So how do you successfully embed
LPM? I pose this question to Stuart Dodds, Director, Global Pricing and Legal Project
Management at Baker & McKenzie, based in Chicago.
Stuart:
Many firms overcomplicate what Legal Project Management
is. Consequently, many attorneys being
introduced to the concept can often resemble the proverbial deer in headlights,
petrified by fear. But it needn’t be
this way. After all, we all should – in
our everyday roles – be communicating with our key team and client (our
stakeholders), looking to manage to our agreed deadlines, and manage to our
agreed costs. It has always been the
case, and will remain so. This is what
good project management is all about – and we all, to some extent do this on
our matters. To quote Steven Levy, ‘All
projects are managed. Some are managed deliberately, some inadvertently. Deliberate project management is better’.
When
talking about LPM, we therefore need to take out the mystery here and put back
the pragmatism. This does not need to be
the whole scale change feared by some, but rather a refocusing and refinement
to existing practices; Making it
‘deliberate’ as Steven points out. The
exact approach will be different firm by firm, attorney by attorney, but the
role WE can play is to make things ‘simpler’ (which is not the same as making
it ‘simple’, as Einstein pointed out) should not be underestimated. Get a few champions on board first, build
the need for change, get the basics right first and then – and only then - add
any ‘bells and whistles’ you like.
Thanks very much Stuart - and I also really enjoyed
those quotes. Now let’s hear from Peter Secor, who is the Director of Strategic
Planning and Project Management at Pepper Hamilton based in Boston.
Peter:
I believe that some obstacles of embedding project management into law
firms are:
1. attorney time constraints (chicken and the egg)
2. general lack of expertise in presenting “formal” plans
3. being held accountable for engagements when the variables/cost drivers
are not known
4. understanding the value of a “control” and its relationship to profitability
Some of the approaches we’ve used in responding to these challenges
include:
1. to bring our new lawyers into the project management fold by providing
them with training and software
2. this is very similar to how we now have a majority of our timekeepers
entering their own time, by starting them early
3. provide support, professional project management experts - these
professionals have fine-tuned how to get the necessary information out of people
to develop plans
4. help with methods to define scope and the associated potential
variables, ‘what happens to a cost driver if..’
5. scalable approach, this is not a one shoe fits all situation – clients
and internal attorneys
6. have various levels of “tolerance” for project management
a.
one of the most beneficial
aspects of project management is monitoring and review and we have had
tremendous success in saving aggravations of overruns by simply providing
weekly/monthly reporting
7. find and take advantage of the existing project expertise, most senior
attorneys already do various levels of project management utilizing either
formal plans or simple tasks list
a.
use those resources to further
develop and exploit the virtues or benefits of project management, for example;
we deal with clients who have ever increasing in house legal departments, we
now have to manage them as well as ourselves
8. pairings help attorneys support each other, everyone has their strengths
and weaknesses, let them know who can help the, encourage them not to go it alone as they have
specific knowledge about the engagement
Be patient not everyone will adopt at the desired
pace, although some are being forced to adopt, either by internal teams already
using methods or external client pressures.