Bloomberg Law Reports on Project Management (Part 2 of 2)

A few weeks ago, Bloomberg Law Reports published an article I wrote with Jonathan Groner entitled “Legal Project Management in the Trenches: What Lawyers Are Doing Today to Increase Efficiency.”  Part 2 of this article is reproduced below; part 1 can be found here.  To download a pdf of the complete article, click here.

As they transition to this new world, some firms are exploring increasing roles for professional project managers who are not lawyers. One example is Jim Hannigan, a project manager at Fenwick & West, who describes the goals of his firm’s LPM program very simply as: “Increased client satisfaction, increased realization, and increased productivity leading to more engagements.”

One thing Fenwick & West has been doing lately is “historical task coding,” in which financial analysts at the firm look back at past matters and use American Bar Association task codes to see how much particular aspects of each case cost and how much time they took. The firm then uses this past data as a basis for future bids in response to RFPs issued by prospective clients.

Another approach that Fenwick & West uses is to require the responsible attorney for every case over a certain amount to produce a budget in advance. To assist the lawyers, the firm employs a staff of four in-house budget analysts.

Non-lawyers also play a key role in Baker & McKenzie’s approach to LPM. In 2010, the firm brought in professional project manager Sarah Prime in its London office to help increase efficiency in key matters. Sarah often works as a billable member of the client team. In one instance a client requested that she be included on the team because “they valued the involvement of a project management resource and saw that it represented a cost effective approach, freeing up lawyer time to deliver high value services.”

Sarah works not just on individual matters, but also “on wider process efficiency. Both are equally important, as refinements captured on one matter can be fed into subsequent matters.”

The key to true efficiency is lawyer behavior, and the way things get done. Stuart Dodds, who was recently hired to fill Baker & McKenzie’s new position of Director of Global Pricing, explained that is why “Project management training is a key component of our associate and partner skills development, with a number of courses already implemented worldwide.”

According to Kirsty Wilson, Baker & McKenzie’s global head of reorganization, the result of this broad and deep commitment to LPM is that “Our clients go home happy in the knowledge that throughout each stage of the project there is complete transparency.”

While Fenwick & West has a required budget rule, Williams Mullen has instituted a two-hour staffing rule to eliminate the problem of “lawyer creep.” When they systematically analyzed staffing of past cases, Williams Mullen found that some cases that were supposed to have four lawyers assigned ended up with twice as many lawyers billing time to the client in a given month. This type of lawyer creep surprises clients and adds unneeded expense.

These days, according to partner John Paris, chair of Williams Mullen’s Innovation Committee, an essential element of any case management plan includes identification, in advance, of the lawyers who are authorized to work on the matter. Any member of the team who wants to bring in a new lawyer who will spend more than two hours on the matter must contact the responsible attorney for permission in advance.

“This does two things,” says Paris. “It avoids lawyer creep and it makes the responsible attorney truly responsible. It forces them to think through and solve issues on their own. There’s less redundancy. Fewer people need to know all the facts. It’s not just what the tasks are, but who is going to do them, and when. This type of planning, including the staffing rule, has proven extremely attractive to our clients.”

At Tucker Ellis & West, trial lawyer Jonathan Cooper has focused on process improvement, especially budgeting and risk assessment tools to plan litigation costs.

“We’ve developed software tools that help us estimate well in advance what something will cost, at least roughly, at the RFP stage,” Cooper says. “The idea is to turn budgeting more into something like TurboTax.”

The software, Cooper says, helps the firm ask questions like: “What are the really expensive points here? Do we really need to depose this expert?”

If you understand the risk, Cooper says, you can assess whether it’s worth the potential reward. One result has been that Tucker Ellis & West, which works mostly in the areas of defending mass tort claims, product liability, and pharmaceutical liability, is now deriving 60 percent of its revenues from non-hourly alternative fee arrangements.

Fasken Martineau, one of the largest law firms in Canada, is making legal project management a part of the firm’s culture through a series of “Lunch & Learn” and “Breakfast Club” sessions in which lawyers experienced in project management train six to eight other firm lawyers at one time.

“The intent is to break down barriers to understanding what LPM is,” says Sean Morley, a partner in the business law section. “In many instances lawyers are intuitively practicing LPM but not always in a disciplined way. We are developing standardized templates to assist in planning, budgeting and budget review, including task lists. We want to make the connection between planning discipline and cost-effective management of legal mandates. The firm is then in a better position to manage the file and to price it with a greater degree of confidence, whether the price is based on hourly rates or on an alternative fee arrangement.”

Clearly, LPM is gaining momentum.

As Foley’s David Simon summed it up: “It surprises me that more firms aren’t doing this already. Litigators need to think about a case from the point of view of the client’s business objectives. Corporate clients want more for less. . . . Your clients are telling you what they want you to do, so just do it.”

 © 2011 Bloomberg Finance L.P. Originally published by Bloomberg Finance L.P. Reprinted with permission. The opinions expressed are those of the authors.