Whilst many international law firms have some form of legal operations function or legal project management office (LPMO) within their organisation, not all do. Some will have established something akin to an LPMO, operating as an extension of their business finance teams and offering some level of client relationship management and/or profitability analysis for larger client accounts. These are often very effective functions focusing on client value, and through strong and mature connections, they can establish enduring trusted advisor relationships. They don’t generate any revenue – nor should they – but they generate goodwill and help to build business.
For those firms who don’t have an LPMO or a financial management and client engagement team but are keen to build one in response to enquiries about legal project management (LPM) from clients and increasing complexity in legal mandates, how should they start?
There are three parts to the implementation of an LPM initiative:
- people – roles and responsibilities
- resources – the tools and skills necessary to support project management in a law firm
- steps necessary to establish your new team
This post considers Part 1 – the team and looks at the people and roles that will be necessary when beginning your firm’s or legal department’s LPM journey. The important thing is that this is not about developing a new service line or revenue stream. LPM is all about service excellence and ensuring that, notwithstanding significant changes in the world of legal service delivery in the last decade, you can provide real value to clients at the same time as ensuring that you remain profitable. You might also improve your lawyers’ experience at a time when retention is becoming harder and you need more and more from your people.
LPM is something that you do already. But, doing it well and having a clear and defined approach to LPM can provide a huge competitive advantage. Nevertheless, if you get it wrong, you can end up with a large and very expensive administrative team adding little more to your business than you might find you are getting from a well thought out generative AI approach in a year or two. In the modern world of BigLaw though, competitive advantage is necessary and approaching legal project management as your ‘service excellence’ initiative will drive the right behaviours for both lawyers and legal project managers. It’s the only way to adapt to a new world of complex transactions and litigations, managed and volume services and global regulatory advice. Higher profit is not the only objective – transparency; better client experience; and better lawyer experience will all increase goodwill and market share. If you are ready for the challenge, then read on. If you think that your LPM or legal operations teams aren’t quite hitting the target for you, then you might find some tips here that will help you pivot to ensure your LPM team is delivering value and not simply costly admin.
Director or Head of Legal Operations
Perhaps the most important member of your new LPM team is your lead, head-of, or director. This should be a senior lawyer – someone who has practiced law for some time and therefore, at least in the context of one practice area, understands the ‘how’ of legal services. At the very least, a non-lawyer head-of LPM should report to a lawyer partner sponsor…someone with skin in the game and who sees the value in establishing an LPM team. That sponsor must be someone who will be able to identify and support the new team’s objectives and will be the mouthpiece for the new initiative. Without that direct nexus to the practice that they will support, none of your new LPM team will be empowered to manage. Needing a lawyer at the helm can be a contentious view. A look at any of the well known and accepted project management methodologies, and speaking to their experienced practitioners will return a generally held view that a project manager does not need to be experienced in the field in which he or she is project managed.
Law is the exception. There are cultural reasons and credibility reasons. Both can make it very difficult for a legal project manager to manage a legal matter unless they can speak the right language. There is also the risk factor – if a legal project manager spots a spike in the financials during due diligence and the local counsel team flags a ‘compliance issue’ as the reason, there is a list of questions that the LPM will need to ask to determine whether the work is in scope, out of scope or within the agreed range of materiality or acceptable risk. If the LPM doesn’t know what questions to ask then the legal team are likely to pick up work that the client doesn’t want doing and may not pay for. Under the heading of ‘compliance and regulation’ that could be enough of a mistake to wipe out any upside from simply delivering the matter better and more efficiently using LPM principles.
That all said, there are some very strong potential lead candidates that you might find amongst the Big Four or those with a corporate finance background, with many years’ exposure to the types of global complex transactions and disputes that Big Law deals with in the ordinary course. Those candidates will speak the language and will be competent in cascading that knowledge through the LPMO and to the lawyers. So there are options. But, suffice to say, this will be your most important hire and will be the difference between success or a very expensive fail.
Legal Project Managers
You will also need some legal project managers. Getting this right is the hard part. These are the people responsible for infiltrating your business and building credibility with both your workforce and your clients. You will need to both identify the right kinds of people and equip them with the tools necessary to do their work within your law firm culture and infrastructure. That means they will need to understand your people, your financial measures and your compensation models.
The legal project manager could be an existing member of the legal team and in fact, it will have been your lawyers who have historically managed your matters as part of their legal services delivery, prior to the establishment of your LPMO. One of the objectives though, of setting up an LPMO, is to ensure that the only role of the LPM on a matter is the project management, so that the LPM is able to effectively support the legal team without the distraction of prioritising a piece of drafting or a negotiation session. A complex legal matter is typically more successful in achieving profit objectives and client satisfaction when an LPM is responsible for:
- drafting and agreeing a detailed scope of work
- managing budget against actuals and anticipating and responding transparently to project changes
- tracking the performance of each group of lawyers and the engagement from the client team and providing suitable and constructive feedback
- managing and responding to stakeholders
- managing communications; coordinating meetings; and capturing and sharing matter information
- designing processes and supporting, where relevant, the production of playbooks and providing or coordinating guidance and training on process and negotiating positions
You may already have lawyers who do this very well. The nuance brought by an LPMO or a LPM initiative is that the project management becomes a role within the service delivery team and not just activities undertaken in part or in full – off the end of the desk.
Coordinators/Analysts
Small to medium sized firms with a limited budget may only have one or two LPMs supporting the whole firm. Here, the LPM will need to take a more hands-off and advisory role but can still service a number of the firm’s larger matters provided they are supported by an analyst or legal project coordinator. Even larger firms will need to provide some support to their LPM team, either in the form of coordinators or analysts or members of the administration team. This could be a paralegal or experienced legal secretary with a good understanding of the firm’s infrastructure and an internal network that supports troubleshooting and navigation of the firm’s systems and protocols. Again, there is much to be gained from promoting people within the firm into these roles because they will already understand the firm’s culture, financial priorities and potentially have existing client relationships.
Other skills and roles
Change management – this is a large part of a successful LPM initiative and shouldn’t be underestimated. It’s a skill that will be essential in your LPM lead, but there will be an element of change management required from each of your LPMs. Your LPM initiative will require your lawyers to operate differently, use new systems, follow new processes, communicate differently and defer to a matter manager.
Training – law students are now provided with some high level LPM training but by no means enough to equip them to manage large teams and complex processes whilst still trying to hone their legal skills and understanding. Therefore, a big part of many LPM initiatives is to cascade that project management knowledge and understanding across all legal teams. There are different ways of approaching this. External coaches can be expensive and it’s also costly bringing together large groups of lawyers and taking them away from their fee earning activities. Many firms rely on an element of one to one learning as a direct result of including an experienced LPM on the matter team. The challenge with that approach is that the lawyers may not see any value in what the LPM has to teach and there needs to be a level of respect for the skills and experience that the LPM is bringing to the organisation. The second challenge is that you will only bring an LPM to your most complex matters and so you are limited in terms of who can and will be reached on a one-to-one basis. It is therefore essential that, if training and development in LPM skills is to be part of the legal project manager’s role, then finding the right people to fill LPM roles is critical – they will be required to teach and their audience will be tough.
Process improvement – this is a discipline, distinct from LPM but I have included it here principally because it is the legal project managers who are sitting in the matter teams and have a direct view of the challenges of delivering a particular matter to a particular client and therefore the opportunities for process improvement. Absent that bird’s eye view it’s difficult to see how an independent process improvement specialist could gain enough access to an in-flight matter, or sufficient time with the busy lawyers delivering the work, to enable the process improvement to happen. As with all of your LPMO roles, it will be important to the initiative’s success to establish, first and foremost, how each of your new team members will actually be able to fulfil his or her role effectively. This is a further attestation of the importance of having a senior and experienced lawyer leading your LPM initiative.
Innovation – most modern law firms are keen to appear progressive when it comes to technology. Innovation is more than just knowing and understanding what technology is available – it’s about looking to the horizon and around corners and spotting opportunities to improve the bottom line or engage with more, new clients. It’s difficult to hire well in innovation. Sometimes, there may be no-one better placed than your lawyers and your LPMs to spot new opportunities. Innovators in any sector, including the law, need to understand how that sector operates now and, perhaps more importantly, where its limitations lie – and that understanding can only come from experience. Combined experience and curiosity for the new and experimental can be rare.
The importance of getting it right
Putting the wrong people in post, or expecting individuals to fulfil too many of the roles mentioned above, can spell the end for your LPM initiative. Expecting too many roles from one person will result in their failure. More importantly however, that failure will result in a lack of, or no buy-in from lawyers to the new ways of operating.
Keep it lean. Define roles before you go out to market – especially now. The dawn of generative AI will impact ‘middle management’ far more than other parts of your organisation and that includes your project management teams. Establish what you want them to do and move the work to them – all too often we see LPMs brought into law firms only to discover a new keenness from lawyers to do the LPM themselves, leaving the LPM in the wings waiting patiently for a scrap of work to be sent their way. The result? Unfulfilled LPMs picking up admin that you can’t recoup from your clients.
Remember, you don’t need a partner with responsibility for legal operations, a Director of Legal Operations, a Head of Legal Operations, Legal Operations leads and a vast array of ‘managers’ covering LPM, technology, pricing and data analytics. That kind of structure gives you lots of managers with nothing (or very little) to manage. Your lawyers won’t know who to engage with. You need a senior and experienced (in law) strategic lead who can set the agenda for the firm with the sponsorship of an engaged partner (or partners) and then a lean but talented collection of do-ers (LPMs; technology attorneys and perhaps pricing or costs lawyers). Your strategic lead should be able to supervise, manage and set the direction of your legal operations or service delivery function in a way that delivers valuable support to your lawyers. Partner buy-in and sponsorship will be crucial to the success of the function and function head.
Resources and recruitment
Recruiting is a long process. We’ve included some resources to get you started:
Finding the right talent can be difficult. Project management certifications aside, almost anyone can describe themselves as a legal project manager, whether they have managed the delivery of a complex legal matter, improved or digitised a service delivery process, increased your recovery, or not. Bear this in mind when your recruitment team tells you that you can employ an LPM for less than the cost of a junior to mid level associate and consider what, if anything, that candidate can do with sufficient credibility to impress those associates enough to persuade them to make use of your new Legal Operations team. Candidates anticipating a lifestyle role should consider a different profession – supporting the service delivery of a complex or multi-jurisdictional matter requires lawyer hours.
To find out more about how legaloperations.co.uk can help you in your search, contact us at info@legaloperations.co.uk. Our experts have extensive knowledge of the market, with experience both in practice and all aspects of legal operations. We can therefore take on much of the hard work finding you candidates that will make a positive difference to your legal operations.
In Part 2 – resources we will take a look at some of the tools and resources you will need to get started with your LPM initiative. Remember, there is no magic to good project management – just structure and proactivity and a willingness to take the time to set each matter up for success before you lift your pen and start drafting your advice.
