Legal Project Management (Part 8): McDermott’s Deal Dashboard

If you believe what’s been written on the web lately, you’d think that the idea of applying project management principles to legal matters was brand new.  In fact, however, some lawyers have been focused on these ideas for years, developing new tactics and tools, often under the radar.

For example, consider Deal Dashboard, a web-based collaborative deal space custom developed for two former in-house lawyers who went back to firm practice.  It’s been available for several years, and is currently being used by a few in-house departments and one law firm.

When McDermott Will & Emery partner Byron Kalogerou conducted a demo for me, he explained that he had previously worked for 14 years as in-house counsel at Tyco, where a great deal of emphasis was placed on developing new systems to cut costs.  But when he moved to an outside firm and began talking about project management, he felt that he was living out his college motto: A voice crying in the wilderness.  (Kalogerou went to Dartmouth, so naturally the motto was in Latin: Vox clamantis in deserto.)

The Deal Dashboard offers a sophisticated set of web-based tools that, as a McDermott brochure puts it:

Streamline the M&A process, reducing inefficiencies and costs.  The Dashboard enables counsel to corral all of the moving pieces of a deal, so that everyone involved knows what needs to be done, by when, by whom, and at what cost.

Kalogerou notes that he and his former colleague, Terry Mahoney, who had also spent many years in-house, sought to develop a tool that brings transparency, accountability and predictability to the transactional relationship.

When work begins on a new deal, the client team sits down with McDermott lawyers to perform the kind of basic planning that professional project managers do on any new job: identify tasks, assign people to each task, set deadlines, and plan the budget.  The brochure shows how this works for a typical deal with tasks grouped into four phases: due diligence, negotiations, closing conditions, and post closing.

As the deal proceeds, tasks and issues are tracked online in the Deal Dashboard, so that every team member on both sides of the table can find out exactly where things stand, minute by minute, by reviewing the latest updates at a password-protected site on the web.  In the brochure’s fictional example, several high priority issues are highlighted for action, such as “plant lease – right of first refusal grant” and “determine whether pre-merger filing is required with the Federal Competition Commission in Mexico.”

Just as important, a budget for each phase is established online at the beginning of the deal, whether the work is performed on an hourly basis or for an alternative fee.  The system then tracks costs to date, and compares them to the budgeted estimate.  In the fictional example in the brochure, the negotiations stage was initially budgeted at $125K.  But by the time 75% of the work had been completed, only $85K had been spent.  The system calculates the “expected variance” from these figures to show that negotiations could be completed more than $11K under the original budget.  (When you do the math, if 75% of the work cost $85,000, 100% of the work would cost $113,333.  Subtract that from the original estimate of $125,000, and you’ll see a net savings of $11,667.)

McDermott has embraced the Dashboard and legal project management and is looking to deploy the Dashboard in a number of areas, including in litigation.  As Kalogerou notes, “Using legal project management and tools like the Dashboard drive efficiency into the way we deliver legal services; clients are demanding value from their law firms and we deliver it.”

The concepts of using an online system to facilitate team communication like this, and to track spending, would be old hat in any other business.  In the law business, this is a breakthrough.  But maybe not for long.  As these words are written, large firms are exploring a wide variety of tools that are springing up to meet the need to increase efficiency.  Because clients are demanding it.

To download a .pdf summary of this series, see the white paper in the project management section of our web page.  It will be updated from time to time as the series continues.  Additional information appears in the Legal Project Management Quick Reference Guide.

Comments

[Paul C. Easton]

From your post and the brochure you linked to, It's not clear whether Deal Dashboard has been productized or whether it is a home-baked system for use only by McDermott and its clients, but I assume that the later is the case. While it is good to see large firms taking the initiative to develop such systems, it is a little surprising that they have to. There is a nice niche here for the software developer who can develop a solid project management tool that is lawyer friendly.

Traditional case and matter management developers don't seem to be up to the task and the new generation of cloud-based matter-management services are mostly working on replicating the functionality of traditional, desktop products. The only solid project-management systems for law firms and legal departments that I see on the market focus on litigation support, e-discovery in particular.

Am I missing any?

[Jim Hassett]

Paul - Deal Dashboard was developed by a Baltimore company named TX2 Systems, for sale to law firms and law departments. See http://baltimore.bizjournals.com/baltimore/stories/2009/04/27/story16.html for an announcement last year of a product they offered with Lexis Nexis.

I omitted this detail from my post because I was unable to find much about the company on the web, heard rumors that they were no longer offering this for sale, and felt it was a distraction from the main point.

In general, I think most lawyers are not ready for project management software, and that dealing with software could distract some from the fundamental tasks they should focus on first (and which we stress in our workshops), such as improving communication with clients about spending.

However, I also believe that a small group of lawyers are ready for project management software. Since I am often asked about this topic, I have started some research and will post on it soon. I will start from the list you’ve compiled at http://legalprojectmanagement.info/legal-project-management-applications.html, and am also setting up a demo of Onit Legal Edition with www.onit.com.

If you track down more details about TX2 Systems or related products, please let me know. -- Jim

[PM Hut]

Hi Paul,

I have published an extensive article on Legal Project Management last week (you can find it here). The topic is gaining a huge momentum that I do not think will wane anytime soon, as more people are noticing the benefit of adopting legal project management.

I am also noticing a spike in blog postings on this very topic.