Professional Project Management in a Legal Environment

Paul Easton (LegalProjectManagement.info) and I have been having a dialog of sorts via blog-and-comment. I hope others are finding this dialog useful. In addition to cross-referencing various posts, Paul has left comments on my site, and I have done the same on his.

I started to leave a comment about his latest post, but it became too complicated for comment-ville. I’ve turned it into the current post.

In that post, Paul was very supportive of the points I’ve been making, but he also took issue with a couple of statements. I don’t disagree with the thrust of his two issues about. I suspect I wasn’t clear enough, since Paul has read the two statements with which he takes issue as absolutes.

Overall, Levy’s article is spot on.  But I do take exception with two assumptions that he makes. One is that “standard project management” software is not appropriate for the law firm or legal department. The second is his rehashing of the stereotype that lawyers are not going to adopt new systems and technologies, so don’t bother trying to get them to.

Professional Project Manager Tools: Paul notes that an LPMO (Legal PMO, project management office) might do well with a tool such as MS-Project. I didn’t call out an LPMO specifically, but I did pose an only-slightly-tongue-in-cheek five-question quiz about project management software. I would expect qualified folks in a PMO of any sort to ace that “test.”

I did say “skip the specialized tools,” and for mostpractices (sans LPMOs) I still think that’s the right idea. However, it would have been clearer had I written “skip the specialized project-manager tools.” Paul’s absolutely right that case management tools already include many of the capabilities attorneys need to manage their projects. I suspect that as LPM gains traction, we’ll see case management software refine these capabilities.

Workflow and project management have much in common; a project manager might even call workflow management a subset of project management. I think case-management workflow will over time grow “upward” to encompass and support various project management concepts.

I don’t think attorneys are more “Luddite” (Paul’s term) than, say, doctors. But, like doctors, as a class (I’m generalizing, and I know it’s not at all unanimous) they resist anything they see as taking them away from their core job, the practice of law or medicine. To be more specific, they want to focus on that part of the practice that requires their specialized knowledge. While there are still some who have a secretary print their EMail, most are quite comfortable with EMail, word processing, time-and-billing, and case management tools. These all tie very directly to allowing them to practice their specialties. Project Management software as it exists today is not line-of-sight to that practice — and that’s why I don’t see attorneys using it to any real degree in the near future.

And as I have said, I don’t think most attorneys should use those tools.

LPM Specialists: Paul suggests attorneys turn over the nuts and bolts of LPM to specialists.

Certainly this handoff is already happening in eDiscovery. However, eDiscovery is virtually sui generis; while there are certainly some practice-management lessons to draw from efficient eDiscovery, it doesn’t model the rest of a high-end or even mid-level practice’s activity. It’s a mill with few parallels (such as a high-tech corporation’s annual H1B processing, or a storefront attorney’s intake-and-dispose work).

I’m not as sanguine as Paul that attorneys are willing to cede “flow control” to professional legal project managers. Is that a reasonable way to go on some cases or particular types of cases? Absolutely. I’m just dubious that we’ll see much handoff in, say, the next three years.

That’s why I’m focused on how to get the attorneys themselves to understand and apply at least basic LPM techniques.

I do think that once attorneys are comfortable with the concept of LPM, they’ll be willing to have others pick up the non-lawyerly tasks. Many already have paralegals handling other forms of “non-lawyer” tasks. The difference right now is that attorneys themselves can do what paralegals do; they understand the work, and thus are comfortable ceding it. I think once they understand and can do LPM, they’ll also be willing to cede the nuts-and-bolts aspects.

The trick is getting attorneys to understand, trust, and adopt LPM methods. Which brings me back to the major points on which Paul and I agree — it’s not a tools issue, it’s a culture issue. Step 1 is moving the organizational culture to a place where thinking like a business is not only accepted but rewarded. (An article in the current edition of Law Practice Management makes a similar point.)

I think we’re starting to see just a bit of light at the end of that tunnel.

Now let’s hope that light isn’t an oncoming train of business-as-usual.