Patrick Lamb of Valorem Law Group and I are wrapping up the Alternative Fee Arrangments conference in New York Wednesday with a discussion of legal project management.

LPM is an essential tool for ensuring that firms remain highly profitable when working within the constraints imposed by fixed and flat fees. If you bill for each hour worked, clients tend to pay for stuff that they don’t really value, often because they’re not really keeping close tabs on very complex bills. But after a time, clients become uncomfortable — even if they’re not fully aware of the reasons. They just know that legal work is costing them more than they expected.*

So their repurchase intent declines — and repurchase intent is one of the few outcome-determinative true business metrics, as hard as it may be to measure. Suddenly the firm’s getting less work from that client, and no one is quite sure why. (Sometimes even the client is unsure… but doesn’t call to discuss it, because this is a very difficult conversation when everything from effort to outcome is hazy and vague.)

Alternative fees — which come in many flavors — are a way of better connecting the client and the firm, in a way that ideally benefits them both. AFAs aren’t just about getting cheaper legal work; they’re not a client-only win, but as Valorem and other firms are discovering, they’re a win/win.

When the cases/matters are managed well.

Which is what we’ll try to help with, at least as much as we can in an hour.

Here’s a link to the conference. I don’t know if there are any seats left, but you can always check with the conference team via the link.

I think it will be fun.

And I think the only bullet points in the entire slide deck that Patrick and I are presenting are on the last slide, which calls out the takeaways from our session. We’re going to be engaging with the attendees, not reading slides.

=======================

*What does “more than expected” mean? Good question. Too often, the client doesn’t set cost expectations, and the firm doesn’t ask. That’s a situation that leads to hidden dissatisfaction and resentment.

If you’re the firm’s client contact, ask.

I’m not suggesting every matter needs to be done for a fixed fee. As a consultant, I’m working right now on a project where the client and I agreed to hourly billing because we’re still in an early phase, scoping out what the client needs and how much work it will be –  but we had this discussion directly, and expectations are clear. All I’m saying is, have the discussion. Up front.

=======================

I probably won’t post again at least until Friday because I’m traveling. Seattle to NYC is a long flight — and even longer coming back, since we fight headwinds. On the other hand, 150 years ago, the trip was a heck of a long longer!

As I’ve been refining the syllabus for a one-day class on Legal Project Management, I realized I’d build a list of a dozen CSFs — critical success factors — for managing a legal project.

A dozen is too long for a good list, so I’ll combine some of them for the real class list — but I’ll also be able to talk through them in more detail, with some give-and-take with the attendees. For now, though, here’s the list:

1. State the business problem. Clients have business problems, even if they appear as legal problems.
2. Find the hidden stakeholders who influence client satisfaction and thus repurchase intent. The practice of law is a business; a key to future survival is intent to repurchase.
3. Define “Done.” I’ve written about this item repeatedly. It’s third in the list because the list represents the order in which you’re likely to encounter these touchstones, but it’s first in importance.
4. Negotiate conditions of satisfaction, which in a sense are the explicit if-then relationship between “Done” and getting paid.
5. Plan before you execute. How many projects go into “ready, fire, aim” mode after the first week… or day… or hour?
6. Think before you plan. Don’t jump into planning without knowing where you’re going. This is the project manager’s variation on the trial lawyer’s bromide, “Don’t ask a question to which you don’t already know the answer.”
7. Be realistic. Sure, Browning wrote, “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for,” but clients need you to be successful in this life.
8. Build the most effective team you can. Effective includes capable, available, focused, cost-efficient, and good for the practice as well as the client.
9. Communicate, communicate, communicate.
10. Respond to new information. First, what you don’t know hurts you. Second, situations change and data grows; manage change, but don’t blockade yourself against it.
11. Don’t be afraid to try something new. This and the next touchstone represent general advice to the project manager. Every project manager had a first project, just as every attorney had a first case. Maybe you weren’t a total winner on the first case… but if you hadn’t done it, you wouldn’t be a partner now. As I tell my kids when they play sports, winning beats losing, but losing beats not playing.
12. Be a leader. Mange the people and not just the project; a good project manager is first of all a good people manager — not necessarily a line (reporting) manager, but still one who helps her team succeed and grow — and want to work for her again tomorrow.

What’s the relationship of project management and people management?

The worst professional project managers I’ve worked with over the years were universally terrible people managers. Conversely, the best project managers were outstanding people managers.

(Two clarifications: First, I’m talking about people whose explicit “day job” is managing projects, not “accidental” project managers. Second, by “people manager” in this context I don’t mean line reporting relationships, but rather the art of helping your team decide they want to do what you need them to do.)

While correlation doesn’t imply causation — in other words, just because two things happen together doesn’t mean A causes B — I do think there is causation in play here. If you are not effective at leading people, you won’t be effective at managing projects involving independent-minded knowledge workers.

This can be a difficult dilemma for attorney project managers. Many attorneys receive no training in how to manage people, let alone lead them. Luckily, the traits that select for “good attorney,”  or at least “successful attorney,” seem to have some correlation with “good people manager,” and thus a significant number of experienced attorneys — though for sure not all of them! — learn over time how to be leaders also. These are the ranks from which good project managers will arise.

But if you don’t enjoy leading (not managing) people, you’ll find project management very frustrating. The techniques that matter are people-based — communication, negotiation, understanding motives, and getting people to see the goal as you do. The traditional project manager techniques of calculating schedules, doing the math with resources, and such are useful but are not nearly sufficient in themselves for managing a legal project, or any knowledge-worker-driven project.

===========

I’m starting to work with a training partner who has over a decade of experience teaching people management to attorneys. While I’m an experienced manager with a reputation as an effective leader, I’m looking forward to partnering with someone who’s able to teach these skills very directly.

And yes, leadership can be taught, and learned. I don’t know that you can take someone with low potential and make them a leader, but I do know it’s possible to take someone who “gets it” but isn’t very good at it themselves and teach them to be a solid (if not necessarily great) leader. I’ve seen it repeatedly in practice.

===========

Maybe “project management” is a misnomer, though it’s a term everyone accepts and recognizes. In the knowledge worker world, you don’t manage projects except through managing (leading) the people working on the projects.

I don’t know of a better term than project management; “matter management” is taken, and “case manager” has specific connotations that make it a poor synonym. So “project management” it remains — but remember, it’s “people management” too.

(And to reiterate — people management does not, in this context, imply a reporting (manager-employee) relationship. Rather, it’s about guiding the work of the people involved in the project, from the client to the project team to the practice’s own management.)

I watched the only hockey action I’ve seen in the past decade yesterday afternoon. I heard the Olympics gold medal game had gone to sudden-death overtime between the US and Canada, so I went downstairs to our old TV and dialed it up.

I’m not a hockey fan. I enjoy baseball (playing, coaching, watching), and I guess I’d better figure out lacrosse because both of my kids are on lacrosse teams this year. But I’ve never been attracted to hockey.

Still, it was an exciting prospect, especially since today I’m at our island cabin only a few miles from the US/Canadian border (and for that matter, maybe 50 miles from the Vancouver Olympics venues).

The Canadians scored the winning goal perhaps halfway through the overtime period. I was watching, and didn’t see the puck go in the net. After three replays, I still didn’t see it.

So what’s that have to do with legal project management?

Think about three levels of hockey fan. There’s the sophisticate, who understands all the strategies, recognizes the plays as they develop, and knows before the announcers that the scorer was unchecked in front of the net. There’s the fan, who knows who the players are — they were all or mostly NHL professionals yesterday — and may or may not have seen the puck go in the net on the live shot but who quickly understood the situation and how the play developed once NBC got around to showing a replay after an interminable wait. And then there are casual viewers like me, who tuned in mostly because it was an event.

Professional, Knowledgeable, Occasional

As far as level-of-fandom goes, let’s call these three groups the professional fans, the knowledgeable fans, and the occasional observers.

• The professional fan saw the pattern and play in all its intricacy and serendipity as it happened, recognizing exactly how Canada was attacking and the US defending at that moment.
• The knowledgeable fan could see the puck but also saw the broader picture and understood how the play was developing.
• The observer saw a bunch of guys skating around, but in the scramble near the goal the puck moved too fast to follow (because we didn’t know where to look).

Now consider project management. At one extreme are professional project managers, who understand everything from the math behind crashing a schedule to the PMBOK. At the other are observers, to whom project management seems like chaos, magic, straitjacketed discipline, or a combination of all three — and who have no idea what PMBOK or crashing a schedule mean.

And in the middle are knowledgeable project managers. They understand how to apply basic project management principles to their work. They meet schedules with controlled costs. They get the job done effectively, though perhaps they don’t squeeze every bit of slack out of the work. (Nor do they squeeze out every bit of joy, which more than one professional I’ve known has seemed to take as a birthright.) The knowledgeable PM perhaps can’t do the rigorous math for crashing a schedule and probably hasn’t read the PMBOK, but it doesn’t matter; he or she adds significant value to a project.

That’s the target for legal project managers — attorneys or perhaps other legal pros keeping a legal case moving forward efficiently and profitably/cost effectively for both the client and the practice.

It’s a long road to becoming a professional project manager. It’s a much shorter journey to becoming an effective, knowledgeable project manager. That is a journey that many practicing attorneys can make easily and profitably; they’ll rapidly win back the time spent learning by becoming better at managing their projects, rather than letting their projects manage them.

And when the crunch comes, the sudden-death overtime of a project, the knowledgeable PM will be in there understanding what’s going on and making a significant contribution, while most of her peers are just trying to figure out where the puck is.

If you spend ten minutes every decade managing a project, losing sight of the puck isn’t a big deal. But if you’re involved regularly, you have to find the puck.

Anthony Tijan’s article in the Harvard Business Review about bundling services and goods goes on to make an intriguing point about Alternative Fee Arrangements (AFAs):

I remember receiving a legal bill that carefully showed the breakdown of all the expenses. As the buyer of these services, I appreciated the detail and it ended up playing to my advantage…. One expense line item jumped out: document reproduction of an article that was priced at $600…. [T]hat single line item made us angry and caused us to question several other items, which ultimately resulted in us receiving a lower bill. A single bundled price would have benefited the legal office. We were pleased with the work overall and would have readily paid the total bill on a “value-priced” basis if it were billed as a total fee. [Emphasis mine]

Fixed-fee billing for matters is not a one-way street. Firms can do well while keeping clients happy.

Patrick Lamb of Valorem Law Group and I are giving a talk at the Alternative Fees conference in New York in a few weeks, and we were going over our presentation on the phone this morning. Valorem is one of the leaders in AFAs in litigation, and both of us believe that AFAs in general, and fixed or flat fees in particular, can be a win/win for both firms and clients. Of course, my dog in this fight is Legal Project Management; to succeed with fixed fees, you need to control costs, meet schedules, and manage risks, and I see LPM as key to achieving those goals repeatably.

Obviously, burying a $600 copying charge is not in itself a good reason for AFAs. However, if you’re better — more efficient — at delivering on a matter than your competition, you can keep the producer surplus — a/k/a additional profit. In tough times, finding a way to generate these profits has to be a plus.

From an economics perspective, delivering legal services under AFAs is a rare type of transaction in which there can often be both a consumer surplus as well as a producer surplus. In other words, the consumer makes out well on the deal, and the firm makes out well on the deal. This arrangement is a leading indicator of repurchase intent — i.e., your future profitability.

Or if you want to get away from economic theory, just call it a true partnership.

A colleague — a very experienced high-tech project manager — was complaining recently about the difficulty of teaching project management in one 12-hour course over two days.

Given that I’m teaching a master class in April in about half that time — six teaching hours, one day — I found it an interesting question.

I have three answers, none of which requires talking twice as fast:

1. Any class is only a survey or introduction, whether one day or five.
2. Teaching Legal Project Management is different than teaching, say, computer programmers to manage projects, because attorneys already have many of the right skills but don’t recognize it and need help recasting those skills.
3. The math and mechanics of traditional project management cannot be covered in a few days; should you teach them at all in a short class?

(I don’t mean to make light of my colleague’s comment, by the way. I’ve lifted it out of context a bit, and his question makes complete sense in the world of technology project management. The things you need to know to manage a technology project are too complex to cover in necessary depth in a two day course, but two days is more than a survey or overview; he’s in no-man’s land. Even so, I know he’ll do a terrific job leading that class.)

1. Class = Introduction

No class is sufficient to transfer expertise in complex material, of course. You need practice. You need to apply the class-learned skills in practical situations in the real world.

More importantly — important because it’s so often overlooked — is that you need post-class coaching, too, to fully leverage the value of the instruction. Classroom situations are highly excerpted from the complexities of the real world. When you get back to your desk and try to apply the material, it’s very difficult to map your learning onto the reality of a messy case. The legal associate years, in a way, are one long coaching session following a three-year class.

In addition, when you get back to your desk after a day or two away, email is piled up, you’re behind on your work, and it seems to take a week to catch up. You come out of class revved up, but by the time you even think about applying what you’ve learned, a week has passed.

I had the privilege, in my years in corporate management, to attend half a dozen week-long 16-hour-a-day training classes on leadership and running a business. Amazingly, for all of that investment, there was but a single hour of follow-up coaching offered for all of these classes together. When I spoke with my peers and co-attendees, we all recognized the need for follow-up coaching, and we did our best to coach each other… but we all had our full-time-and-a-half jobs to do.

Thus I vowed, when I got Lexician going, that I would always offer coaching sessions — onsite or remote — to follow any training I did. Now I don’t do these for free, of course, but I do my best to help clients recognize the value in these coaching sessions.

I can convey a lot of great information in a six-hour class such as the one in April — and make it fun, too — but a few hours of follow-up coaching can really seal the deal and help attorneys become truly effective legal project managers.

2. Legal Project Management Isn’t Traditional Project Management

I believe attorneys already have learned many of the key skills needed to manage legal projects. My job is to help them tap into these skills in a new way, to put them together to create a powerful new capability. I haven’t found that to be necessarily true with people in the technology industry — where the attendees also have great skills, just not the skills that map easily onto project management. So teaching a Legal Project Management class isn’t like teaching a class in tradition project management.

In addition, in LPM I dispense with most of the project-management-world insider terminology. If you don’t have to learn a new language on top of everything, we can cover a lot more ground. It’s also easier to learn if you don’t have to translate a whole bunch of new words that the speaker keeps using.

3. Traditional Project Management Math and Mechanics

A friend of mine teaches project management to graduate (MBA) students at the University of Washington. (He’s been kind enough to let me try out some of my own approaches on his classes at times.) It’s a standard 15-week (45 classroom hours) course, with a significant amount of homework and study required. There’s a lot of math — not as bad as full-fledged six sigma, but serious math nonetheless. There’s terminology to be learned, new tools to be mastered, and most of all some very difficult concepts the students have to get their heads around. And this is really a grad-level introductory class; there’s a lot more material he doesn’t get the chance to teach.

No way could anyone convey that material usefully in 12 hours with little or no out-of-class work — the problem I posed at the start of this column. I don’t know how he’ll even begin to cut down this level of complexity into something that folks can use after a couple of days.

Most legal projects, however, won’t yet get significant gains from the level of depth and refinement. I say “most” — high-repetitive-volume sub-projects such as e-discovery prep and production indeed are often run, and run well, by professional project managers. Right now, for most legal projects, the 80/20 principle governs — you get 80% of the value of all-out project management from the first 20% of the effort.

And that’s what I teach, the material to get attorneys and other legal professionals to the 80/20 point. That’s why I have versions of an LPM course that run from one day to four days. I think three days is the sweet spot, because of the depth of exercises, case studies, and incident-method work we can do — but there’s an awful lot we can accomplish in six hours. You can do it with Legal Project Management; I don’t think you could do the same with traditional project management. (I assume in both cases the attendees come in with little or no real knowledge about project management other than what they’ve heard and what they may have seen from their IT folks or PMO.)

Of course, you can sign up for my New York master class if you want to see what this looks like in action!

Justin Fox of Harvard Business Review has an interesting piece trying to codify types of checklists.

He suggests that Atul Gawande, author of the terrific The Checklist Manifesto, doesn’t offer a “checklist for checklists.” I think Gawande actually does cover this material, though I suppose he doesn’t bring it out as a checklist. I’ve referred to it in the past in articles such as these notes from a Gawande seminar.

Here are Fox’s categories in summary:

1. Task checklists, step by step through procedures that must be followed in order, such as preparing an airplane for takeoff.
2. Troubleshooting checklists, also common in aviation, where lives depend on this stuff — though to my mind this is just another use of a task or step-by-step checklist.
3. Coordination lists (Fox’s term) or submittal schedules (Gawande’s example from the construction industry), akin to what in Legal Project Management I call a Communications Plan.
4. Discipline checklists, a list of things you need to do or check that don’t necessarily have a required sequence. Most of the LPM checklists I’ve been posting are of this type. I don’t like Fox’s name; I prefer Project Checklist.
5. To-do list, which Gawande doesn’t mention but which Fox notes is really a checklist. I think a to-do list is really a special case of a discipline checklist, although (a) I like the idea of pointing it out specifically and (b) unlike most discipline lists, it’s not a failure to not get through the entire list, at least with a personal to-do list. Some folks do, though years of leadership observation, practice, and coaching suggest that most people don’t — and that doesn’t cause them to fail. I would put a professional to-do list back in the discipline list bucket rather than calling it out separately, however.

Fox leaves out one type of checklist that Gawande spends considerable time on, though Gawande, unfamiliar with project management per se, didn’t name it: a Gantt chart, a/k/a a “project schedule.” In the construction industry, because every single task is known — complexity, duration, resourcing, relationships to other tasks — a Gantt chart can indeed function as a checklist. In fields where tasks are not fully known, Gantt charts tend to create a false sense of knowledge — if it’s on the chart, it must be right. In the legal world, e-discovery processing is amenable to Gantt charts as checklists in a way that few other functions are. E-discovery, too, is the one area in which professional project management separate from case management is becoming de rigueur.

I’d break out a checklist taxonomy this way myself for Legal Project Management:

• Procedural Checklists, steps that must be followed in order.
• Communications Checklists, associated with both scheduled communications — e.g., billing and status — and unscheduled difficult conversations — e.g., scope discussions.
• Project Checklists, steps that must be covered but which have some flexibility in the order in which they’re covered. Project schedule, task lists, and work breakdown structures are checklists of this type.

I’m not sure how much this taxonomy matters, except in reminding people that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to checklists or other tools of the trade. Use what works — and try different approaches to expand your capabilities.

In The Princess Bride, Inigo Mont0ya says to his manager Vizzini, who calls every setback “inconceivable”:

You keep using that word — I do not think it means what you think it means.

See the brief clip at the bottom of this post. By the way, if you’ve never seen The Princess Bride, go rent it. Watch it with your kids or other loved ones.

Metrics are like Vizzini’s “inconceivable.” They rarely mean what you think they mean.

I have a long section in my book devoted to the evils of substitute metrics — a metric you use when you can’t measure what you really want to measure. The substitute metric I’ve run into most often, both in my own work as a department head and in consulting, is “customer satisfaction.” What you really want to measure is usually repurchase intent — and studies have shown that there is limited or even no correlation between CustSat and repurchase intent. I won’t go into more detail here, at least for now; I’ve covered it in other posts, and of course I’d really [shameless plug alert!] like you to buy the book to learn more.

Presentation guru Jan Schultink uses two graphics about Bush, Obama, and job losses to powerfully explore one of the fallacies around metrics — that numbers never lie. Consider: which of the two following charts presents the correct picture of job losses during the past two years?

The first answer: it depends on your political leanings.

The second (and correct) answer: They both do… because they show different metrics!

The metrics seem very similar, and indeed they are drawn from the same data… but a slight, subtle twist on the actual measure determines whether it appears that job losses have gotten worse or better in the past year. (The left-hand graph shows cumulative losses; the right-hand graph shows losses per month.)

The lesson is that you need to examine metrics carefully. Having no metrics is bad… but having bad (incorrect or misleading or substitute) metrics can be worse.

====================

Here’s a six-second clip of Inigo Montoya (Mandy Patinkin) telling Vizzini (Wally Shawn) that “I do not think it means what you think it means”:

My son (age 9) has started playing lacrosse. It reminds me of a project gone bad.

Having grown up playing baseball, soccer, and football, lacrosse is alien to me. Still, there’s an awful lot of running around and slamming into each other, though I guess it’s not much different than football in that regard — other than that the players appear to still be of human dimensions.

Project management, in the end, is a lot like baseball. Consider the following similarities:

• To the casual observer, baseball seems to be a game where most people are standing around doing nothing, with only three of them — pitcher, catcher, batter — involved in every play. The reality is that every defensive player sets up differently for each batter and subtly shifts their weight in a particular direction with each pitch. On almost every batted ball, all nine players have specific actions that the casual fan never notices — until something goes wrong and the ball gets away because a player wasn’t backing up another player properly.
• There is an immense amount of planning that happens out of sight, long before the Execution (game) stage.
• Every starting player has one specific role at which they specialize. While most shortstops, say, can fill in second base or a centerfielder cover one of the corner outfield positions for a bit, it normally takes considerable practice — months and even years — to get good at a new position at the professional level. The ball curves dramatically differently when it’s hit to left instead of center, and the pivot at second on a double play bears no relation to making the same play from shortstop.
• Metrics, metrics, metrics. There is no sport with the obsessive levels of metrics and measurement that is commonplace in baseball (though football analysts are now looking at replicating some of that work in their own sport). Like project management, baseball metrics are of two natures: substitute metrics that purport to tell you something but can be very misleading, such as a pitcher’s won/lost record, and predictive metrics that align closely with value, such as the relatively new wins-above-replacement-player. (A won/lost record depends on the specific team and the vagaries of a very small sample size; WAR tries to remove team effects, park effects, and so on.)

Okay, maybe it’s just that spring training has started and my son has opted for lacrosse over baseball this year. (Actually, I suggested it; he’s small, aggressive, and high-energy, which will serve him well in lacrosse.)

But the point is this: Baseball, from the outside, can look like a lot of waiting interspersed with flurries of fevered activity. So can project management. And when the activity is needed, planning, training, and accurate engagement — right place at the right time — make all the difference in both arenas.

Recently, US Magistrate Judge Paul Grimm, who’s been active in the e-discovery world, made a comment that FRCP Rule 26 (g) might call for project management.

Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26 contains provisions for (electronic) discovery, which has been the hottest — and costliest — topic in the legal world for half a dozen years. Judge Grimm pointed specifically to Rule 26 (g) (1), the relevant part of which (with many ellipses — see the link for the full text) reads:

Every disclosure and every discovery request must be signed by at least one attorney of record. By signing, an attorney certifies that:

(A) with respect to a disclosure, it is complete and correct; and

(B) with respect to a discovery request, response, or objection, it is consistent with these rules. [Lots of intermediate words left out, but I think I've thus highlighted the relevant idea.]

Judge Grimm’s point, as I understand it, was this: How can you certify these things in a complex case without being fully aware of and in control of all the processes behind collecting the data, ensuring that it’s reasonably on point and responsive, that stuff isn’t falling through the cracks, and so on?

Given that he’s a judge who writes thoughtfully and influentially on thorny issues (are there any other kind?) of e-discovery, his opinions carry weight beyond the confines of his own courtroom.

This may be one of those areas where traditional command-and-control project management, as opposed to Legal Project Management (LPM), has a place in the legal world. There is in e-discovery little of the ambiguity or fluidity that makes LPM so well suited to the management of legal cases/matters/projects. Sure, there is debate on specific legal points — Is this responsive? Can we claim privilege? To what extent are we obligated to reveal something the other party didn’t specifically ask for? However, within each case e-discovery process and procedures are concrete, measurable, and repeatable, with clear and unambiguous requirements.

I didn’t get the sense that Judge Grimm was suggesting that the world needs to increase the already outrageous costs of e-discovery by adding more process — though there may remain some disconnect between judges and the messy real world of business. Rather, he understood, I think, that much e-discovery is already happening with project management in place, and suggested that the attorneys draw on the data already present as part of complying with Rule 26.

It’s an interesting idea. On one hand, attorneys don’t want to add any more straws to the overloaded camel that is compliance with e-discovery requests. On the other, they want to avoid sanctions and provide at least the appearance of cooperation.