LPM Case Study: Hanson Bridgett (Part 1 of 3)
By Jim Hassett and Jonathan Groner
“The law firm of the future will require many new skills that were never taught in law school,” according to Andrew Giacomini, the managing partner of Hanson Bridgett, a northern California law firm with more than 150 attorneys in four offices. “That’s why we have decided to make a significant investment in training our lawyers in legal project management (LPM), value pricing, and leadership training, to enable them to be more successful.”
This series of posts discusses the process and results of the LPM portion of Hanson Bridgett’s training, which began in July 2013 when partner Garner Weng and Chief Information Officer Chris Fryer organized a group of 11 attorneys to compare several variations of our LPM coaching program.
Most of the firms we work with these days concentrate on two months of one-to-one LPM coaching, which looks for “low hanging fruit” and applies LPM to ongoing real-world engagements as explained in several previous case studies in this blog and on our web page. The one-to-one approach allows any number of lawyers to begin whenever it is most convenient. However, the best approach for any given firm depends on its culture and its needs, and based on the results with their first group, Hanson Bridgett decided to organize the coaching into groups, beginning each with a just-in-time training workshop on LPM. At the end of the two months, each lawyer also had the option of completing a third month. (Only a few have exercised that option, but everyone seems to appreciate having it available.)
Based on the success of the 11 in the pilot test, they offered this LPM program to 13 more lawyers beginning in April 2014 and then another 14 starting last March, for a total of 38 to date. Fryer expects to keep offering this program until he has offered it to all the lawyers who could benefit, with “sessions for 10-14 lawyers about once a year in the future.” The program has been helpful to a wide range of lawyers, including some of the most senior partners in the firm.
Larry Cirelli is a senior trial lawyer and business litigator. In addition to his business litigation practice, he is frequently asked to step in and assist when the firm goes to trial in almost any type of matter.
“I have always applied certain principles that I would call LPM,” says Cirelli. “For example, I always ask the client at the start of a matter, ‘What are your goals? What is your ideal resolution of the matter?’ Then I create a plan to attempt to achieve those goals. I use an Outlook task list in part to do so. Outlook allows you to set deadlines and relate each item on the list to the overall strategy of the case. But just because I’ve been doing this all along doesn’t mean I can’t improve. There are always better ways to do things.”
Cirelli says that as a result of his LPM coaching with Mike Egnatchik, he streamlined his task list, added subfolders to break down tasks more precisely, and added management objectives such as ticklers to stay in touch with clients on a regular basis.
Also in the coaching, Cirelli discussed the way he handles certain cases all over the United States for a major client – cases that tend to follow a pattern. He then worked with John Murphy, Hanson Bridgett’s senior value pricing specialist, to set up budgets for these types of matters. As Fryer explained, the pricing position was created in December 2014 to “improve budgets for AFAs and hourly matters in order to make our budgeting approach more professional and ultimately more profitable.”
According to Cirelli: “Working with John, we set up budgets for these cases using the information we had gleaned from completed cases to guide us with regard to the time needed for each specific task. So we were able to say for each case, ‘Did we/could we go over budget? If so, why? Did we underestimate anything? Can we provide service to the client in a more efficient manner?’” Using these budget templates, he was able to reassess and rebudget some of the eight ongoing cases. “In each case we sent these budgets to the client and the client was very pleased with this approach.”
“The whole training process has made us more efficient in handling all these cases and it has made me more productive,” Cirelli concludes. “You can never stop learning and improving. And although I already had my system of project management, now that we have the technology to use LPM, it helped me make my system more efficient.”