The International Institute of Legal Project Management (IILPM) has recently published its Legal Project Management Maturity model.

The model is intended to help legal service organizations of all kinds self-assess their current level of legal project management maturity.  It also helps them plot their way forward towards further maturity.

Before explaining what the IILPM’s legal project management maturity model is and what it looks like, I will explain what project management maturity models are, the correlation between project maturity levels and commercial success and how this correlation works in practice.

What are project management maturity models?

Project management maturity models are often represented as a series of levels or steps.

Most often, the models list 5 levels of project management maturity.  Level 1 is the lowest level of project management maturity, while level 5 is the highest level.

In addition to the baseline descriptions of each level, the models usually provide criteria for organizations to use so they can self-assess their project management maturity within the context of the model under consideration.

There are around 30 project management maturity models in existence, some better known than others.  Some models are industry agnostic, while others have been designed with specific industries in mind.

The IILPM’s legal project management maturity model has been designed for the legal service industry.

Why bother with project management maturity models?

Research, such as that by Price Waterhouse Cooper in its bi-annual State of Project Management surveys and reports, shows there is a direct correlation between an organization’s level of project management maturity and its commercial success.

Organizations with high levels of project management maturity tend to perform better than competitors with lower levels of project management maturity.

How does this correlation work?

The correlation between high levels of project management maturity and commercial success comes about because:

1. Mature organizations develop and apply standard methods and processes supporting project delivery
2. Which means they are very good at managing project risks, costs and scheduling etc.
3. Which increases the likelihood of successful project delivery
4. Successful projects are more likely to create and deliver services and products which client’s / customers value
5. Clients / customers will readily pay for the improved products and services they receive.
6. All this results in increasing effectiveness, reputation and profitability of the project delivery organization in its chosen market.

This has been seen time and again across all industry sectors, including the legal services sector.

Legal Project Management Maturity

The discipline of legal project management has been well-known for the last ten years or so.  Early adopter law firms continue to invest in their legal project management development.  Consequently they have a relatively high degree of legal project management maturity compared to some of their competitors.

Clifford Chance, winner of the IILPM’s 2022 global LPM Awards, is a good example of this.

Other law firms and in-house legal teams have embraced legal project management more recently.  It is therefore reasonable to expect that organizations with less experience of applying legal project management have a lesser degree of legal project management maturity compared to some early adopters.

That said, this is not always true.  Some legal service organizations have been able to make a lot of progress in a relatively short period of time.

The IILPM’s Legal Project Management Maturity Model

IILPM Legal Project Management Maturity Levels

In the IILPM’s LPM Maturity Model there are six levels, rather than the more standard five.

There are still some legal service providers who are simply unaware of the need for legal project management.  These legal service providers are at Level Zero – an absence of any recognition or support for legal project management.

I believe that every legal service organization can benefit from the application of legal project management principles and practices.  There is no ‘one size fits all’ but legal service organizations of any size and sophistication can adapt and apply some of the principles and practices of legal project management to help with their matter management.

Beyond level zero there are five more advanced levels in the IILPM’s Legal Project Management Maturity Model:

Level 1 – Emerging

Level 2 – Introduced

Level 3 – Implemented

Level 4 – Enhanced

Level 5 – Optimised.

There is no ceiling on how high the optimised level can be stretched.  When legal service organizations reach this level much of the work they do is about continuously improving their legal project management maturity.

Legal Project Management Maturity Development

The IILPM has also identified 5 criteria by which legal service organizations can self-assess and plan further development of their legal project management activity.

These criteria are:

Recognition

While it’s possible to make a start developing and applying LPM techniques from the ground-up and without any formal support from an organization’s senior partners or executives, longer term this is not sustainable.

Having the engagement and support of senior people helps propel LPM development in many ways, the most obvious being the freeing up of time and resources to support LPM development.

During the early stages of LPM development it must be accepted that there will need to be a, perhaps significant, amount of ‘non-chargeable’ time set aside for LPM training, practice and the creation of LPM supporting tools.

Senior management should also understand that LPM development is not necessarily a quick fix.  While there are usually some early ‘quick wins’ associated with LPM development (most often concerning improved client communications), it usually takes time for the benefits of applying LPM to emerge.  Hence senior management should be prepared to engage with and support LPM development longer term.

Tools and Practices

The creation of supporting tools and practices is a core activity of legal project management practitioners.  The IILPM supplies a core set of LPM templates to all its LPM trainees, and we encourage all our graduates to consider how the templates may be adapted to best fit the needs of their legal service organization.

Training

As you might expect, we at the IILPM see staff training as vital to improving organizational LPM maturity.  Everyone in legal service teams should receive some LPM training, even if only enough to understand the rationale behind project based legal service delivery.  Once this is understood, then all team members can then become effective project team members.  People performing the role and / or having the title of Legal Project Manager benefit from more in-depth training and certification.

Legal Project Manager Roles

One aspect of this is formal recognition that some legal service team members should be acting (at least part of the time) as legal project managers.  By which I mean that they will be consciously setting time aside to scope, plan and manage matters properly using project management tools and techniques.

Ideally the role of Legal Project Manager will be recognised, created and developed.  A natural extension of this is the creation of a well-defined career path for legal project managers, which might look like:

• Trainee / Apprentice Legal Project Manager, leading to
• Junior Legal Project Manager, leading to
• Legal Project Manager, leading to
• Senior Legal Project Manager, leading to
• Head of Legal Project Management, leading to
• Head of Legal Operations.

Some of the largest law firm in the U.K, which have invested in legal project management for the last 10 years or so, are able to offer this kind of career development for legal project managers.

Another aspect of legal project manager role development relates to the organizational understanding about what the role is in practice.  In the earlier days of LPM development, many legal project managers were expected to be Jacks and Jills of all trades.  They were given very wide briefs.  This was unrealistic and rather unfair on the legal project managers concerned.  Now as the discipline as a whole matures its possible to discern broad consensus about what can be reasonably expected of anyone holding one of the legal project manager roles listed above.

Legal Operations

The phrase ‘legal operations’ is most associated with in-house legal teams, but we are seeing more law firms create their legal operations departments too.  At the optimised level (Level 5) we would expect to see formal legal operations teams created and being made up of staff with skills in legal project management, legal process improvement and legal technology.  All the skills and expertise represented here are pooled together with the aim of enabling the most effective (and often innovative) delivery of legal services and products.

Another point to be made here is that legal project management does not and should not exist in splendid isolation from the rest of the commercial and business activity going on in the organisation concerned.  By way of illustration, consider the very early stages of legal project management development in a medium sized law firm: that firm will almost certainly already have project managers in its legal I.T department and business development department and drawing on the knowledge and experience of these people can help kick-start legal project management development.

Continuous Improvement of the legal project management maturity model

The IILPM’s legal project management maturity model will be developed further, as legal project management itself continues to evolve and develop.

If you would like to discuss any aspect of the model and your organizational legal project management development, especially training, please contact me.