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 I Can Help You
Legal Project Management Training, Certification and Support
After completing one of my courses you will understand the key principles of legal project management, feel confident about putting them into action and become more able 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 my courses.
The International Institute of Legal Project Management (IILPM) certification is now widely recognised, with IILPM Legal Project PractitionersTM 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.
Legal Project Management Training Courses
I deliver two broad classes of legal project management training courses: IILPM certification courses and shorter non-certification courses.
IILPM LPM certification courses last either two days (Legal Project Associate – LPA), or three days (Legal Project Practitioner – LPP).
Certification courses
- Are based on the IILPM’s 4-Phase Legal Project Management Framework
- Cover traditional (‘predictive’) project techniques as well as Agile (‘adaptive’) techniques
- Have a lot of workshops and exercises so students get some guided practice at applying project management to legal matters.
Shorter non-certification legal project management courses can last varying amounts of time, although most commonly I run ‘bite-sized’ sessions of about 90 minutes or sessions of half a day.
Non-certification 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 and
- Courses for in-house legal teams.
A number of my courses are public courses open to individual subscription.
You can find out about my public legal project management courses currently available and scheduled for 2024 here.
What Is Legal Process Improvement?
Legal Process Improvement can be defined as
A structured methodology for optimizing 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.
Legal Process Improvement Training Courses
The International Institute of Legal Project Management (IILPM) has created the certification of Legal Process Improvement Professional (LPIP).
LPIP training and certification is relevant to anyone with an interest in improving processes in the legal services industry.
The training and certification course lasts two days and there are no pre-requisites for attendance.
After completing my two day IILPM accredited training course you will become a certified Legal Process Improvement Professional (LPIP).
Testimonials
About me – Antony Smith
I am 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. I am 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).
I have considerable experience of project management in all kinds of legal environments: solicitors firms (Pinsent Masons, Berrymans Lace Mawer), academia (School of Law, King’s College London) and legal software development organisations. I enjoyed working as a Strategic Project Manager at Axxia / LexisNexis for more than 10 years.
Some Of My Blog Posts
Providing estimates of matter cost and duration is an essential part of the legal project…
Legal project management skills, methods and tools are all connected. So why not present them…
Legal Project Management has grown immensely since I started this blog site in 2012. Most…
In my last post I argued that well-known principles of supply chain management can be…
In the latest edition of his book Tomorrow’s Lawyers, Richard Susskind says that The discipline…
When running legal projects of all kinds, meetings are necessary. If run well, legal project…
The International Institute of Legal Project Management (IILPM) has recently published its Legal Project Management…
‘The Legal Team of The Future: Law+ Skills’ is a book written by Adam Curphey,…
