What will Legal Project Management mean in 2014?
As we wrap up 2013 and start planning for the coming year, I found myself wondering how much progress Legal Project Management has made this year and what’s in store for us LPMers in the coming year.
In years past, I was an IT project manager and I can remember fondly the days when telling someone what I did often generated a nod of general understanding. Being newer to the legal project management community I still find myself surprised that replacing the “IT” with “legal” erases so much of that established understanding. And I wonder when the legal world will nod in general understanding when I tell them I’m a legal project manager.
I was reminded of an insightful blog post on 3 Geeks and a Law Blog Law Firm Project Managers - Lawyer or Non-Lawyer? in which the author was asked, “is it time to hire professional project managers?” and provided an answer which would prove to be more true than I think the author was aware of at the time. “My answer is that it is definitely time to start talking about it.” And talk we did.
That post was written in January of 2010 and nearly four years after the blog was posted the lack of understanding continues to grow. As firms are evaluating and allocating their limited non-attorney resources, they are making decisions about what legal project management means and how they can best leverage the momentum of a nebulous concept to the benefit of their clients and ultimately their firms.
These decisions about legal project management are as varied as the firms which make them. Legal project management can be located in a variety of areas inside of a firm. It can be seated in accounting, finance, in dedicated project management offices, in IT. I’ve read about firms who are identifying interested attorneys and training them up in project management. I’ve seen firms hiring dedicated experienced project managers and training them up in legal service delivery. I’ve even met one practicing attorney who went all in and became Project Management Professional (PMP) certified through the Project Management Institute (PMI.org).
Even the legal project management initiatives are varied. Some focus on task codes, others on process improvement. Pricing, alternative fee arrangement, and general legal service delivery continue to be hot LPM topics. Some firms have been involved in legal project management for a while now and more and more firms are emerging with some type of legal project management offering.
Even through several firms have proactively taken the initiative to explore legal project management it’s surprising that our clients are becoming the driving force in firm legal project management adoption. There has been a significant increase in the number of RFPs requesting information on a firm’s legal project management approaches and practices and these requests are becoming more sophisticated.
When I think about how a firm tries to define what legal project management means to them I think maybe, we are trying to figure out the wrong thing. Legal project management initiatives should be built on the foundation of delivering more value to our clients. Instead of asking what legal project management means to us, shouldn’t we be focused on figuring out what legal project management means to our clients?