Legal Project Management Support

Supporting You After Training

I will support you after training to help you and your organisation develop competence in legal project management and help ensure that your legal project management implementation is successful. I do this by providing:

Mentoring and Coaching

As a non-practising solicitor and still practising project manager I appreciate that sometimes it can be really tough implementing good legal project management practices.  For lawyers, the pressure of ‘the day job’ and the attraction of ‘just getting things done’ are ever present; this means the opportunity to step back and try something new – legal project management – can feel very limited.

Full time legal project managers face a slightly different set of pressures with perhaps the most pressing being able to show how they are clearly adding value to matter management and client satisfaction.

After initial training I will remain available to discuss with you how best to implement legal project management in your particular environment.  I will also help you identify realistic targets to aim for re matter delivery, and help you achieve them.

Perhaps most importantly of all, I will help you develop your leadership skills by applying the principles of good project management.

LPM Tools, Templates and Software

During the LPA and LPP courses you will be introduced to some legal project management templates and get some practice using them with reference to legal scenarios.  This will provide you with a solid baseline from which to start and / or improve your legal project management.

As you might expect, I have quite a large library of legal project management templates which I can share with you as your experience and needs develops.  I can also work with you to help you adapt and amend the templates and supporting techniques (such as estimating and agile practices) to best fit your requirements.

Maximising the benefits of applying legal project management will usually require the application of supporting I.T systems.

To assist with the production of legal work, this software may be legal workflow, contract management or perhaps even wholly new practice management software.

Good legal project management practices can also be supported by specialised legal project management software, while demonstrating the value of legal project management over time will often require good data analytics and reporting software.

Most of my professional life has been spent in legal I.T, in various guises (software developer, project manager, product manager and power user).  I can help you find and implement the most appropriate systems for your needs.

Process Improvements

For some, legal project management is best visualised as a wrapper, wrapping around a series of processes used by lawyers to produce their legal work.  If the underlying processes are themselves inefficient, then the effectiveness of any legal project management effort will be compromised.

I can show you how to conduct a process mapping exercise effectively: how to baseline your current processes, how to run process improvement workshops, how to create new processes and, most importantly, how to implement new processes properly.

Unfortunately, some law firms have endured the pain of process improvement initiatives – they have run the workshops and created new process maps – but they have not realised the benefits of applying new processes. Ultimately, this is due to a failure of their project management.  Process improvement initiatives must be run as properly managed projects themselves if they are to succeed.

If you would like to find out more about the detail of legal process improvement, I also run a separate two day Legal Process Improvement Practitioner (LPIP) course.