A recent article on the productisation of legal project management caught my eye – LPM as a ‘product’ is a concept that has been talked about by professionals in the industry for some time but it’s a concept I still struggle to grasp. For the most part, LPM as a ‘product’ has been used as a justification for charging for it. But, whether we talk about ‘productising’, ‘product offerings’ or ‘service offerings’, my advice to legal practitioners, partners and their clients would be to remain cautious. There is a much stronger value proposition sitting behind LPM.
As is well established, legal project management is simply the management of legal projects using a combination of project management principles best suited to the legal sector. Legal project management isn’t even a service of itself – not in the true sense. Rather it is the means by which the legal service is delivered effectively and efficiently. So, without goods or services, it’s difficult to understand what there is that might be productised or marketed, separate to, or distinct from the legal services being procured.
To look at it a different way, there is nothing in legal project management that can be marketed and sold independently of the legal advice being provided. And legal project management has always been part of legal service delivery – transactions would never complete and litigations would never conclude if someone wasn’t in charge and steering the ship. So, whilst LPM still remains a relatively new concept, all we have actually done is extracted a necessary part of legal services delivery, found a group of professional who are particularly good at leading, and attached a label to that part of the legal work that sits inextricably around, but distinct from the advice, drafting, negotiation and research done by a collection of lawyers in a complex matter.
So, now we have established that LPM has always been there – charged at strategic hourly rates and rarely, if ever challenged as a non-chargeable activity by clients (financial management being excluded) we can stop calling it out as a value add and start to show clients that by bringing in professionals to do it, we can push the price point down a little – after all, absent a competent legal project manager, the decisions on how, when and by whom the work will be done, will be left at a very senior (and expensive) level.
What is actually meant by LPM ‘products’?
The reality is that when we allude to LPM ‘products’ we are actually talking about progressive and creative legal products – certainly, at least, when we talk about the kinds of ‘products’ that might be used as differentiators for a law firm. These types of things might include hotlines with triage capability to help ease the burden for lean and over-stretched in-house legal teams, managed services or digitised due diligence, document review or disclosure services. There is a small but highly effective collection of technologies that clients welcome because they force transparency. Technologies such as collaboration tools (for the design and build of virtual deal spaces), workflow automations (to manage diligence and disclosure); document automation (for managed services and volume contracting),… the list continues but each is a better way of delivering a legal product that already exists. None is an LPM ‘product’. Even ‘products’ like the regulatory toolkits and interactive platforms built for hosting technical regulatory advice in complex and fluid regulatory regimes are ‘legal’ and not LPM products – not withstanding that the ‘how’ of the delivery of those kinds of legal projects will be coming from a legal project manager supported by a strong and technically sound Legal Operations team.
LPM ‘products’ for private practice lawyers are simply good legal project management principles. Tools and templates prepared by LPM teams including standardised matter plans, project plans, financial reporting templates, stakeholder maps and scopes of work are all formalised or codified operating models or parts of operating models. Those things aren’t LPM products – they are simply the first step in the effective launch of any LPM initiative in private practice.
Solving user problems and doing things better and more efficiently is process improvement and service excellence – it isn’t product development. As such, getting clients to pay for your efforts isn’t a problem – you are simply presenting them with a more cost effective legal service that takes advantage of technology and good and experienced management from people hired to actually manage.
That all said, applying a problem solving mindset of the kind that drives those in product development to produce saleable and in-demand products, is exactly what your LPM team should be doing.