Legal project management (Part 12): What Canadian firms are doing

Last week we offered a project management webinar workshop at Clark Wilson, one of the leading law firms in British Columbia.  The next day, a colleague asked me how Canadian legal project management differs from the US.  My answer: it doesn’t.

True, when we customized their edition of the Legal Project Management Quick Reference Guide, we had to use a Canadian English spell checker.  But changing the spelling of practice (to practise), and defense (to defence) was about the biggest cultural challenge we faced.  Of course Canadian law differs from US law in many ways, but when it comes to legal project management, the basic principles are the same.

For examples of what other Canadian firms are doing, see Michael Rappaport’s article in the current issue of the Canadian Corporate Counsel Association magazine.  It’s entitled “Better service by design: Project management and the quest to add value,” and discusses how:

• McCarthy-Tétrault's enhanced project management program is supported by customized tools including work plan templates to help lawyers “develop time lines, define the scope of work,  staff a matter appropriately, plan for contingencies and generate cost estimates.”  The tools were developed in house over 18 months, and the firm is rolling them out this year to all of its 650 lawyers. Detailed training sessions for all lawyers will be completed by the fall.

 • Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt has “launched a matter management initiative and has rolled out a project management guide book, which will serve as the firm’s bible for legal project management.”

• Borden Ladner Gervais “continues to build on project management initiatives started 25 years ago in its trademark and practice group.”

These days, I spend much of my life talking to people about what law firms are doing with project management, but before I read this article I was familiar with only one of these three initiatives.  Like my post on McDermott’s Deal Dashboard, this suggests that there has been an enormous amount of legal project management activity going on under the radar for years. 

And all signs point to an acceleration of legal project management activity in Canada, not to mention everywhere else. A few hours before I offered the workshop at Clark Wilson, I got an email out of the blue from the training coordinator of a Canadian government agency that employs over 200 lawyers.  They too are considering a project management initiative, and she wanted to discuss the best way to structure training to assure immediate and practical results.

I told her about the approach we used in our highly interactive two-hour webinar workshop with Clark Wilson, starting with a brief review of eight key areas for improving efficiency:

1. Set objectives and define scope
2. Identify and schedule activities
3. Assign tasks and manage the team
4. Plan and manage the budget
5. Assess risks to schedule and budget
6. Manage quality
7. Manage client communication and expectations
8. Negotiate changes of scope

Each lawyer picked one or more of these areas to focus on, based on their personal needs and interests.  Then our proprietary process focused on the customized Legal Project Management Quick Reference Guide we had created for Clark Wilson, and helped each lawyer identify the tasks that could have the most immediate and significant impact for their practice.

Note that we did not tell lawyers what to do.  If you’ve ever tried that, you know how rarely it works.  Instead, we structured the situation so they had easy access to summaries of tactics that had worked for other lawyers and professionals, and they told us what would work best for them.

The action items they agreed to included writing monthly one-page status reports on a few key matters based on the suggested format in our Guide (see point 7 above), using the Matter Planning Template in our Guide to plan the details of a complex set of assignments (see point 2), and using our Project Risk Analysis Template from the Guide to identify potential problems in advance before they had a chance to affect the budget (see point 5).

Of course, there is nothing radical about any of these action items.  What’s radical is the simple fact that law firms are actually putting them into practice without huge investments in training, software and/or process reengineering. Now.

The day after the workshop, I called Darren Donnelly, the project manager for our workshop and one of the participants, to ask how he thought it went.  I most enjoyed the part of the conversation where he talked about why he thought it had gone “very very well.”  But I learned the most when he talked about how our process had guaranteed practical next steps and increased the chances of successful implementation.  As Darren summed it up, “It’s always better if people come up with their own ideas.”

For the next 30 days, LegalBizDev principal Steve Barrett, will be following up with each participant to provide support, and to help them fine tune activities to maximize results.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

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.