.

Each gets its own block in the template below.

If you are still deciding whether the seat makes sense — the level you need, the scope you hand it, where to source candidates — our guide to how to hire a personal injury case manager covers the decisions before the posting; this page is about writing it.

Core duties.

The seat this template describes runs on file movement: keeping each matter moving between the client, the medical providers and the lawyer.

Write tasks a candidate can picture, and apply one test to every line — does the posting make clear that a lawyer reviews the work?

Supervision belongs in the duties block, not in fine print: Comment [2] to ABA Model Rule 5.3 lists paraprofessionals among the assistants lawyers must instruct on ethics, especially confidentiality, and says supervision should account for the fact that nonlawyers lack legal training and are not subject to professional discipline.

The structure behind that — Rule 5.3(a) requires firm-wide measures, and Rule 5.3(b) puts a separate duty on the lawyer with direct supervisory authority — is in our guide to supervising non-lawyer staff under Rule 5.3.

Duties that earn their place on a personal injury case manager posting:

• Serving as clients' day-to-day contact for case status, on the update cadence the firm sets
• Gathering initial facts at intake and running the initial conflict check
• Requesting, tracking and organizing medical records, billing and provider files
• Opening new matters and keeping case files current in your case management system
• Tracking treatment status, key dates and filing deadlines and flagging them for the supervising attorney
• Preparing demand packages and settlement brochures for attorney review
• Following up with providers, lien holders and insurers on outstanding records and bills
• Scheduling client appointments, depositions, independent medical examinations and mediation
• Assembling mediation and trial binders and exhibits
• Supporting billing with time and cost entries

Client contact needs the most careful wording on this block.

ABA Formal Opinion 506 (June 7, 2023) says a lawyer may train and supervise a nonlawyer to conduct prospective-client intake — gathering initial facts, running an initial conflict check, obtaining the signature on the fee agreement — provided the prospective client is always offered the chance to talk to the lawyer; and whether that nonlawyer may answer a prospective client's specific question depends on the question, because Model Rule 5.5 bars lawyers from assisting unauthorized practice.

So write what the case manager gathers and records, never what they advise.

Where the intake team around this seat fits: our guide to staffing a personal injury firm's intake team.

Qualifications and certifications.

Two wording decisions do most of the work in this block.

First, certificate versus certification: NALA distinguishes a certificate — completing a learning program — from certification, which validates mastery against a professional standard, so write the one you mean.

Second, required versus preferred: unless your firm genuinely requires a credential, list it under a preferred line, or you may screen out strong candidates who learned the casework on the job.

On the certification question for this seat specifically, our research surfaced no license or certification requirement aimed at legal case managers — a negative that is ours, not your state's, so ask your state bar what applies where you practice before you finalize the requirements block.

The credentials our research documents are paralegal credentials, and they are the letters you will see on legal-staff resumes:

• NALA's Certified Paralegal (CP) — the prerequisite for NALA's Advanced Certified Paralegal (ACP): anyone may take an ACP course, but the credential itself is available only to current CPs, and the ACP course list includes Personal Injury — the option most on point for this seat's subject matter.
• NFPA's CRP and RP — from its PCCE and PACE exams; NFPA says someone without substantive paralegal work experience is not eligible for either exam under its current criteria.
• NALS's ALP, CLP and PP — Accredited Legal Professional, Certified Legal Professional and Professional Paralegal.
• State-level voluntary certifications — NFPA's regulation page lists 16, including California Certified Paralegal, Florida Registered Paralegal and Texas Board of Legal Specialization Certified Paralegal; the list itself names different kinds of issuers, so check the specifics with the issuing body before you require one.

Whatever a resume claims, verify the credential directly with the issuing body before you rely on it.

For the role described from the candidate's side — training routes, credentials, career path — our personal injury case manager career guide covers it.

Skills and software.

Name the systems your firm actually runs — your case management platform, your medical-records and demand workflow, document management and e-filing, time-and-billing — and split them into must-have-on-day-one versus willing-to-train.

A posting that names its real stack helps candidates judge the fit before they apply, and it sets up the working session at interview.

Skills worth a line each: organizing records other people can find, deadline tracking that surfaces problems early, written client updates that stay inside the facts, and confidentiality habits.

The confidentiality line is not filler — Comment [2] to Rule 5.3 makes instructing nonlawyer assistants on ethics, especially confidentiality, the lawyers' job for the assistants they employ, whether employee or independent contractor, and a posting that commits to that instruction tells candidates supervision is built into the seat.

Skills tests.

If you screen with a writing or mock-file exercise, keep it short and run it on a mock file.

The FLSA defines "employ" to include "to suffer or permit to work," so a candidate producing real, usable work for the firm — say, a client update the firm actually sends — may be an employee owed wages; a short exercise on a mock file is the safer design.

The EEOC adds a second constraint: a required test must be necessary and related to the job, and must not exclude people of a protected group or people with disabilities.

Pay range and benefits.

Anchor the range in your market, then adjust for the caseload you wrote above.

On federal data: BLS has no separate occupation code for legal case managers, so any figure you quote has to be named as the broader category.

In the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) May 2025 release, Legal Support Workers, All Other (SOC 23-2099) — the proxy category our research maps this seat to — had a national median annual wage of $72,110 ($34.67 per hour) across all industries, and in the Legal Services industry (law firms, NAICS 5411) the category numbered 10,550 workers with a median annual wage of $63,100.

The category takes in other titles too, so treat these figures as the broad bucket your hire sits in, not a case-manager rate — set the range from the duties you listed and what comparable legal staff roles pay in your city.

Whatever range you post should be one you believe.

California defines "pay scale" as a good-faith estimate of the salary or hourly range the employer reasonably expects to pay on hire, with penalties running $100 to $10,000 per violation.

In the jurisdictions our research verified, posting the range is already the law, not a nice-to-have: California (employers with 15 or more employees — and an employer that uses a third party to post must give it the pay scale to include), Washington (15 or more, in effect since January 1, 2023, with a general description of benefits required in the posting), New York State (four or more employees) and New York City (a good-faith pay range in job advertisements for NYC-performed work since November 1, 2022).

California also goes a step further: the pay scale is due to an applicant on reasonable request regardless of employer size.

Other states and cities have their own rules we did not read — check with your state labor agency before you post.

Two pay decisions sit behind the range.

Classification: the DOL says job titles do not determine exemption status — duties and salary must meet the regulations — so decide how the role is classified for overtime before the posting names hours; our guide to which law firm employees are exempt from overtime walks the analysis.

Bonus design: personal injury compensation instincts run toward case-tied bonuses, and that is where the fee-sharing rules sit — ABA Model Rule 5.4(a) bars a lawyer or law firm from sharing legal fees with a nonlawyer, subject to listed exceptions, while Rule 5.4(a)(3) lets a firm include nonlawyer employees in a compensation or retirement plan based in whole or in part on profit-sharing.

Where a specific case-tied bonus fits is a state-specific ethics question — our guide to staff bonuses under Rule 5.4 works through it, and your state bar's ethics counsel should confirm the structure before you promise one in a posting.

Before you post, confirm the rules that move.

Posting laws differ by state, city and employer size, and legislatures keep amending them; classification and bonus questions have their own variation.

Confirm current pay-disclosure rules with your state labor agency, and classification and bonus questions with employment counsel or your state bar's ethics counsel.

Adapting the template for a small firm.

In a small personal injury firm, this seat can be the client-communication hub for the whole docket.

If your one hire has to span intake facts, records chasing, demand preparation and mediation logistics, write exactly that breadth into the duties block instead of dressing it up — an honest list lets candidates judge the breadth before they apply.

The named-supervisor line matters more in a small firm, not less: with fewer lawyers, each person's supervisory role is specific, and the duty attaches to the lawyer with direct supervisory authority, so name who reviews the work.

Adapting for a specific practice area.

The template is written for a general personal injury docket; tighten it to yours.

A pre-litigation-only seat leans harder on records chasing, treatment tracking and demand preparation; a litigation-heavy seat adds deposition and mediation logistics, exhibit sets and expert files.

Motor-vehicle dockets run on provider records, property-damage files and adjuster correspondence; premises and product matters add investigation records and expert-heavy files; medical malpractice adds record volumes where organization itself is the job.

Let the requirements block follow: ask for experience with the documents your cases generate, not "personal injury experience" in the abstract.

Adapting for level.

An entry-level posting leans on the training you will provide and asks for organized, client-facing work experience; a senior posting asks for years of carried caseloads and day-one ownership of the records pipeline and the demand calendar.

Say which one you are hiring — the honest version shows up in the requirements block and in the pay range you set, and it saves you from rewriting the posting after the first round of applications.

If your client base is bilingual.

Client communication is the core of this seat, and building a staff that can serve clients in more than one language is a sourcing and screening question of its own — our guide to hiring bilingual paralegals, intake staff and assistants covers it.

Five wordings sink otherwise good personal injury case manager postings.

Each is fixable before you hit publish.

1. Duties that promise legal advice.

Phrases like "advise clients on their options," "evaluate settlement offers" or "manage your own caseload" can read as practicing law.

Keep every duty inside supervised work — Formal Opinion 506's intake line is the model: the nonlawyer gathers facts, runs the initial conflict check and collects the fee-agreement signature, and the prospective client is always offered the chance to talk to the lawyer.

And because whether a nonlawyer may answer a client's specific question depends on the question, write what the case manager records, never what they conclude — the value of a case and the client's next step are the lawyer's answers.

2. Preference wording that screens by who people are.

The EEOC says it is illegal to publish a job advertisement that shows a preference for, or discourages applications from, people because of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information — its own examples include an ad seeking "females" and one seeking "recent college graduates," which may discourage men and people over 40 from applying.

Write about the work, not the person.

Keep application questions to what is essential to decide whether a person is qualified — the EEOC treats questions about race, sex, national origin, age or religion as irrelevant to that decision — and treat the borderline ones as risky rather than harmless, because federal law does not clearly forbid every such question but the answers can be used as evidence of discriminatory intent unless justified by a business purpose.

Keep the process accessible, too: an employer must provide an accommodation a disabled applicant needs in order to apply, unless it causes significant difficulty or expense.

3. Salary-history questions.

The state laws we read bar seeking an applicant's salary history: California (Labor Code 432.3, all employers), New York (Labor Law 194-a), Illinois (820 ILCS 112) and Massachusetts (G.L. c.149 §105A) — each with its own conditions and exceptions.

Ask for expectations instead — California's law expressly allows an employer to ask an applicant about their salary expectation for the position.

Other states and cities have rules we did not read, so check yours before the interview stage.

4. Conviction-history questions too early.

California's Fair Chance Act (employers with five or more employees) and New York City's Fair Chance Act (most employers) bar asking about or considering conviction history until after a conditional offer of employment; Illinois bars it until the applicant has been found qualified and selected for an interview or, with no interview, until after a conditional offer.

If your application form asks about criminal record, check your state and city law before you post.

5. Vague everything.

"Wear many hats," "fast-paced environment" and "other duties as assigned" with no task list leave strong candidates unable to tell whether the seat is a supervised case-management role or a catch-all — and Minnesota's posting law adds its own reason to be specific: posted ranges may not be open-ended.

The fix is the duties block above: specific tasks, the software they run on, and the lawyer who reviews them.

After you post.

Set a review cadence before the posting goes live and hold to it — don't let applications sit unanswered while you compare notes.

If the pay range or the duties change, update the posting rather than explaining the difference in interviews.

Prepare the interview the same way for every candidate — the same questions, the same mock-file exercise, a scoring sheet — it keeps comparisons fair and keeps every question and test tied to the job, which is the EEOC's standard for screening tools.

And before yours goes up, browse the live case manager jobs on this board to see the pay framing and duty lists you are competing against.

This page is employer information, not legal advice. Posting laws, classification rules and ethics rules change and vary by jurisdiction — confirm them with your state labor agency, employment counsel and your state bar's ethics counsel before you post.