Project managers help bring order to complex cases

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Project management seeks to bring order and predictability to the potential chaos large projects may bring.

Legal project management has emerged in recent years as firms look for new ways to provide their clients with more value for the money.

Barbara S. Drake, an attorney and adjunct consultant with Altman Weil Inc. in Newtown Square, Penn., said that alternative fee arrangements have been a hot topic for a number of years now. But within the past two years — since the economic downturn — she and her team have incorporated legal project management as a component of the alternative fee training they provide. She has trained firms of all sizes in legal project management, because they can benefit from it, she said.

In addition to more alternative fee arrangements, clients are now demanding greater predictability, improved accountability and above all, cost-containment from their firms, Drake said.

According to the Project Management Institute, project management is “the application of knowledge, skills and techniques to execute projects effectively and efficiently.” It’s always been practiced informally, but began to emerge as a distinct profession in the mid-20th century.

In the context of law, among other goals, Drake said that project management: establishes protocols for managing legal projects, including communication, budgeting and progress reporting; defines project objectives, identifies constraints, and builds a project plan that creates a working map for lawyers and clients; and creates legal budgets that are predictable and in sync with clients’ budgeting cycles.

It goes beyond case and matter management, which give structure by organizing, tracking, monitoring and reporting on matters handled by the lawyers in a firm. “It’s a discipline to study and identify the steps in the process in either litigation or transactional matters and to reengineer the process to eliminate waste and any activities that do not contribute to the value or quality needed from the matter,” said Drake.

The Wisconsin perspective

In some ways, lawyers have always been trying to bring structure, predictability and cost-containment into their work, according to Nancy J. Sennett, managing partner of the Milwaukee Headquarters of Foley & Lardner LLP.

“But as new tools have become available, we’ve been able to develop more ways to manage projects, and to do it more creatively and meaningfully than in the past,” she said. “The idea has been around for a long time, but most recently, we have aggressively approached it with our implementation.”

Donald A. Daugherty, of Whyte Hirschboeck Dudek SC in Milwaukee, has studied the topic extensively and has encouraged his colleagues in the Business Litigation Group, which he co-chairs, to do the same.

He said legal project management is not just a fad. Remember Total Quality Management, or TQM? It’s not necessarily a bad thing that business philosophies are developed, come into vogue, and then eventually disappear, because in the meantime they motivate some people to think hard about how and why they perform their work.

Daugherty doesn’t believe legal project management will go the way of TQM, primarily because clients won’t let it. There was a time when clients turned matters over to lawyers who, following their professional ethics, zealously litigated them while the clients watched, fingers crossed, how they shook out and if they stayed within budget. These days, he said, “We’re still a profession, but lawyers are more aware than ever before of business realities and competition.”

In addition, consider that:

• Most Fortune 500 businesses have a project management office somewhere in their organizations.
• Project management is now a required course in many MBA programs, and the Indiana University-Bloomington Mauer School of Law is creating a course on legal project management.
• In April, Philadelphia-based Dechert LLP, one of the world’s largest firms with more than 800 lawyers, launched a firm-wide initiative to train every lawyer in legal project management.

Similar to Dechert, a sizeable number of lawyers at Foley have attended sessions on the principles of legal project management, said Sennett.

That took place last February, when Foley began using its Budget Management Tool. It allows clients to track the budget spent and evaluate projected budget summaries, with graphical presentations of budgets and schedules, as well as real-time, task-level budget detail.

Just five months later, Foley was recognized as a 2010 CIO 100 organization, exemplifying the highest operational and strategic excellence in IT. The firm attributes the honor, in large part, to the Budget Management Tool.

That’s in combination with FOLEY ClientSuite, which lets clients log in to a secure website where they can track their matters from wherever they have an Internet connection. They can access resource pages on the general topic of their legal matter, and, per Sennett, “Everything that used to be kept in the paper file — pleadings, strategy memos, legal research memos, contact info for all players; a timeframe of when events are to occur, and who will be involved in accomplishing the tasks involved.”

The technology tools aren’t a replacement for human interaction. “We have regular contact and provide updates all the time,” she said.

“We’ve heard from our clients that they believe it [legal project management] provides value. And for us, it also helps make sure we’re on task so that we are in fact providing that value.”