Before you read on, hoping that you might find all the answers to your billing, resourcing, productivity and profitability woes, I’d like to first mention one fundamental point – you are, in all likelihood, already part of a successful and profitable organisation, either law firm or commercial organisation with its own legal function. You should not be seduced by a concept – ‘legal operations’ , ‘legal project management’, ‘legal process improvement’, or by any group of consultants or experts who seek to tell you that in running your business you could ‘do it better’.
If however, you have found your way here because you are seeking a proactive response to the challenges that you and your lawyers raise day to day; you are a law firm partner looking to respond to growing client demands; or you are a client wanting more from your panel firms, then read on.
Structure
Structured management of legal projects (just like any other consultancy service or project) is not a new concept, despite the idea of legal project management (and the legal project managers employed to deliver it) being relatively new as a discipline of itself. But, structured proactive management of legal projects will almost certainly result in the lawyers delivering it feeling valued, and the clients receiving it seeing value in the legal services they have procured. Where a law firm combines that structure with a framework for the delivery of its legal services and replicates and applies it across everything it does, it will have some very tangible solutions to all of the typical daily law firm challenges and those solutions will drop immediately to the bottom line. For the client, there will be greater value for money, predictability, transparency and strategic lawyer rates charged only for strategic legal work. It’s something of a win, win. But it has to be done right.
Standardisation and codification
However, none of that preamble answers the question that I get asked most frequently… ‘What is legal project management?’ …or more importantly, what does it look like? Formulating a comprehensive answer is as difficult as trying to define a platypus. It’s a hodge podge of more familiar things: the platypus is a small, carnivorous, furry mammal with webbed feet and a duck bill, and it lays eggs – you almost need to see one to understand what it is. The same applies to legal project management. Lawyers manage projects all the time – sometimes well and sometimes badly; sometimes with a view to efficiency and sometimes with the objective of maximising billable hours. But the principle doesn’t change – it’s a structured approach to managing the delivery of legal matters within a clear and defined operating model. That means of course, that an operating model needs to exist, and the organisation and everyone within it, must know how to apply it – the individuals within your organisation will not know what you want or need them to do unless you tell them what that is – it sounds obvious but I have lost count of the times I have challenged organisations about why their people aren’t doing what they should only to discover that what’s required and is critical to business success, features only as a by-line in a new-starter induction pack.
Good legal project management requires some standardisation, at least at a basic level, of the pricing model applied. It requires the legal services provider to collect sufficient base level mandatory data points at instruction to enable the law firm to benchmark against previous projects. there should also be some effective organisational data management so that the huge amount of data obtained by law firms is, firstly, useful in supporting the firm’s delivery of service excellence, and secondly, the integrity and confidentiality of that data is preserved – something that is becoming more and more critical with the development of AI in a world of Big Data and cyber risk.
Scoping
One of the steps most often overlooked by law firms, but critical to effective pricing, minimising assumptions, resourcing and delivery against KPIs, is detailed scoping. Whilst as a legal operations professional, I understand the value of a short investment at the very beginning of an instruction before the lawyers lift their pens and switch on their clocks, but I also understand as an experienced transactional lawyer that this pause is unnatural for a group of professionals with a uniquely high score for urgency on the Caliper Profile.
It’s that tendency for immediate action with a view to delivering immediate results that typically impacts law firm profitability and erodes value to clients. I have met very few lawyers over the last two decades, who are prepared to pause and interrogate their client’s instructions before the work begins in order to ensure that that both lawyer and client are aligned. Time spent preparing a detailed scope will minimise assumptions and give the client certainty. It will also limit those difficult conversations about fees and, over time, produce a body of matter and transaction intelligence that can drive more fixed fees based on real data and reduce the risk to law firms of switching off the clock.
Financial management and pricing
Managing the financial aspects of a legal instruction is also critical and a key part of our definition of legal project management. For many law firms, this, along with pricing, is the legal project management focus and the chief-of-staff, matter management and accountability role of the legal project manager (including in-flight innovation and process improvement) is left to the lawyers. We’ll explore the significance of this separation in some of our posts, but if a law firm is going to implement a legal project management initiative, it will need to at very least, get the pricing and financial management right in order to get a return on its legal project management investment. But, good financial management of the kinds of global, complex legal matters that law firms often deliver today, is more that fancy dashboards and push button, real time WIP reports. What it should never be, is time sheet remediation and reallocation or redrafting of time narratives in order to beat the AI that is now being used by consumers of legal services to review detailed invoice narratives. For those law firms whose analysts, coordinators, operations graduates or managers are doing any significant amounts of time sheet remediation – you are not getting any value for money from either your legal operations function or your financial management system. Financial management and converting legal services into paid fees is a topic deserving of its own page. Suffice to say, your legal project management team will need to have a comprehensive understanding of both the numbers and the legal work and how it’s delivered.
Who?
So now that we know what your legal project managers should (and should not) be doing, who should you have on your legal project management team?
Should your legal project managers be qualified lawyers? What kind of background and experience should they have? Do they need formal project management qualifications? There are no wrong or right answers to these question but what is very clear is that anyone can call themselves a legal project manager and apply for a role within your organisation. They are expensive and you will need a return on your investment. Before hiring a team of legal project managers make sure that you are treating your legal project management initiative as a project in its own right – just as you would if you were moving into a new sector or territory. Scope the work that your managers will do and then make sure that your lawyers and other stakeholders within your business will allow your newly hired legal project managers to do the work and manage their projects. Provided you scope the legal project management role and agree it with the business, you will know who you are looking for and what it will cost. It will vary from firm to firm and organisation to organisation. For some law firms, candidates will need to be experienced and qualified lawyers (and may even need to be keen lawyers already in the business, looking to improve their project management skills) because non-lawyer candidates will not be viewed as sufficiently credible or knowledgable enough of the services being delivered to provide more than administration services. This is a cultural limitation that does exist within City law firms and should not be disregarded. However, there is now a resource market where candidates, although not qualified, have several years’ experience in law firms or legal functions, and have learned to navigate unique cultures and contributed to effective legal operating models. There are also candidates coming from industry and the Big Four, experienced commercial consultants advising businesses in procurement and who provide law firms with a powerful client lens that can be hugely impactful when in comes to service excellence.
Legal project managers are not salespeople. They will not bring in new business or a new revenue stream. But, a talented legal project manager will build strong relationships of trust and reliance with stakeholders and will ease the burden often carried by lawyers juggling the conflicting priorities of, on the one hand, constructing exceptional legal advice or documentation, and on the other, managing large and dispersed legal delivery teams, work streams and budgets. You therefore must allow your legal project management professionals to manage and you should trust them as an integral part of your legal delivery team. Taking that leap may also help you to determine the kinds of candidates you want and need in your organisation.