Turning on the Light of Legal Project Management

Paul Easton has a good post recently where he talks about the possibility of Legal Project Management as a panacea. (That’s the term in his title, and I think there’s just a bit of tongue-in-cheek there.)

As much as I think Legal Project Management can make a huge positive difference in the business of the practice of law, I don’t want to suggest it’s a panacea myself.

LPM won’t cure cancer. It won’t end world hunger.

It won’t even help law practices become more efficient… if it becomes something grafted on rather than a way of thinking those practices adopt. You can’t flick the LPM switch and turn on project management the way you turn on a light.

To carry that analogy further, consider: You’re in a house without electric lights. To get them, you have to put in the fixtures, pull the wiring through the walls, install switches and circuit breakers and such. It’s work, and it will even disrupt the house for a bit.

The payback for the disruption is huge — reliable lighting! You can read or walk around at night without worrying about fumes from leaking gaslights or carrying a candle and looking like Lady Macbeth. The payback is huge, but there will be temporary disruption.

Legal Project Management will cause temporary disruption. People are challenged by new techniques, new approaches to old problems. Some will have big investments in the old solutions — whether they are actually solving anything or not. It will pay off many-fold, and fairly rapidly, but there will be a cost (and not just to hire someone like me to teach and coach attorneys in the practice).

Is the rewiring of legal processes by Legal Project Management guaranteed? Well, it’s not a panacea… “but screw your courage to the sticking-place, and we’ll not fail,” says Lady Macbeth.