Rethinking Legal Project Management Tools

Paul Easton has a terrific post today on project management tools for law firms. His title, “Buying a Lathe Does Not Make You a Carpenter,” definitely gets the point across.

It works the other way ’round, too. I did a fair amount of carpentry designing theatre sets and props in the 70s, and I never owned a lathe. (Still don’t.) It’s a highly specialized tool with limited applicability; it requires a lot of skill to run one well; and few carpentry projects actually need one. And you can hurt yourself with one.

I’d say the same think about Legal Project Management (LPM; see definition at right). Skip the specialized tools. You can hurt your goals, do more harm than good.

Yup, that’s pretty blunt.*  

Ready for the tools? Let’s start with a test. In a total of 30 seconds, without looking anything up, describe what the following items represent:

• PERT
• 14SS,17FS-3d
• Monte Carlo Simulation
• CPM
• Lag (vs. Delay)

If you didn’t go five for five, I wouldn’t recommend standard project management software. And if you did go five for five and you’re reading legal-world blogs, you probably already recognize the difficulty in applying standard project management tool-based methods to a legal practice of cases and matters.

Rather, you need to think long and hard about what project management means in the context of cases.

Levels of project management: What is project management? I think of it in three levels:

1. Scheduling, resource allocation, costs, dependencies, deadlines (not the same as scheduling), risks, and, to be honest, a certain amount of CYA.
2. Managing the people and resources to control and achieve the stuff in Level 1.
3. Understanding and influencing the overall system so that you can be effective at Level 2.

Most companies that I’ve worked with have approached the levels backwards. They start with Level 1, which is by far the easiest of the three. There are lots of tools and a plethora of people who claim to be project managers. Over time, especially if they have a few project managers who “get it,” they figure out Level 2, especially the effective use of resources that are not really under your control. Finally, some of them gain enough perspective to see Level 3 — and then understand why the whole thing has been so hard, so unrewarding, and so frustrating.

Seeing Systems: The system (see definition at right) at a law firm or law department is

(a) very different from that of a standard business and 
(b) extremely complex in a way not covered by standard project management theory.

If you’re in the system, it’s extremely hard to see the system. In addition, systems change; they evolve. And as leading systems theorist Barry Oshry points out, “In all systems, there is a story that unfolds — a history that has shape, movement, pattern, and direction.” Not only are systems changing, you can’t understand where they are today — and where they will be tomorrow — without understanding how they got there. That’s a very difficult task.

So if it’s hard to implement the nuts and bolts of project management — scheduling, resource allocation, etc. — in an organizational system that is reasonably well understood, such as an IT department, how hard must it be in the very different types of systems in law practices?

The warning: That’s why I’m warning you off the tools. The tools are designed for managing Level 1 issues, but they will fail absent a rich understanding of Levels 2 and 3. I don’t see that understanding playing out yet in the narrow overlap of project management and the practice of law.

If you get caught up in the tools, I believe you’ll go down a path that leads to failure, departmental self-destruction, and the CYA that lurks at Level 1.

Making a start: Rather, begin at Level 3. Strive to understand the system in place. Only then can you realistically map project management techniques against the ground of the law practice. Only then can you figure out what pieces of project management you can mesh with the practice’s culture, its people, its operations and practices.

Okay, another test? Go tell a senior attorney to do a task not related to the actual practice of law. Let’s even make it a simple task, one with a legitimate bearing on their pay. Tell them to keep their time entries up to date.

That’s a task every attorney has practiced since day one as a first-year associate, and still the compliance rate is low. What kind of compliance rate do you expect with project management tools?

So I think you have to start out addressing Level 3. Why does the practice want project management? Who wants it? What do they hope to achieve? How will they — and you — sell it to the legal practitioners? What are the first couple of super-easy this-makes-sense ease-into-it steps you can take? Do you understand who the influencers are? The snipers? How to win the former and disarm the latter?

Do you understand the system, its history, and where its heading — if not in its entirety, then at least enough to begin swimming in its stream and then influencing it?

If not, you’d be better off getting a real lathe and trying to make it as a carpenter.

(In a follow-up post, I’ll discuss some food-for-thought low-tech LPM tools.)

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*Possible exception: project management/workflow tools to manage electronic discovery. If you do a lot of ediscovery work+management, you’re already using project management principles. Either that, or you’re not surviving. If you are, a tool that helps better organize what you already do may pay off.

By the way, I’m a devoted Microsoft Project user. I like that tool. But it’s a professional project manager’s tool, as are its main competitors. A carpenter who sees someone using a slot-head screwdriver for a chisel — or worse, the other way ’round! — will say, “Use the right tool for the right job.”
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