All solicitors, whether in private practice or in-house, must show how they comply with the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) Statement of Competence.

The Statement of Competence is made up of four sections:

Section A – Ethics, professionalism and judgment

Section B – Technical legal practice

Section C – Working with other people and

Section D – Managing themselves and their work.

Section D of the Competence Statement for Solicitors focuses on the organisational and business skills required to deliver legal services effectively.

This article focuses on Section D, but reference will be made to some of the other sections as well.

Section D provides a list of project management tasks the SRA expects solicitors to be competent at.

In this article I will explain how professional project managers would approach the project management tasks in Section D and show how solicitors can learn from this.

I will also explain how solicitors, and other legal service team members, develop their legal project management skills when attending one of our legal project management training courses.

These courses are accredited by the International Institute of Legal Project Management (IILPM) and lead to the certifications of Legal Project Associate (LPA) or Legal Project Professional (LPP).

 

Professional development for solicitors

As part of the annual declaration made during practice certificate renewal, solicitors must confirm they have:

• Reflected on their practice
• Identified and addressed any learning and development issues
• Maintain their competence in accordance with the competence statement.

I suggest that, upon reflection, most solicitors notice room for improvement in the way they manage their matters.

The SRA has, as we shall see, directed solicitors to consider their ability to manage matters efficiently and effectively by applying some basic project management skills and principles.

 

Section D SRA’s Solicitor Competence Statement

Section D of the SRA’s Competence Statement asks solicitors to consider how they manage themselves and their own work.

Section D says that solicitors must

“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

a. Clarifying instructions so as to agree the scope and objectives of the work

b. Taking into account the availability of resources in initiating work activities

c. Meeting timescales, resource requirements and budgets

d. Monitoring, and keeping other people informed of, progress

e. Dealing effectively with unforeseen circumstances

f. Paying appropriate attention to detail”

Points a to f above list core aspects of matter and project management the SRA expects to be competent in.

How would professional project managers approach the above, and what can lawyers and other legal team members learn from them?

 

Clarifying instructions so as to agree the scope and objectives of the work

Project managers adopt a structured approach to their work.

Structured approaches increase the likelihood of project success, and they also help create environments which are, frankly, more enjoyable to work in compared to environments which are unstructured and ad hoc.

The International Institute of Legal Project Management (IILPM) promotes a 4-phase approach to legal project management.

The phases are:

1. Define

2. Plan

3. Deliver and

4. Close.

 

Definition Phase

It is during the definition phase where instructions are clarified and confirmed, and an initial project scope is created.

As part of a structured approach, project managers will often use (and adapt) well known tools, techniques and methods to help manage projects successfully.

Project Definition Document

For example, in the project definition phase, project managers will use a Project Definition Document (otherwise known as a Project Initiation Document or Project Charter) to capture the essentials of the project as it appears in its early days.

During our LPM courses we give our students a legal project definition document and guide them on how to use this in their matter planning.

Our legal project definition document comprises six steps.

Steps 1 and 2 are most relevant here.

In step one students are guided about how to determine, and record,

• Client objectives
• Key facts of the matter
• Key legal issues and
• Assessment of the range of most likely outcomes for the client.

(The above also helps demonstrate compliance with Section B of the Statement of Competence).

In step 2 of our legal project definition documents students are encouraged to consider and record

• Project deliverables (which in legal services are usually documents) and
• The project phases where the deliverables will be delivered

Essentially, project scoping is about determining what deliverables will be created to achieve the project’s objectives and step 2 of the legal project definition document makes a start with this.

 

Taking into account the availability of resources in initiating work activities

Professional project managers approach resource management in several ways.

Before looking at this in more detail, note that it helps if the delivery organization is a project driven organization with a high degree of project maturity.

Organisations with a high level of project maturity prioritise and resource projects according to organizational and commercial goals.

Unfortunately, many legal service organisations still have a relatively low level of project maturity and one consequence of this means that project (matter) resourcing is often more difficult than it should be.

Recognizing this, project managers working in legal services do things such as:

• Make sure they are plugged in to the informal information network, so they have a good idea of firm and departmental capability and capacity
• Have project kick-off meetings, especially for matters considered relatively large and complex, and during that kick-off meeting ensure the project team has the capacity to do the work required and that each team member is aware of their key project responsibilities
• Create a Responsibility Assignment Matrix, which records all team members roles and responsibilities for project work. This matrix should be created with the team and shared with them.

When considering resources, it is also essential to consider technical resources such as software support.  If any specialist support software is likely to be required (say to assist with e-disclosure) this should be noted, and the relevant technologists be made members of the project delivery team.

 

Meeting timescales, resource requirements and budgets

Estimating

Before anyone can meet timescales, those timescales must be known.

Assessment of timescales is all about estimating.

Estimates about how long it will take to complete all the work required to produce deliverables and respond to most likely project events should come from within the delivery team.

The delivery team will have their experience to guide them, along with data.  An easy starting point should be: how long has it taken the team to complete similar matters?

The role of the project manager here is to act as facilitator to draw out the experience of the team and help them meet their goals.

For example, the immediate goal is to estimate accurately.  A project manager should start by reminding the team of estimation bias.  We all have this bias and believe tasks will take less time than they will.  We must overcome this bias to arrive at realistic estimates.

Project managers encourage breaking work down into smaller chunks.  This helps with estimating, as it is obviously easier to estimate a smaller chunk of work than a larger one.

Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)

A key tool in use here is a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS).  As the name suggests, a WBS breaks down project work into smaller chunks.

A WBS also helps create a project (matter) budget.  Fee earners are assigned to specific tasks, the time estimates (hours) for task completion are then multiplied by the fee earners charge out rate.

Add up all time and charge out rate estimates for all tasks and you have a first cut of the project (matter) budget.

Estimates for any additional resource costs – such as supporting software – will then need to be added to the above to arrive at a complete project (matter) budget.

Making sure that projects are delivered on time and within budget using well defined resources is often the stated goal of project management.

As every project manager knows however, this is a fiction – because things always change somewhere along the line from project inception to project completion.

Project change is inevitable, and it is not necessarily something bad, especially if the next set of tasks are executed well.

 

Monitoring, and keeping other people informed of, progress

Comparing Plan to Actual

Project managers work closely with their project delivery team colleagues and keep track of both work done and cost to date of having done the work.  At regular intervals these are then compared to the original project schedule to check for variances.

There often are variances between the actual and original plan.  Unfortunately, these variances are usually negative, with the project starting to go over budget and / or behind time.

Good project managers will not try to hide any bad news.  They prefer to tell all stakeholders while also suggesting options for bringing the project back on track.

Sometimes this is impossible, and the project needs to be re-scoped with project plans updated, perhaps significantly.

Clients and other key stakeholders must be made aware of these new developments including implications for the project timeline and budget.

Communication Plan

Mindful of the need to inform everyone of developments throughout, project managers

• Create a Communication Plan about project communications with all project stakeholders and
• Create simple communication tools such as status update reports sent to the project delivery team and client. The classic project status update report is no longer than one A4 page and contains items such as project progress to date compared with the original plan, cost incurred to date compared to the original project cost and short lists of current issues and risks.

Informing everyone of progress has lots of benefits, including helping with rational decision making, based on the best evidence available.

 

Dealing effectively with unforeseen circumstances

Informing everyone throughout helps reduce tension when something unforeseen occurs.

Project managers also take steps to look ahead and consider what may go awry in future.

Risk Management

Risk Management is another key aspect of project management.

Project managers take steps to systematically identify risks, analyse them and prepare responses to them.

As with estimates, risk management should be a team-based exercise, where project managers deploy their facilitation skills to draw out the experience of the project team.

Project Scheduling

Risk management also feeds into Project Scheduling.

Preparing a project schedule also helps devise ‘what if’ alternate scenario planning guided by the risks identified by the project team.

During our course we encourage students to create Gantt Charts to represent project schedules.  We show how to create Gantt Charts and how to use them for effective schedule management.

 

Paying appropriate attention to detail

Project managers love the details.  A good project manager will eat, sleep and live their projects.

There is some danger associated with this, however.

Not everyone needs to be aware of the project details, and some stakeholders will react negatively to being presented with, in their eyes at least, too much project detail.

To counter this, project managers become adept at explaining what is going on in their projects at different levels of detail to different audiences.  This requires knowing, and acting on, the preferred communication style of different project stakeholders.

This communication skill set is also referred to in Section C of the Solicitors Competence Statement, ‘Working with other people’ and in particular section C 1C where solicitors must demonstrate they are

“Using the most appropriate method and style of communication for the situation and the recipient(s)”.

 

Next steps for you?

Practicing solicitors and other legal service team members such as barristers, costs lawyers, professional support lawyers and paralegals benefit from acquiring and developing project management skills.

If you would like to acquire these skills – and show you have acquired them with an internationally recognised certification in Legal Project Management from the International Institute of Legal Project Management (IILPM) – you can take one of our courses in Legal Project Management.

During our courses you will acquire core project management skills and use, in the context of a realistic legal scenario, the tools referred to in this article earlier including (but not limited to) the

• Project Definition Document
• Responsibility Assignment Matrix
• Communication Plan
• Gantt Chart
• Risk Management Plan

We also show how to apply various ‘soft skills’ and introduce students to both traditional (predictive) and newer (adaptive) project management methods.

All this helps with meeting the compliance requirements of the SRA’s Solicitors Competence Statement, Section D in particular but also other sections as referred to earlier.

This website has a lot of information about our legal project management courses, and if you would like to find out more you can always contact us directly via the contact form (we will respond quickly).

We look forward to seeing you on one of our legal project management courses sometime soon.