Legal Project

Management in One Hour

fOr Lawyers
Pamela H. WoldoW and douglas B. RicHaRdson

To order Legal Project Management in One Hour for

Lawyers or get more information, visit the ABA Webstore.
 Contents

About the Authors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v

Introduction  Flyover at Thirty Thousand Feet.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii

Chapter 1  LPM 101. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Chapter 2  Objectives and Scope. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Chapter 3  Project Planning. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

Chapter 4  Executing the Plan: Doing the Legal Work. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

Chapter 5  Monitoring and Measuring Progress. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93

Chapter 6  Post-Project Review. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111

Chapter 7  Implementing LPM in Your Firm. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123

Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
 Introduction

Flyover at Thirty Thousand Feet

To put all that follows in perspective, let’s start with a basic working defi-
nition of legal project management. It is…
• a systematic approach
• for scoping, planning, managing, and controlling legal work
• within clearly understood—by both law firm and client—time,
budget, and performance requirements
• that also captures lessons learned after a project is complete in order
to enhance future performance.

Managing Uncertainty
At its core, legal project management (LPM) is about two things:
• performing legal work more efficiently and
• managing uncertainty.
LPM focuses attention on driving greater consistency and efficiency
into decisions and judgments that lawyers make in response to widely
varying situations. LPM recognizes that legal issues are not always pre-
cisely controllable and that a client’s legal goals may not always be

vii
viii  Legal Project Management in One Hour for Lawyers

attainable, no matter how skilled the lawyers. The forms of project

management that are common in the industrial sector—particularly man-
ufacturing, technology, and research—focus on delivering invariant results
and producing identical, repeatable outcomes. LPM is different. It focuses
on delivering value as efficiently as possible under the circumstances.

Why This? Why Now?

The crux of the rapidly escalating LPM trend is this: today, in the face of
unprecedented financial and budget pressures, legal clients are demand-
ing greater control, predictability, accountability, and responsiveness from
their outside legal service providers. They are sending their business to
those who can demonstrate these qualities, and they are withdrawing busi-
ness from those who can’t or won’t.

ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE # 1: The Headline Says It All

“Balfour Beatty to Slash Legal Spend by 30 Percent in Panel Review: Con-
struction giant Balfour Beatty is looking to save up to a third of its external
legal spend by packaging certain areas of work and tendering out to the
lowest bidder.” (The Lawyer, November 7, 2012)

Having already trimmed internal expenses to the bone, general counsel

now are looking for ways to reduce outside legal spend, which typically
eats up approximately 55 to 60 percent of all corporate legal budgets. All
types of rate squeezes are now common, with clients pressing for dis-
counted rates, capped fees and budgets, or various kinds of alternative fee
arrangements built around project-based or value-based fees rather than
time-based (hourly) billings.
 Introduction  ix

What Do Clients Want, Anyway?

LPM’s growth has been fueled in particular by increasing client pressure
for changes in the way legal services are priced and billed. LPM is develop-
ing a solid track record for providing what clients want from their lawyers:
• value conferred as viewed through the eyes of the clients
• efficiency: managing to budget, lean and efficient staffing, lower
outside legal spend
• predictability: no costly surprises, fewer unexpected events
• communication that is timely, responsive, accurate, and complete
• understanding all aspects of their businesses, not just their
legal needs
• alignment between the client’s interests and the firm’s behaviors
For first-adopter and first-follower law firms, the LPM train has left
the station and is fully up to speed. Large firms may have been pioneers
in adopting LPM best practices, but these practices are trickling down to
mid-size and smaller firms,1 who are adapting LPM precepts to fit their
clients and their firm’s resources.

The Proactive Firm: Building a

Collaborative Alliance with Clients
The fact that clients have assumed a more dominant role in shaping legal
service delivery does not mean that firms should just sit idly by, waiting
1 LPM benefits obviously are of great relevance to legal departments, as well as law firms, and some legal
departments have commenced internal LPM initiatives. While this book is targeted primarily to lawyers in
law firms of various sizes, its basic precepts are generally equally applicable to any legal setting.
There is a major distinction between law firm and legal department LPM initiatives, however. Legal
department LPM efforts are intended to generate greater efficiency and consistency within a corporate
cost center, certainly a laudable goal. To that goal, law firm LPM adds the crucial driver of profitability.
In today’s legal climate, firms that cannot perform efficiently cannot perform profitably. Hence this book’s
strong emphasis on implementing LPM within law firms.
x  Legal Project Management in One Hour for Lawyers

for the clients to call the shots. Taking a proactive posture has become
very important. Law’s “new normal” offers extraordinary potential benefits
to firms that take the initiative and reach out to clients in order to build
joint, LPM-related processes and protocols.

ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE #2: Orrick and Levi Strauss

In 2009, at a point when global clothing giant Levi Strauss was using the
services of several hundred law firms, The Wall Street Journal reported that
the company’s legal department was suffering a huge and immediate bud-
get cut. Obviously, this represented a daunting challenge to Hilary Krane,
Levi Strauss’s general counsel. Certainly this also was an opportunity for
the outside firms to render assistance, to brainstorm and collaborate about
ways to accommodate the budget squeeze.
So how many firms did so? Only one. A young partner at Orrick, Herrington
& Sutcliffe saw this situation as an incredible opportunity, and she con-
tacted Krane. She said that if Levi Strauss was willing to share detailed
information about all its legal needs, legal services, and legal spend—con-
fidentially, of course—Orrick would develop an omnibus service proposal
for providing all needed legal support for an all-inclusive, flat fee. Kane
appreciated this novel approach and supplied all the information Orrick
needed to develop a comprehensive service proposal—not an easy task be-
cause alternative fee arrangements were new to the firm, too, and because
it was essential for profitability that the firm deliver all services efficiently.
Levi Strauss accepted the novel proposal, and Orrick went from being
just one of many providers to handling all Levi Strauss legal work worldwide
(except for some intellectual property work sent to a second firm). Clearly
creativity and the willingness to break new ground, coupled with a proac-
tive approach, had produced an extraordinary success. For Orrick, working
efficiently, managing work carefully, and incorporating learnings from its
innovative role proved essential to bolstering firm profitability.
 Introduction  xi

Clients’ Personal Perspectives

Law firm lawyers too often forget that general counsel and chief legal offi-
cers have skin in the game as well. That is, senior in-house legal leaders are
evaluated, compensated, and bonused—even sometimes punished—based
on the performance of the departments they manage. More than one
general counsel has been terminated because of a persistent failure to rein
in legal spend.
During the depths of the recession that started in 2008, salaries for
many general counsel were frozen or even reduced, and their annual
bonuses decreased dramatically—by an average of 40 percent, accord-
ing to one study. This added dimension of personal pain meant that law
department leaders were bound to respond enthusiastically and gratefully
to anything that would help them reduce their legal spend and stretch
ever-tightening budgets.

Another Benefit: Getting Laterals in the Loop and

Up to Speed
LPM also has another notable virtue: it speeds and smooths the assimila-
tion of lateral hires. In an era where firm-jumping is now very common,
partners and associates who join a firm laterally often struggle to get on
board, get up to speed, and adjust their working style to accommodate
“the way we do things around here.” Historically, law firms have not
done a terrific job with taking on lateral hires, which results in a striking
number of them failing to take root and later moving on. A firm with a
clear set of LPM best practices, however, presents lateral hires with a stable
and transparent performance platform during those first crucial months of
trying to fit in, collaborate with colleagues, and contribute rapidly to the
profitability of the firm.
xii  Legal Project Management in One Hour for Lawyers

What LPM Means to You

One of the key objectives of this book is to make LPM less daunting. As
we’ll discuss in greater detail, it is understandable that the average lawyer
worries about LPM’s transformative implications: it’s likely to make big
differences in almost every lawyer’s life. But putting your head in the sand
simply is not an option.
Regardless of the size of your firm or the nature of your clients,
these days you really do need to know about LPM: understand its basic
mechanics and appreciate how it will impact your firm’s marketing, service
delivery, and profitability, in both the near and long term.
For those only now coming to understand and accept LPM’s implica-
tions, it is certainly not too late to catch up. Some firms still hope that the
legal service infrastructure will revert to “the old days,” but that simply is
not going to happen. Firms that fail to adapt stand to lose market share to
those who assertively embrace more efficient and predictable service deliv-
ery methods.
If you think your clients somehow escaped the financial pressures of
recent years or are indifferent to the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of
their outside counsel, you are not talking to your clients enough. Some
may feel the pinch more than others, but the vast majority report intense
pressure from management to pare down outside legal spend and avoid
costly surprises. They may not all know what legal project management is,
but they all want what it provides.
 Introduction  xiii

WHAT YOU SHOULD DO

Do some intensive fact finding and reality testing.
First, compare your initial fee estimates or your project budgets with
the actual fees you ended up charging for various engagements. You are
likely to find that these numbers do not align very consistently.
Second, if you think your firm already has systematic approaches for
scoping, planning, managing and controlling legal work, talk to your asso-
ciates. They will tell you there are as many different ways of doing a deal
or handling a piece of litigation as there are partners responsible for them.
Third, have a heart-to-heart talk with your clients. They will tell you
that no matter how excellent your legal firm’s legal expertise, they contin-
ue to be frustrated by your ever-escalating rates, budget overruns, spotty
communication, and tendency to use their matters as training grounds for
your associates.

What We Can Accomplish in an Hour

You will not become a proficient LPM expert simply by reading this book.
You won’t acquire all the hands-on skills and master all the techniques you
need to be an LPM superstar. However, by the time you finish reading,
you will be conversant in the basic language of LPM and be able to apply
some basic LPM principles to your practice and your relationships with
clients. Specifically, you will come away with:
• a general understanding of LPM features and benefits,
• approaches for negotiating project scope and budget with clients,
• ability to better align your legal work with client needs
and priorities,
• tools for improving communications, both with internal team
members and with external clients and constituents,
• tools and techniques for developing accurate cost estimates and
managing to budget,
xiv  Legal Project Management in One Hour for Lawyers

• familiarity with LPM technology—software, tools, and templates,

• a sense of how to integrate LPM tools and techniques to leverage
time and effort,
• the ability to tie LPM to improved business development, client
trust, and knowledge management.

Making the Implicit Explicit

This book also can help you break some inefficient habits in your man-
agement style. Each of you has your own unique way of doing things.
Unfortunately, your idiosyncratic preferences and style also are breeding
grounds for collaboration disconnects when you are trying to work inter-
dependently with other lawyers—which these days is most of the time.
It’s common for lawyers responsible for legal engagements to use a
centralized “hub-and-spokes” approach to planning and managing. Other
performers and stakeholders are, so to speak, positioned around the rim of
the wheel, connected to the “hub lawyer” by direct manager-subordinate
spokes—but not necessarily connected with each other.
Such centralized control and communication often produces project
team members who can’t see the big picture, don’t know each other, aren’t
familiar with each other’s areas of expertise, don’t know how their roles
relate to those of others, and aren’t clear about their responsibilities or
limits of authority.
These gaps and lapses result in expensive inefficiencies: redundant work,
dropped balls, gaps in accountability, do-overs, write-downs, write-offs…
and, most important, frustrated clients.
As author Jim Benson writes in his book Personal Kanban, “We are told
to do work, but we don’t understand why. We crave and deserve context.
Without context, just being told what to do is a communication failure.”
 Introduction  xv

WHAT YOU SHOULD DO

Take a moment to reflect on your own management style. Focus on whether
it fosters or discourages collaboration and communication. Ask a few part-
ners how they would describe your management style. If you realize that
you are regarded as highly autonomous, overcontrolling, overcautious, turfy,
overemotional, pusillanimous, or undercommunicative, consider engaging
the services of a qualified legal coach who can help you cultivate more
collaborative management skills.

LPM provides a different approach for planning and managing work

and a different model for legal working relationships: LPM makes implicit
things explicit; that is, open, clear, accessible, and repeatable. We’re going to
talk about this a lot more in coming pages.

Dealing with Resistance—

Yours and Your Colleagues’
Maybe you’re turned off to the whole idea of legal project management,
perhaps because you are incorrectly analogizing it with other kinds of
project management that are common in industry, manufacturing, or
research settings.2

2 Industrial project management disciplines, such as Six Sigma, CPM (critical path method), PERT (project
evaluation and review technique), Lean, Lean Six Sigma, PROMPT, PRINCE2, PRISM, or Kaizen, all can
be plodding, highly quantitative, fiendishly complex, strongly IT-driven, and designed, above all, to impose
absolute uniformity and precision on the task of producing identical things—razor blades, widgets, or
stealth bombers. They’re valuable, but ponderous.
These disciplines are not intended to foster creativity and innovation. 3M, for example, introduced
Six Sigma in the late 1990s and found that “the Six Sigma process killed innovation at 3M,” as one 3M
“Ambassador,” put it. When the internal 3M Six Sigma champion was queried about its damping effect on
creativity, he said it was never designed for to foster creativity; it was simply designed for manufacturing
control when the company was starting to scale up a product.
We do admit some admiration for a different project management methodology called Agile, a dynam-
xvi  Legal Project Management in One Hour for Lawyers

In fact, the discipline of LPM—legal project management—is most

assuredly not the same as industrial project management transplanted into
a professional services environment. Perhaps industrial project manage-
ment’s focus on producing identical and repeatable outcomes has led you
to think that LPM will cramp your style or impair your creativity.
In any event, it’s not uncommon for many lawyers, particularly senior
partners, to resist or dismiss LPM because they worry that it:
• will impose a steep learning curve and require them to master a
whole new vocabulary, suite of IT tools, and procedural protocols;
• represents an inflexible, mechanistic approach that will devalue
their experience and judgment, curtail their discretion, reduce their
authority, and negatively impact their compensation;
• will add an additional layer of work to their already over-
taxed schedules;
• will diminish firm profitability by limiting the time and tasks that
can be billed to the client;
• will reveal how inefficiently the firm has managed work before;
• won’t really work—with their practices, their colleagues, and
their clients.

These apprehensions are not entirely unfounded. Some legal firms’

attempts to apply industrial project management approaches and technol-
ogy to planning and managing legal work have resulted in considerable
frustration, a lot of wasted time and money, and a frequent lack either of

ic departure from the slow, step-by-step “waterfall” architecture of traditional industrial project manage-
ment systems. Agile emphasizes constant team collaboration, rapid feedback, and continuous adaptation
as events unfold. For this reason, it can be quite effective in professional services settings. It works well for
small-scale projects (even leaderless projects in which team members assume various management/super-
vision responsibilities) and situations where rapid delivery time is imperative. Agile methodology calls for
constant “team scrums” in which team members detail their activity to their colleagues, running quickly
through “yesterday, today, and what’s in my way?”
 Introduction  xvii

increased efficiencies or lawyer buy-in. But overall, the trend is clear: LPM
works, and more and more firms and lawyers are trying it—and liking it.

Expanding Out, Trickling Down

LPM now has an accepted set of best practices, a rapidly evolving set of
IT providers and tools, ardent internal advocates, and sophisticated prac-
titioners in diverse practice areas. Law schools are installing LPM courses
alongside other core courses. As LPM has gone global, it has proved its
worth as a way of integrating the cultures and operations of firms with
offices in various countries and cultures. Australia’s eight-hundred-lawyer
Mallesons Stephen Jaques, for example, built out a sophisticated internal
LPM function even as it completed its merger with a one-thousand-lawyer
Chinese firm to become King & Wood Mallesons.
Perhaps more relevant, in the United States the trickle down has
reached many smaller firms and smaller clients. Midsize, regional, and
local firms find that implementing LPM is a great equalizer and an excel-
lent marketing tool for competing effectively with larger competitors on
both price and efficiency.
Yes, some lawyers in smaller markets claim, in effect, that “our clients
don’t know about LPM and don’t care about LPM. For us, it’s business as
usual.” At this point, it may still be true that some in-house counsel are as
ignorant of LPM constructs as their outside law firms are.
Yet whether they know about LPM or not, virtually all of them say they
want what well-implemented LPM delivers: greater predictability of legal
spend, better budget management, fewer surprises, and better communica-
tion with outside counsel.
xviii  Legal Project Management in One Hour for Lawyers

WHAT YOU SHOULD DO

Get with the program. Accept the reality that LPM represents the new face
of legal service delivery and the best approach for optimizing client rela-
tionships in law’s “new normal.”1

1 Master blogger Paul Lippe, founder and CEO of Legal OnRamp and one of the very
few people named as a Legal Rebel by the ABA, now writes a column for the ABA called The
New Normal. It should be required reading for lawyers fighting to stay ahead of the curve.
See http://www.abajournal.com/legalrebels/article/welcome_to_the_new_normal.

A Disclaimer
You will note in the following pages, there will be some anecdotes and
examples where we identify the firms and clients involved. We know this
adds interest and real-life immediacy.
There are others where we cannot disclose the identity of the partici-
pants, for a number of reasons: Perhaps some have been clients, and we
have worked with them pursuant to nondisclosure agreements. Perhaps
some have provided us with proprietary information but asked that we
disguise it to protect confidentiality. In some cases, we want to avoid
the implication that we are advocating or recommending certain firms,
products, or services. In any case, when identities are revealed, it is either
because the information has been reported in the public domain or
because we have been granted explicit permission to use names.
 Chapter 1

LPM 101

Basic LPM Building Blocks

Regardless of its form, complexity, or application, legal project manage-
ment is predicated on three core principles:
• Front-end planning is better than damage control.
• Keep all crucial stakeholders in the loop all of the time.
• If it can’t be measured, it can’t be managed.
These axioms express themselves in a cascading sequence of stages and
action steps, none of which can be done well unless all antecedent steps
have been done well.
In the following chapters, we will break LPM methodology into five
sequenced steps.

1
2  Legal Project Management in One Hour for Lawyers

The Five Steps of Legal Project Managment

1. Defining Project Objectives and Scope

• information gathering to understand the client’s business, needs,
and expectations
• discussions with the client to agree upon project phases, delivera-
bles, and desired outcomes
• discussing project scope, time, and cost
• agreeing on billing arrangements
• discussing possible events or risks that may impact the engagement

2. Project Planning
• defining project phases, tasks, and performance standards
• developing timelines and milestones
• selecting the project team (firm side and client side)
• budgeting
• getting appropriate tools in place
• planning communications
• planning approaches for handling unexpected events and risks

3. Executing the Plan: Doing the Legal Work

• deploying the right lawyers to the right tasks
• making task assignments and delegating authority effectively
• giving timely, objective, and specific feedback
• managing team performance, dynamics, and morale
• ensuring collaborative team and client communication
 Chapter 1  LPM 101  3

4. Monitoring and Measuring Progress

• tracking progress of phases and tasks
• avoiding scope creep, bottlenecks, redundancies, or other
inefficiencies
• tracking budget-to-actual
• making project adjustments when unexpected events occur

5. Post-Project Review
• evaluating outcomes in terms of agreed project scope
• identifying what went well and what needs improvement next time
• discussions with client to give and get real-time feedback
• identifying lessons learned, resources needed, and surprises that can
be avoided
• aligning post-project review with the firm’s knowledge management
function to aggregate cumulative learning and put it in a form
accessible to all in the future

Experienced lawyers are bound to assert that they already do all these
things in some way, shape, or form. That last phrase is often the efficiency
killer and budget buster, because it reflects the vagueness, subjectivity,
personal preferences, and lack of transparency that often mark how legal
projects are scoped, planned, managed, and measured.
LPM is designed to provide a clear and consistent context for lawyer
performance and client communication. As one converted skeptic
exclaimed to the colleagues on his highly specialized client team, “Try it!
You’ll like it. C’mon in, the water’s fine.”
4  Legal Project Management in One Hour for Lawyers

Defining Some Important Terms

Before we dig more deeply into LPM methods and processes, we should
clarify a few essential terms, concepts, and acronyms useful in understand-
ing LPM.

What Is a Project?
For LPM purposes, think of a project as any single—and singular—
endeavor that has a distinct beginning, middle, and end and that produces
agreed-upon deliverables and objectively measurable outcomes. (This may
seem obvious, but this definition distinguishes projects from continuous
or indefinitely continuing activity, such as processing claims or bottling
soft drinks.)
A legal project may take the form of any kind of client mandate: an
entire engagement, a single matter, a particular transaction, a piece of liti-
gation, or a group of cases. It may be complex or straightforward, short or
protracted, but at some point it is over.
Projects generally are made up of a sequence of component phases. To
the people working on a complex phase (such as document review in an
antitrust matter or due diligence in a financial transaction), each phase
may seem like a project—something that’s done when their contribution
to it is done. Overall, however, LPM’s job is to bring order and control to
the big picture—to an end result as envisioned and desired by the client,
not as perceived by those doing legal work.
Phases, in turn, are made up of a variety and aggregation of tasks; that
is, discrete activities assigned or delegated to specific performers. The job
of LPM is to bring many interrelated tasks together to produce an efficient
and coherent whole.
 Chapter 1  LPM 101  5

What Is a Project Manager?

In LPM, this can be something of a trick question. For one thing, lawyers
and law firms tend not to use the term project manager, because it did
not originate in the legal profession. Lawyers have their own functional
labels—and often they don’t have any labels at all that bear on their roles
in LPM.
In law firms, the allocation of power and responsibility for a project
often flows in markedly different channels. In other words, the finders
(rainmakers) and the minders (client-relationship partners) may be entirely
different from the grinders—that is, the people responsible for actual exe-
cution of legal work.
Therefore, sometimes the project manager role is automatically assumed
by the senior client-relationship partner. Or it can end up being assigned
to an up-and-coming junior partner, a precocious senior associate, or even
a seasoned senior paralegal, if the project manager role focuses mainly on
administrative oversight and “herding the cats” once a matter is under way.
In firms with a cadre of professional LPM staff riding shotgun and lawyers
performing the legal tasks, the project manager title may even be given
to a non-lawyer. And, unfortunately, all too often, project management
responsibility is assigned to…nobody.3
Frankly, who—if anyone—carries the project manager title is probably
not all that important. What is absolutely crucial, however, is that every
engagement or matter has one or more clearly designated owners who bear
accountability for 1) successful completion of all project phases and tasks
on time and on budget, 2) keeping the team fully informed and up to
speed, and 3) the quality of the project team’s legal work.

3 The Agile methodology previously mentioned sometimes does not appoint a single project manager;
instead, it has a highly collaborative “leaderless team” that spreads responsibility and accountability among
various team members. In Agile leaderless teams, however, it’s not accurate to say that no one serves as
project manager; everybody serves as project manager.
6  Legal Project Management in One Hour for Lawyers

These different accountabilities may or may not all vest in the same
person, and that can create problems. If it is not clear to all team players
and stakeholders who the appropriate go-to people are for each phase and
task, obviously the quality and consistency of legal service are put at risk.

Just Who Is the Client?

This question is more a warning than a definition. Lawyers at all levels
often refer indiscriminately to “the client,” a sloppiness that produces
frequent gaps in communication. For example, when someone in the
firm asks, “What did the client say about our bill?” or says, “Hey, call the
client!” Does the term refer to:
• the name of the business entity that has engaged the firm,
• the general counsel or perhaps the chief financial officer (to whom
many general counsel report these days),
• a business unit head for whom a project is being performed,
• a lower-level member of the corporate legal staff with whom law
firm lawyers or paralegals may interact (perhaps without the knowl-
edge of their superiors)?

As we’ve said, LPM can serve as a powerful communication engine

that can bridge the traditional communication gap between law firms and
their clients. As described more fully in Chapter 4, LPM takes great pains
to assure that the right types of communications are directed to the right
recipients at the right times.

What Is LPI and How Is It Different from LPM?

LPM sometimes is confused with LPI, or legal process improvement.
They sound a lot alike, and the line between the two disciplines often
blurs because both are instrumental in the quality and efficiency of legal
 Chapter 1  LPM 101  7

service delivery. But the substance of each is quite different. The main
components of LPM are the planning and organization of project phases,
tasks, and teams, and the mechanisms for monitoring progress against
project performance standards, particularly those relating to project scope,
time, and cost. LPI, on the other hand, describes a discipline devoted less
to how legal tasks are planned and managed, and more to improving the
efficiency with which particular legal tasks are performed, including reduc-
ing the time it takes to do them and the number of steps a particular task
takes to complete.4

What Are AFAs?

LPM owes at least part of its momentum to the emergence of various
kinds of alternative fee arrangements (AFAs). AFAs are assuming increas-
ing importance in the legal marketplace because more and more clients
are insisting on them as a lever to lower outside legal spend by imposing
billing approaches based on the value (to the client) of the work per-
formed, rather than on the time spent performing it.
In place of time-based billing, value-based billing puts a negotiated
value on project outcomes and deliverables, sometimes with a bonus or
kicker for exceptional results. The most common AFAs are flat or fixed fees
negotiated either on specific matters or whole tranches of legal work. In
several extraordinary cases, firms have won all of a client’s legal work by
proposing AFAs for any and all client work.
These days, a great many clients demand significant fee discounts or
mandate capped, not-to-exceed fees. Strictly speaking, these are not AFAs,
since fees remain pegged to time-based billing. Nonetheless, they do
reflect clients’ need for predictive accuracy and budget certainty, as well as

4 See, for example, The Legal Process Improvement Handbook, by Chris Bull, Ark Group/Wilmington Publish-
ing & Information, 2012.
8  Legal Project Management in One Hour for Lawyers

clients’ increasing impatience with annual law firm billing rate increases
that exceed the rate of inflation and are what clients perceive as overbilling
or “overlawyering.”5
There obviously is a direct nexus between the trend toward AFAs and
client demands that legal work be done efficiently. Those demands, in
turn, are fueling the LPM trend and are exerting pressure for greater
efficiency even in engagements not conducted under alternative
billing arrangements.

Scalability
LPM is scalable. That is, it is a flexible, common-sense framework whose
design and application can be adjusted to fit projects of widely differing
sizes, complexities, and durations. Its basic precepts and phases, however,
provide a consistent foundation for efficient performance, regardless
of application.
Many uninitiated to LPM think its methods and procedures are valu-
able only for showing unskilled and inexperienced performers how to
follow the simple steps in simple, repetitive projects with similar tasks
and outcomes.
Not so. Obviously, in simple projects LPM’s scale should be kept
simple, lest its application cost more in time and effort than it provides in
benefits by assuring quality, consistency, and timeliness.

5 Law firm lawyers offended by the suggestion that overbilling is rampant, accepted, and even encouraged
should consider a New York Law Journal article from March 26, 2013, that reported on a recent coun-
terclaim by an energy industry client that DLA Piper had sued for payment of $675,000 in unpaid legal
bills. The counterclaim alleged a “sweeping practice of overbilling,” and discovery disclosed some damning
intra-firm e-mails. “I hear we are already $200K over our estimate,” wrote one firm lawyer. “That’s team DLA
Piper!” Another partner responded that a third colleague had now been brought in to work on the matter.
“Now Vince has random people working full time on random search projects in standard ‘churn that bill,
Baby’ mode. That bill shall know no limits.” [emphasis added]
 Chapter 1  LPM 101  9

LPM really comes into its own in planning and executing highly com-
plicated projects, those involving many distinct moving parts and players.
Its job is not to impart legal knowledge to the unknowledgeable; it is to
impart order to the various activities of already knowledgeable performers.

A Few Words on LPM Technology

Please, don’t get freaked out about technology. In the following pages,
we will indeed discuss the role of emerging technology in supporting LPM
and provide some screen shots that show what state-of-the-present-art
technology looks like. And yes, a lot of tech-savvy IT experts, vendors,
and practicing lawyers are making great strides in developing effective and
user-friendly LPM tools and platforms.
However, because LPM is a common-sense approach to managing work
that primarily involves how people communicate with other people to
get projects done, it is not necessarily technology-dependent, nor does it
require technological tools. The great pyramids—a pretty decent project
management accomplishment—managed to get built without soft-
ware support.
Smaller firms that don’t have large IT budgets certainly can cultivate
some or all LPM skills without state-of-the-art software support. For
small or fast-breaking projects, LPM planning can be done on the backs
of envelopes or can employ hand-drafted checklists and flow charts—any-
thing that will impose order and manageability on project phases, tasks,
and budgets.
That said, it is true that LPM can benefit greatly from a project team’s
collective access to technological support tools that aggregate, organize,
and permit open access to all relevant forms of project information. These
tools have come a long way in a short time.
10  Legal Project Management in One Hour for Lawyers

The first-generation stand-alone tools developed between 2005 and

2008—often by internal law firm IT staffs—generally earned lawyers’
disdain as being overly complex, hard to learn, and too time consuming
to use.
Newer efforts have produced tools that are far more user-friendly.
Some come from external vendors, either as off-the-shelf offerings or as
customized platforms keyed to firms’ legacy IT systems. Others are built
internally, the products of effective collaboration among lawyers, internal
financial staff, and IT experts.
However the technology is created, today’s best tools are
• easy to learn and use without extensive training;
• readily accessible in real time by all team members (including, with
some firm-only information blocked, client-side stakeholders);
• capable of tying together in real time all relevant scoping, planning,
communication, and monitoring information;
• capable of providing internal team members and clients with
customized dashboards that allow easy review of task status,
budget-to-actual, and changes to the original plan;
• linked to the firm’s existing time entry and financial
reporting systems;
• good for tracking current activity and for accessing historical data.

Templates and Checklists

Templates, checklists, and other “job aids” have undergone a parallel evo-
lution in LPM. In the past, these tools often were created by individuals
for their own use or generated ad hoc for a particular transaction or piece
of litigation. The result was that they were idiosyncratic and often not
widely shared, even among members of the same team.
 Chapter 1  LPM 101  11

Because LPM encourages consistent activity and vocabulary, part of

its maturation has included efforts by practice groups and client teams
to break recurring projects into consistent phases and tasks and to
embody collective and conventional wisdom into consistent templates
and checklists.
Rather than reinventing the wheel for each engagement, practice
groups can develop an ever-expanding and ever-improving set of tested
and validated templates, checklists, or action steps. This can be time-
consuming, but it only has to be done once for each type of deliverable.
Savvy lawyers use these templates both for initial project scoping and for
subsequent detailed project planning. This supports project continuity,
and it also ties all legal activity back to the client’s original objectives and
priorities. These checklists can be keyed to specific project phase codes and
task codes, allowing automated tracking. This will be discussed in more
detail in Chapter 5.

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