What are the current trends and issues in Legal Project Management (LPM)?

Previously I have written about longer term trends in legal project management, but this article presents more of a snapshot of trends and issues for people wanting to develop their legal project management capability.

Why listen to me?  I spend a lot of time meeting and talking with a wide range of people in the legal services industry.  I also train many in legal project management and I have done so since 2012.

The legal project management trends and issues I see are:

Legal Project Management continues to gain traction

Some of the large international law firms headquartered in the City of London have been developing their LPM capability for the last ten years or so.

More recently many of these firms have created legal operations teams. This is where people with knowledge in legal project management, legal process improvement and legal tech work closely alongside each other to help improve legal service delivery.

But it’s now abundantly clear that LPM is no longer limited to the largest law firms.

All law firms, other than small high street firms and those specializing in criminal law, now take an interest in LPM.

Let me put it another way: I have trained Partners, Associates, Professional Support Lawyers, Costs Lawyers and others working in a wide range of law firms, inside and outside of London.

The drivers behind the interest in legal project management are not hard to find.

Law firms remain under pressure to seek efficiencies and deliver their legal services cost effectively.  Added to which in some sectors large commercial clients will insist law firms appoint legal project managers on matters of significant size, complexity and importance to them.

The demand for Legal Project Managers continues to grow

The LPM practice model most often adopted by law firms is for them to employ legal project managers to work closely alongside its practicing lawyers.

The logic behind this is:

1. LPM work must be done in any event, and most often it is being done by practicing lawyers, which is not an effective use of their time
2. Absent any training in LPM, (and most lawyers receive no training in LPM) practicing lawyers are not as good at LPM as legal project managers are
3. Practicing lawyers charge out their time at a higher rate than legal project managers
4. Hence it makes sense to have legal project managers, charged out at a lower rate than practicing lawyers, to work on all operational aspects of matter management.

It follows the default now is for legal project managers to be charged out to clients for the work they do.

Development of LPM maturity

The best way for developing LPM maturity can be summarised as:

1. Some (ideally all) senior Partners buy-in to LPM and become champions for it (or to adopt project management terminology, they become project sponsors, helping to drive the roll out of LPM)
2. All practicing lawyers and other related staff (such as Paralegals, Professional Support Lawyers and Costs Lawyers) receive at least some basic training about LPM, which helps with their day-to-day work and helps them understand how to best work alongside full-time legal project managers
3. As noted above, legal project managers are employed to work closely with their practicing lawyer colleagues.

This is the model I see applied most often.

Legal project manager career path

Firms with a relatively high level of legal project management maturity can offer a well-defined career path for legal project managers, with job titles such as:

• Legal Project Co-ordinator
• Junior Legal Project Manager
• Senior Legal Project Manager
• Head of Legal Project Management.

The detailed role of legal project manager differs from firm to firm and practice area to practice area.  This reflects different law firm cultures and the demands of practice areas and clients.

In the U.K. a legal project manager is usually a client facing role.  Legal project managers are (or should be) the principal point of contact for legal team members and clients about all operational matters.

To avoid doubt: legal project managers are not involved in and responsible for the provision of legal advice to clients.  That must remain the preserve of practicing lawyers.

Illustrative tasks of legal project managers

Project managers working in any industry will essentially work on the same core project management tasks, some of which are set out below.

To become effective project managers must understand and work with, the culture of the sector and organisation concerned.

There is a strong cultural aspect to working within a private practice law firm, usually run as a partnership. The points listed below appear quite obvious, but getting these things to work properly in law firms is not straightforward.

1. Collecting information from the legal team and putting this together in status update reports and then sending those reports out to key stakeholders (a natural progression of this work is for legal project managers to request, and help configure, matter status dashboards which let stakeholders see matter status information online)
2. Planning matter delivery – i.e. confirming who is responsible for tasks and when those tasks are due to be completed
3. Tracking the schedule and then ensuring that either everything is going as planned or, more likely, that any significant changes to the plan are understood by all (including the resulting changes to cost and timeline)
4. Calling, and running, team meetings to discuss operational matters (such as matter kick off meetings) and being ready to provide updates about operational issues at any other meetings (including client meetings) where they are in attendance.
5. Participating in pitches and presentations to prospective clients, to explain and show how the firm’s legal work is managed and delivered effectively and efficiently.

Essential requirements for legal project managers

1. To start with the most obvious: sound knowledge and understanding of project management tools, techniques and methods and how these can all be adapted to meet the needs of the legal service industry.
2. Being an effective communicator.  It is well known that between 70% – 90% of a project manager’s time is spent on communications.
3. As noted above the ability to fit into the culture of the  legal services sector, law firm and / or practice area concerned.
4. I have long maintained that legal project managers should develop leadership skills and be ready to step up and lead legal service teams from an operational perspective. A lot of work remains to be done in this area – legal project managers should do more to take a lead.

LPM issues for law firms

The top LPM related issues which are most often surfaced as cause for concern within law firms are:

1. Human Resource Management and deployment: to be fair, this is difficult to do. For it to be done properly it requires time, effort, skill, data (about current and future workloads) and, sometimes, software.
2. Poor delegation of work by more senior people: delegation is not, or should not be, difficult to do. It is a long-standing problem in the legal service industry but, frankly, it should not be – lawyers need to get better at delegating work.
3. Very inaccurate estimates: I accept that sometimes events happen during matters which renders initial estimates worthless – but I think this is rare. Many lawyers, especially litigators, would argue that it’s the norm.  With respect, I don’t think it is.  What is the norm unfortunately is that legal teams tend not to base current estimates on past data, nor do they follow standard processes for arriving at estimates.
4. Poor quality management processes: In my experience, legal teams find it hard to explain what their quality standards are and how those standards are enforced. This can be a significant problem, especially as many lawyers are prone to over-engineering their work while clients are not willing to pay for ‘gold standard’ work, where ‘good enough’ will do.
5. Poor understanding of client needs: at first sight this might be considered highly controversial, but honestly, it’s not.  To take one example, I have lost count of times in-house lawyers on my courses explain that the advice received from external law firms is more difficult to use than it need be, most often because the client (i.e. the in-house lawyer) wants advice which is short and snappy (say no longer than one A4 page) , but the advice received is much longer and more detailed than it need be.
6. Unstructured and inconsistent communications: it seems to me that many legal teams give clients matter updates when the team believes the client needs one. This means the frequency and regularity of the updates can vary.  While this can work, it is not as effective as committing to a schedule of status updates and keeping to the schedule throughout the matter lifecycle.
7. Post matter reviews: it seems relatively few legal teams will hold post-project reviews to note what they did well and not so well operationally, so they can learn from this in future. To overcome this, I usually recommend holding end of phase reviews, which have the twin benefits of taking up less time and enabling lessons to be learned during the lifecycle of the current matter rather than the next one.

Fortunately, the issues noted above can be fixed easily by applying basic project management principles and techniques consistently.

Consistency is key

Most, if not all, lawyers I train in legal project management apply some parts of project management to their day-to-day work.

What they tend not to do is apply proven project management techniques consciously and consistently.  This is a pity because consistency of application generates the best outcomes.

Individual practitioners get better at applying LPM principles more consistently ensuring the lessons learned during training are applied in practice.  (One reason I run free monthly meetups for all my alumni is to encourage the adoption of LPM in practice).

Experience shows that law firms develop their legal project management maturity, and therefore LPM capability, when they employ people as legal project managers to work alongside their legal teams to enhance the baseline legal project management skills of the lawyers in those teams.

Wherever you are on your legal project management journey, please feel free to contact me to discuss legal project management training or coaching.  I am sure I can help you.