What follows are five takeaways from the Panel discussing the ‘Evolution and Future Trends of Legal Project Management (LPM)’, during the recent online conference of International Institute of Legal Project Management (IILPM).

I had the pleasure of hosting the panel, and the panelists were:

• Jo Nerona, Global Lead, CDG, Legal Project Management, Freshfields LLP (Dubai).
• María Pedrosa Martínez, Head of NewLaw & Digital, Repsol (Spain).
• Jacob Capleton, Senior Manager, Legal Project Management, Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer (London, United Kingdom).
• Mori Kabiri, Founder Legal Operations KPIs (USA).

The panelists were convened to discuss the IILPM’s 2025 Global Survey of Legal Project Management.

You can download the survey report here – for free!

The five takeaways for me are:

1. Legal Project Management is a global phenomenon

At the ILLPM we already knew that LPM had gone global years ago and the 2025 survey confirmed this for us.

In addition to the IILPM having Accredited Training Providers in many parts of the world, the IILPM has for the last four years ran its global awards, and throughout that time winners have come from across the globe.

The geographical range of respondents who kindly participated in the survey confirmed the global nature of legal project management.

2. Legal Project Management is still growing

The survey results showed, and panelists confirmed, that legal project management is still growing.

70% of respondents reported that LPM is growing in their organization at least moderately (59%) or significantly (21%).

Panelists enhanced the data with their own experience.

We learned about the legal transformation project at Repsol, Spain (which was also a 2025 IILPM award winner) and sustained LPM growth at Freshfields and Herbert Smith Freehills and Kramer.

3. Client Demand is the primary driver behind the growth of legal project management

Although the survey results listed the need for cost control and efficiency as the main drivers behind the growth of LPM, the panel emphasized the factor put into third place by survey respondents: client demand.

Panelists explained that clients now expect a high degree of legal project management maturity from firms in the more sophisticated legal markets.

It was not too long ago that having a legal project management team in place acted as a market differentiator, but that time has now passed.

Legal project management is a service which is expected by an increasing number of clients, so it is now part of the standard offering of the largest and most successful law firms.

I should emphasise that, in my experience, legal project management is not limited to only large multinational law firms.

While the largest law firms have invested in LPM most significantly, much smaller practices have also devoted time and resources to developing their LPM capability.  As evidence of this consider the fact that I have trained and certified lawyers and legal operations staff in law firms of all shapes and sizes.

LPM is also applied and practiced by in-house legal teams of various sizes.  Arguably, LPM is even more important to in-house teams than to private practice law firms.

Generally, in-house legal teams are smaller than most private practice teams and so they are under even greater pressure to be efficient, maximizing their resources at every turn.  LPM helps with this in a myriad of ways, most obviously making sure the right staff are doing the right work at the right time.

LPM, including risk management, also helps in-house legal teams triage instructions received and assess which matters should remain in-house, which matters can be placed with outside counsel and which matters can be driven by self-service tools and resources.

Clear and concise matter reporting is another key feature of LPM and this benefits everyone: in-house lawyers, private practice lawyers, legal support teams and clients.

4. Technology is important for legal project management development

Survey results show that respondents believe technology is important to the continued development of LPM (38%) but more interestingly perhaps, only 18% of respondents think that technology is essential.

As discussed further later, legal services remains a human centred business and this may in part explain why many working in the field do not believe technology to be essential for a successful LPM practice.

Another reason is likely to be that many LPM teams have great success with relatively straightforward project management tools, such as templates created in MS Word or MS Excel.

Panel discussion also confirmed that many, if not most, people now use Gen AI tools to help with general tasks such as research, generating to-do lists, and summarizing documents.

However there is some way to go yet it seems before AI is used more widely with what might be called more technical project management tasks such as scoping, estimating, scheduling and risk management.

5. Law is still a people business

According to the survey results the top two skills required of legal professionals in future, including legal project managers, are data analytics and familiarization with technology.

Once again, the panel chose to emphasise the group of skills ranked in third place by survey respondents overall: communication and other soft skills.

The overwhelming view of the panel was that while familiarity with technology and data analysis are great skills to have, legal services is still a people-based business.

Ultimately clients and colleagues most value having a real person to interact with.

Another point to note here is that the role of legal project manager is a client facing one, hence the importance of communication and other soft skills.

Find out more about the evolution and future trends in legal project management

LPM and legal operations have developed enormously over the last few years and the IILPM will continue to be a global resource for everyone interested in these areas.

For example, some of my IILPM colleagues have written books about LPM and these books, along with others, can be found at the IILPM’s library page on its website here.

The website you are reading has almost 200 blog posts about all aspects of legal project management, with posts stretching back as far as 2012.  Please do search and browse the site, as I am sure you will find plenty of food for thought.

If you would like to find out more about the evolution and future trends of LPM and acquire a range of LPM skills and templates you can apply immediately, why not attend an IILPM accredited training course in legal project management or legal process improvement?

There are lots of training course options to choose from: live in-person, live online, public courses or private courses for legal teams both in private practice and in-house.

We would love to see you on one of our courses sometime soon!