Case study: Legal project management at Williams Mullen

Many law firms are talking about project management these days, and some have even begun training their lawyers on its general principles.  But only a few firms have taken the next step of converting thought into action by introducing new tools and techniques to serve their clients better.

Williams Mullen, a 300-lawyer firm based primarily in Virginia and North Carolina, believes that the first firms to actually apply project management will have an enormous competitive advantage.  So they have begun implementing a plan to make Williams Mullen the legal project management leader in their region.

Their first major step was to sign up six of their most influential senior partners for an in-house just-in-time training program.  In all honesty, they saw this as an experiment.  Their hope was that these six leaders would quickly begin to identify specific real-world changes that could improve efficiency and client service.  But if the experiment failed, and the six senior partners did not see results, the program could have ended there.

I led a two-hour webinar last November with three litigators and three transactional lawyers, including the section chairs of three key practice groups: litigation, corporate, and financial services and real estate. In this brainstorming session, lawyers used our Legal Project Management Quick Reference Guide, and quickly identified a number of action items that could have an immediate impact on efficiency and client service.

But thinking about project management was the easy part.  The hard part was doing it.  So for the next 30 days, LegalBizDev Principal Mike Egnatchik worked with each of these six partners to follow up on their action items.  In late December, we had a review meeting to discuss what had been accomplished, and what had not.

Although it was only six lawyers and only thirty days, they saw immediate results, especially in the area of new checklists, templates and forms for client intake and matter management.  Some of the elements came straight from our book, and other elements were developed by Williams Mullen to meet their unique needs.  My favorite was the basic budget template one lawyer developed for estimating new matters.  The firm has started using these tools for training, for quality assurance, and to begin standardizing the management process. 

That is not to say that any of these tools are 100% complete.  The world has a nasty habit of changing, and tools like these need to change too.  But this experience enabled Williams Mullen to complete the hardest step: the first one.  And it has led their lawyers to talk more about project management issues in their internal meetings, including at a recent leadership retreat.

More importantly, they have begun discussing legal project management with clients.  Program manager John Paris recently met with a potential client who was interviewing three law firms and wanted details about how Williams Mullen would handle a particular matter.  John answered by reviewing details of the eight key issues discussed in our just-in-time training and explained in our Legal Project Management Quick Reference Guide:

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
6. Manage quality
7. Manage client communication and expectations
8. Negotiate changes of scope

The client was convinced, and a few days later Williams Mullen got the business.

Since then, the firm has made a commitment to aggressively pursue project management.  Their Innovation Committee now operates under a plan derived from the eight issues in our book, and so do five of their subcommittees: Alternative Fee Arrangements, Legal Outsourcing, Knowledge Management, Social Media, and Vision 2020.  They have also scheduled another just-in-time training program which begins next week.