Legal Project Management Training For Teams

Legal Project Management Training For Teams

I train legal service teams, in both private practice law firms and in-house.

Although core elements of the training are usually the same – i.e., covering principles, methods and tools of legal project management – the format and detail will often vary from team to team.

Tailoring my training to meet particular team requirements is not a problem.

Some teams want very short introductions to legal project management, some want half day sessions and some teams prefer the full two or three day certification courses.

Most of my team LPM training is delivered in-person and on-site, although some teams prefer training via zoom.

As you can see, there are lots of permutations to choose from.

Usually I like to discuss the nature and content of team training with a team leader and / or the training coordinator.  The purpose of this is to make sure we tailor the training to meet the needs of the team concerned.

I have trained many teams and I am sure I can help your team improve its service to clients and become more effective and profitable.

Some illustrative examples of the kind of training I have delivered for teams over the last 13 years are given below.

Please consider this information as a starting point.  I know that, working together, we can create the right training session for your team.

The illustrative examples are:

1. Short Introductory Courses for Partners and Senior Managers in Law Firms
2. Half Day Courses for Practising Solicitors
3. Short Courses for Lawyer Cohorts (such as Potential Partners)
4. Courses for In-House Legal Teams.

Short Workshops for Partners and Senior Managers

These tend to be workshops of between one and two hours duration.

The idea behind the workshops is to give participants a feel for what it is like to apply key project management principles to legal matters and to generate discussion about how legal project management might work in their practice area.

As a starting point, typical content includes:

1. Introduction: The International Institute of Legal Project Management (IILPM) 4-Phase LPM Framework.
2. Matter Scoping
3. Risk Management
4. Client Communications
5. Discussion: Implementing legal project management.

Please bear in mind that the above is a baseline starting point.  I have often tailored the introductory workshop to meet specific requirements, such as delivering workshops and presentations to law firm partner meetings (practice group and firm wide).

Half-Day Course for Practising Solicitors

This course is designed to help practising solicitors comply with the requirements of the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s Competence Statement for Solicitors.

Section D of the Competence Statement provides that solicitors must demonstrate they can

“Initiate, plan, prioritise and manage work activities and projects to ensure that they are completed efficiently, on time and to an appropriate standard, both in relation to their own work and work that they lead or supervise, including

1. Clarifying instructions so as to agree the scope and objectives of the work
2. Taking into account the availability of resources in initiating work activities
3. Meeting timescales, resource requirements and budgets
4. Monitoring, and keeping other people informed of, progress
5. Dealing effectively with unforeseen circumstances
6. Paying appropriate attention to detail”

Hence this half day course provides an introduction to the project tasks referred to in Section D of the SRA’s Competence Statement for Solicitors:

1. Introduction: The International Institute of Legal Project Management (IILPM) 4-Phase LPM Framework.
2. Matter Definition (including high level scoping, resourcing and communication planning).
3. Risk Management.
4. Building a Delivery Schedule.
5. Managing the Delivery Schedule.
6. Effective Communications.

As with all my live shorter courses, the above outline is a starting point.  What often happens in practice is that I tailor the short course to meet the needs of the team concerned.  This often means working with team representatives beforehand to develop a realistic legal and commercial scenario the team can relate to – I then show how project management techniques can be applied in context of the work the team is most familiar with.

Short Courses for Cohorts (such as Potential Partners)

Over the past few years I have been invited to deliver project management training to cohorts of Senior Associates who are in their firm’s ‘potential partner’ development and training scheme.

In essence, this type of training is designed to introduce potential partners to project and programme management as part of their continued professional development.

I have trained some ‘potential partner’ groups in a single training session lasting half a day, while I had the pleasure of training another group in 90 minute sessions over a number of weeks.  While I am happy to fit in with differing requirements of different law firms, I have to say that the shorter 90 minute sessions seem to work better.  They are more focused, do not take up too much of the Associates time and allow absorption of the training from session to session.

There is also a slightly different focus with ‘potential partner’ training in that the emphasis is more on how to apply project and programme management techniques to help achieve objectives commonly found in law firms.

Short Courses for In-House Legal Teams

In-house legal team training tends to be even more customised than private practice team training.  It often also morphs into consultancy and problem solving sessions.

In-house legal teams usually have specific issues they want to address although, that said, the most common issues I am asked to consider for in-house teams are:

• Matter scoping
• Client engagement (including client communications and developing a structured framework for client engagement)
• Management of outside counsel.

Generally, in-house legal teams are much less well resourced compared to their private practice colleagues and so the emphasis is on providing straightforward tools and advice which can be implemented quickly.