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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.
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