Legal Process Improvement
Training and Certification
What Is Legal Project Management (LPM)?
Legal Project Management is the application of project management to the delivery of legal services.
Applying project management principles, tools and techniques to client matters helps legal service delivery teams improve the management of cost, pricing, risk, resources and client communications.
How We Can Help You
Legal Project Management Training, Certification and Support
After completing one of our courses you will understand the key principles of legal project management, feel confident about putting them into action and become more able at leading teams and driving legal project management roll-out in your organisation.
Legal project management training is for legal service professionals and professional project managers wanting to transition into legal services. Solicitors, barristers, costs lawyers, professional support lawyers, professional project managers looking to enter the legal service industry and legal industry consultants wanting to improve services to their clients have all been on our courses.
The International Institute of Legal Project Management (IILPM) certification is now widely recognised, with IILPM Legal Project ProfessionalsTM or Legal Project AssociatesTM or Legal Process Improvement ProfessionalsTM working in more than 50 countries (and counting). IILPM certification provides assurance to legal service organisations and their clients that IILPM graduates have a thorough understanding of legal project management and are competent to play leading roles in legal service delivery teams.
We run two kinds of legal project management training courses:
Public courses which are open to individual subscription.
Private courses which we deliver at the request of legal teams.
All our public courses running during 2025 are IILPM LPM certification courses lasting either two days (Legal Project Associate certification – LPA), or three days (Legal Project Professional certification – LPP).
In summary the courses are
- Based on the IILPM’s 4-Phase Legal Project Management Framework
- Cover Traditional (‘predictive’) project management techniques as well as Agile (‘adaptive’) techniques
- Show students and their organisations how to develop their legal project management maturity
- Have a lot of workshops and exercises so students get some guided practice at applying project management to legal matters.
Team based legal project management courses vary in duration – anything from 90 minute bite-sized sessions to 3 day IILPM certification courses.
We usually tailor course content to meet team requirements and we always encourage teams to provide us with scenarios of typical matters they run. We then take teams through project based approaches for matter management using their scenarios.
An illustrative list of team based legal project management courses include:
- Courses lasting up to two hours for partners and senior management staff in law firms
- Half day courses for practising solicitors
- Courses for specific cohorts, such as potential partners
- Courses for in-house legal teams.
What Is Legal Process Improvement?
Legal Process Improvement can be defined as
A structured methodology for optimising legal and business processes, so that legal professionals can deliver high-quality, cost-effective services in less time and with less effort.
The structured methodology most often chosen as a starting point for legal process improvement is Lean / Six Sigma.
As with project management, when process improvement methodologies meet real world demands of law firms and in-house legal departments, they need to be adapted to fit organisational culture, resourcing and process improvement maturity.
We run two kinds of legal process improvement training courses:
Public courses which are open to individual subscription.
Private courses which we deliver at the request of legal teams.
All our public legal process improvement courses running during 2025 are IILPM LPM certification courses lasting two days (Legal Process Improvement Professional certification – LPIP).
All these courses are delivered online.
In summary the courses cover:
- Making an effective start with process improvement and maximising results from limited access to busy lawyers
- Planning and delivering process improvement projects properly
- Working with stakeholders
- Process mapping – why, when and how to use process maps of various kinds.
Team based legal process improvement courses usually last one day (although some teams also elect to do two days’ training and become IILPM certified).
Most often teams ask us not to spend too much time on the detail of formal process improvement methods. Their preference is to experience a structured approach towards understanding and improving their existing processes and creating new ones.
Teams do learn how to solve some of their immediate problems during the training, but the main goal of this training is to make sure the teams understand core principles and techniques of process improvement (including process mapping) and feel comfortable applying these to their process improvement projects after the course.
Testimonials
About Us – Richard Allen
Richard has 40 years’ unique litigation, legal costs and practice management experience, being one of the first to achieve Costs Lawyer status and make partner in a solicitor’s practice.
He was a founding and longest serving non-executive director of the Costs Lawyer Standards Board (CLSB) and is an accredited mediator and coach.
About Us – Antony Smith
Antony is a solicitor by training, with postgraduate qualifications in law, computing and project management. These have been supplemented by continued professional development in project management along with a successful record of project delivery.
He is a founding member of the International Institute of Legal Project Management (IILPM), and full member of the Association of Project Management (APM) and the Project Management Institute (PMI).
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