Twelve Touchpoints for Legal Project Management

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.