About

Helping you develop your legal project management and legal process improvement capability.

Creating more effective lawyers and legal teams with project management

The U.K’s largest law firms now employ full-time legal project managers, working alongside their lawyer colleagues.  I have for a long time believed that legal project management is applicable to all lawyers and all law firms, not only the very largest.  The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) agrees.

In its Statement of Competence for Solicitors, the SRA describes many tasks expected to be performed by all solicitors in terms of project management.  For example, the Statement refers to solicitors ‘meeting timescales, resource requirements and budgets’ (for more please see Section D of the Competence Statement).  This sounds like a high level definition of ‘a project’ to me.

Developing lawyers’ project management skills is just one aspect of creating an effective project based legal service organisation. I believe all of the following are required:

1. Tools – ranging from document templates to software applications.
2. Methods and Processes – standard matter project plans supported by lower level processes and activities.
3. Skills – of both lawyers and support staff, working together as productive teams.
4. Organisational Project Maturity – to help ensure that the project delivery capability of the firm continues to grow.

The ultimate aim is not to become better at legal project management per se, but for lawyers to become more effective and clients to become happier with the service they receive. Happier clients are more likely to pay their bills quicker, instruct their law firm with more work and provide referrals.

I help lawyers and their colleagues achieve these aims by providing legal project management training, certification and support.

Creating more effective lawyers and legal teams with process improvement

I have worked on various kinds of process improvement projects in law firms since the late 1980’s.

For a long time process improvement activity was considered as something which only firms engaged in ‘high volume, low value’ legal service provision did.  This is no longer true, as law firms (and in-house teams) of all shapes and sizes now look to improve their processes.

There is a clear relationship between legal process improvement and legal project management (which I explain further in this blog post).

Experience shows that it can take longer for the benefits of process improvement to be appreciated compared to legal project management.  Legal project managers usually have a client facing role and hence a higher profile than legal process improvement professionals.  Hence the work of legal project managers can be more readily seen compared to that of legal process improvement professionals.

‘Improving processes’ can sound rather vague.  The reality however is that its not just ‘processes’ which are improved.  In my experience legal process improvement is in practice all about improving the effectiveness of legal teams.

If you would like to take a process driven approach to improving legal team working, why not consider attending one of my legal process improvement training courses?

My professional journey

I am a solicitor by training, with postgraduate qualifications in law, computing and project management.  I am a Legal Project Practitioner (LPP) and a founder member of the International Institute for Legal Project Management (IILPM).  I am also qualified in the Prince II project management methodology (practitioner level) and I am a full member of the Association for Project Management (APM) and the Project Management Institute (PMI).  

I have a record of successful project delivery 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.

Since 2012 I have been an independent consultant, providing project management and process improvement services to law firms.  I also write regularly about legal project management.  PDFs of some published articles can be downloaded from here, and you can find my blog site’s home page here and subscribe to my blog posts here.

What am I like to work with?

People tend to describe me as being an enthusiastic, honest, hardworking individual with a sense of humour.  I come from Liverpool originally which may help explain the latter.   I am an objective and considered thinker, with a preference for basing decisions on facts followed by thoughtful analysis.  My default mode is to turn initiatives into plans with objectives, and this is perhaps why I have also been called a ‘completion expert’.  I have over 35 years experience of working in the legal services market and I understand what it takes for individuals and organisations to succeed in that market.

This understanding underpins my legal project management training.  My training reflects the need for effective delivery of legal services, as practised in the real world by solicitors, barristers, in-house lawyers, government lawyers, cost lawyers, professional support lawyers, paralegals and business development staff.  I really enjoy running legal project management training courses and feedback from students shows they enjoy it too.  My courses are comprehensive, intensive and at times challenging.  They are great learning experiences and we all enjoy a few laughs along the way.