Legal Business Development and Project Management

The Top Four Facts Law Firm Leaders Need to Know About LPM (Part 2 of 2)

Fact 2: Experts disagree about the best way to define LPM (cont. from Part 1)

In defining LPM, we believe that lawyers must take a systematic approach that is closely related to the Agile approach to project management.  Stated simply, we encourage lawyers to use an iterative process that focuses on key LPM issues, one at a time, in their order of importance.

In an article entitled “Agile: A Non-traditional Approach to Legal Project Management,” Kim Craig, then SeyfarthLean’s global director of legal process improvement, and Jenny Lee, a senior project manager with Seyfarth, explained why Agile is particularly relevant to the legal profession:

Traditional project management focuses on robust, comprehensive, mandatory project documentation with lengthy project charters, detailed project plans, complex status reports and rigorous, formal change control logs… [But] the world of legal service delivery is fast-paced and unpredictable. In legal matters, we cannot possibly know everything that will be involved with litigation at the outset. Developing an overall strategy is generally common practice, but detailed, cradle-to-grave planning is impossible.[1]

Agile contrasts with the more traditional approach to project management which holds that every project should start with a well-defined plan.  Only after that is completed and approved do you begin working your way to the end, one sequential step at a time.  

The traditional approach is also known as the “waterfall” approach because progress is seen as flowing steadily from the top to the bottom (as in a waterfall).  It typically sees projects in terms of five key phases or steps such as:

• Analysis
• Design
• Implementation
• Testing
• Evaluation

In some cases, firms have hired LPM Directors based on their “waterfall” project management experience in construction, government contracting, and other areas where traditional techniques are used and Agile techniques are not.  This has led to many stories of LPM Directors who could not or would not adapt to a legal environment, and who ended up working with the very small group of partners that were interested in project charters and Gantt charts.

So, if anyone tells you that LPM is defined by five steps such as analysis, design, implementation, testing and evaluation, beware.  They are describing the traditional waterfall approach, not the Agile approach which applies better to lawyers. As the old cliché says, “you won’t get a second chance to make a first impression,” and attempts to apply the traditional waterfall approach have set back the cause of LPM at many firms.

Fact 3:  LPM success requires long-term managerial support

In our work with hundreds of law firms, we’ve seen the importance of follow-up over and over again.  In every single case where we have seen a firm make significant LPM progress, it was led by influential partners or members of the executive committee who were strong believers in LPM.  In a few cases, we’ve seen LPM programs make an enormous amount of progress when they were led by a powerful internal champion, and then slow to a crawl when that decision-maker left the firm.

Many firms have individual lawyers or practice groups that are quite advanced in LPM, but in our opinion not a single law firm in the world can yet say that LPM has truly taken hold across the entire firm. LPM aims to change habits that have been reinforced over decades, and to help firms constantly adjust to evolving client demands.  Having long-term managerial support is critical to success.

Fact 4: Law Firm Partners Don’t Know What to Do Differently

According to Altman Weil’s 2019 Law Firms in Transition Survey (LFiT, p. 44), most law firm partners (60%) don’t know what to do differently, and that’s why law firms aren’t doing more to change the way they deliver legal services. That might also explain why most law firm partners (69%) resist most change efforts (LFiT, p. 44).

If you’re a law firm leader who wants to make positive changes at your firm, you absolutely must be able to demonstrate how things can be done differently, and with positive results. At LegalBizDev, we have been successfully coaching lawyers in LPM over the past decade. In this way, we help law firm partners become internal LPM champions who advocate for LPM by sharing their success stories with other lawyers at the firm.

This blog series was adapted from the fifth edition of the Legal Project Management Quick Reference Guide, an online library of LPM tools and templates which is updated twice a year.

[1]   Kim Craig's article originally appeared in the International Legal Technology Association’s (ILTA’s) December 2013 white paper titled, “Business and Financial Management: Wrangling the Wild Ride.”

The Top Four Facts Law Firm Leaders Need to Know About LPM (Part 1 of 2)

Law firm leaders who are interested in legal project management (LPM), but too busy to dig into the details, should focus on the four critical facts presented in this 2-part blog series.

Fact 1:  Clients want LPM

Any law firm that has responded to an RFP in the last few years knows that client requests for LPM are growing rapidly.

Similarly, survey after survey has shown that legal clients are seeking greater efficiency from firms.  For example, in its 2019 Chief Legal Officers (CLO) Survey (p. 49), Altman Weil provided 238 CLOs with a list of ten possible service improvements, and asked “please select … [the improvements] that you would most like to see from your outside counsel.”  The top three things clients want were all closely related to LPM:

1. Greater cost reduction (58%)
2. Improved budget forecasting (40%)
3. Non-hourly based pricing structures (33%)

Even when clients fail to ask for LPM by name, the results that clients are looking for definitely fall under the term, including minimizing surprises.

If you believe that your clients are different and that they care only about legal quality and not about cost, consider yourself very lucky. But note that if you are wrong, you are at risk of losing these clients to competitors who focus on improving service with LPM.

Fact 2:  Experts disagree about the best way to define LPM

There is widespread agreement that clients want LPM and that it can pay off for firms by protecting business and increasing realization and profitability. But experts still disagree about exactly how LPM should be defined. These arguments have slowed LPM’s progress, as seen in this quote from an AmLaw 200 firm leader from one of our past surveys (p. 89):

We were just at a board meeting last week where we were talking about whether we should do formalized project management training. My answer to that is obviously yes, we absolutely should. But first we need to agree on what legal project management is.

For years, we have argued for a broad definition that embraces a very wide range of management techniques, including pricing, communication, process improvement, and much more:  LPM increases client satisfaction and firm profitability by applying proven techniques to improve the management of legal matters.

By our definition, any lawyer who has ever planned a budget or managed a team has served as a legal project manager. But what was “good project management” for lawyers a few years ago is no longer good enough. Clients are now choosing law firms based on their ability to apply a more systematic and disciplined approach that delivers more value more quickly.

Our systematic approach to LPM revolves around improvements in eight key areas:

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

The key to success in delivering more value more quickly is to find the “low-hanging fruit”:  The management tactics that are most likely to help each individual to increase value and/or profitability.

As Barbara Boake and Rick Kathuria summarized in their book Project Management for Lawyers (p. 14):  “project management is a tool box—choose only what you need to most effectively manage [each] project.”

In part 2 of this blog series, we will discuss how our approach to LPM is similar to the Agile approach to project management, and how LPM success requires long-term managerial support.

This blog series was adapted from the fifth edition of the Legal Project Management Quick Reference Guide, an online library of LPM tools and templates which is updated twice a year.