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.