Legal Project Management Training

Learn how to manage your legal projects from the person who literally wrote the book on the subject!

Managing legal projects is different. It requires different skills than traditional project management. The good news is twofold: First, most attorneys already possess the key skills, and indeed many are already managing project successfully. Lexician provides a framework for honing and focusing those skills, along with building additional skills. Second, Lexician can help attorneys put those skills into play with training that is effective, engaging, and even exciting — anything but dull.

Lexician Legal Project Management techniques increase the likelihood of success on difficult projects. We can show your legal team how to work more effectively, build firm profitability or department budget discipline, make the trade-offs the client needs, and turn project management from a chore into a powerful tool that makes it easier to do the substantive legal work clients need and attorneys love.

Legal Project Management Training

Lexician offers half-day, full-day, and extended group training sessions to build an effective Legal Project Management team based on the principles in the groundbreaking book Legal Project Management.

Lexician’s approach to Legal Project Management focuses on five sources of sustainable competitive advantage:

  1. Client service;
  2. Time management;
  3. People management, leadership, and supervision skills;
  4. Profitability/project management and process improvement;
  5. Client-based business thinking.

Adding Legal Project Management skills reduces write-offs and wasted effort, strengthens client retention, and builds profitability (and its in-house equivalents).

Our courses utilize the concept of “seven habits” to create an easily remembered framework for tools, techniques, tips, and models. The program is structured around seven in-depth but practical techniques.

Attendees learn critical skills and practices they can use immediately to manage their projects, their time, their team, and their fiscal responsibilities. They’ll understand how clients see projects and thus how Legal Project Management can build client satisfaction as well as win and retain client business. We show attendees how to manage legal projects starting with techniques and tools they already have and use regularly.

Attendees will learn the four “management” imperatives:

  1. Legal Project Management, to improve client service and responsiveness;
  2. Fiscal management, budgeting for profitability via the right trade-offs;
  3. Time/schedule management, to increase efficiency;
  4. People/team management, to lower waste and build effectiveness.

We reinforce instructor-led training with challenging questions, individual and group exercises, examples, role-playing, and hands-on practice with techniques and templates. We encourage active participation, which boosts retention and course value. Attendees receive templates, checklists, worksheets, and even laminated cards summarizing high-value practices. At the conclusion of the program, attendees make an active commitment to implementing what they’ve learned.

Steven B. Levy’s Legal Project Management is recognized for distilling project management into simple, practical concepts that can be applied to the world of legal cases/matters – by attorneys, not necessarily professional project managers.

Among the areas covered are these:

  • Introduction to Legal Project Management
  • Assessing and Managing Project Risks
  • Project Management for Non-Project-Managers
  • Leadership, People Management, and the Difference Between Them
  • Delegating Effectively — The Path to Efficiency
  • Legalnomics: The Economics of Projects, Risk, and Alternative Fee Arrangements
  • The Third SigmaTM - Lean Six Sigma for Legal
  • Understanding Project Trade-offs: The Key to Successful Projects
  • Building Associate Profitability
  • Practical Things You Can Do Tomorrow to Start Managing Your Legal Projects

Lexician can also customize training for your specific needs and environment, as well as offer executive overviews designed to build practice-wide or management buy-in. Call us today. Click here for specific contact information.

Project Coaching/Consulting

Lexician can help you succeed with your specific projects by coaching project managers, utilizing Steven’s proven methodology.

Legal Project Goal Setting

The biggest risk to most legal projects is not implementation. Rather, it’s an inability to clarify or communicate goals, to come to agreement on what “Done” looks like. This risk is magnified in a value-based AFA (alternative fee arrangement) environment.

Avoid this common stumbling block with training and consulting up front. Goal-setting and communication failures often appear to be planning or execution failures… but they’re not… and they’re avoidable with effective, Lexician-style Legal Project Management.