Legal Project Management

Corporate leaders successfully steered their businesses through one of the worst recessions in history in large measure by directing their focus on the performance and spending of all supporting departments, including their corporate legal departments. This focus has resulted in General Counsel re-examining every aspect of their department's operations. As a consequence, the law firms that serve these corporations are under intense pressure to deliver the same quality of work product at a sharply reduced rate. General Counsel have sought to implement these spend reductions through the use of Alternative Fee Arrangements (AFAs) with their firms, which are often agreements to perform work at essentially a fixed fee. However, given that firms have historically operated under a billable hour model, they require a new approach to delivering legal services that enables them to maintain high quality while becoming as efficient as possible.

Efficiency, in large measure, depends on much closer collaboration between the parties. The good news for them is that principles already proven in business- and operations-management disciplines are available to address their respective challenges: Project management. Project management (PM) processes were originally designed to manage very large endeavors (such as the Apollo program) but over time have been refined for use in nearly every capacity. Over the past five years, I have noticed a steadily growing interest by commentators in applying PM principles to the legal profession, often when e-discovery is involved. This interest is also becoming apparent when I attend legal conferences and, if it continues, points to an important change in how legal operations will be carried out. One thing is for certain: Project management applications for legal operations ' legal project management or LPM ' hold promise for transforming the relationship between General Counsel and outside counsel because it combines a closer working relationship between their respective teams with a high degree of transparency and accountability for every action taken.

Getting Started with Legal Project Management

The Project Management Institute (PMI) defines a project as “a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product or service,” a definition that could apply to just about any transaction, litigation, or extensive research effort. PMI introduced and refined the collection of principles used today in PM by corporations and government bodies, referred to as the Project Management Body of Knowledge or PMBOK. This breaks down projects into five core processes to produce work product that is consistent in quality and delivered on time and within budget.

General Counsel that have seen PM documents in use at other departments might be inclined to think that they will have to make a sizeable investment in technology and training for the department if they are to gain the benefits of PMBOK. Based upon their initial research into LPM, outside counsel might also be inclined to believe that. But in fact, many corporate legal departments already have the tools needed for the job ' their matter management system. Matter management systems address many of the same aspects as PM software, such as determining the state of a matter, housing supporting documentation, and allowing notes to be added by team members. They also offer several distinct advantages over PM software.

Matter management systems are designed with collaboration in mind and employ extensive contact management tools, e-mail integration, and security features that enable outside counsel to log directly into their client's system whether behind the corporate firewall or hosted on a third-party server. This secure collaboration capability also enables participation from paralegals, subject matter experts, and other parties that assist outside counsel. The reporting tools that come with matter management software can be used to produce snapshots of the state of a given matter or the entire portfolio, such as actual spend versus budget. Those tools also allow the General Counsel to drill down into specifics across matters, such as which staff are participating in which matters, and how much time they have spent to date. Finally, matter management systems also employ native accountability mechanisms to “unwind” processes and events, greatly assisting in determining the root cause of failures during a project.

Using Legal Project Management to Unite
Inside and Outside Counsel