The rise of legal project management
One of the key challenges of legal project management is making it meaningful and accessible to those who are unfamiliar with the approach. It is therefore important to keep legal project management (and the language used) simple. This article is therefore written in that spirit – and the themes outlined below will work in any professional service firm.
Our first article in this three-part series on legal project management provided a brief overview of its rise. In this, our second, I am going to cover the key themes to consider when starting your matter or project.
Many of the challenges we face when conducting a matter can often be directly linked back to what we did (or did not do) during the initial stages. Spending slightly more time at the front end will save significant “noise” both during, and at the close, of the matter. This broader perspective also allows you to work out what really are the key activities to which you need to pay attention. So, what should we do?
The first thing we need do is make sure we have a good understanding of our client’s objectives and our intended scope.
Confirming what your client’s expectations are on the matter is key. It is important to understand the expected scope of the matter and the legal and business issues being addressed and discuss potential outcomes.
It is at this stage you can gain a better understanding of what the client is looking for and start to distinguish between a client’s wants and needs. It’s good to understand what success will look like for both the client’s organisation, the client’s leadership team (however defined), and the client itself, as these are often unlikely to be the same.
Documenting this as part of a simple ‘Statement of Scope’ is also important, with this covering your client’s objectives, the key deliverables and the matter timeline, the team and the roles they will play, any assumptions or exclusions we have agreed (top tip: include only the key three or four substantive assumptions here!), potential risks and finally, the agreed budget or fee (including the payment terms).
Keeping it as short and as simple as possible for managing the process will provide a good basis for reporting and monitoring progress, ensure everyone has a good understanding of what needs to be done and by whom, and to make sure our client’s objectives are successfully met.
Once we have this step completed, we are now in a good position to start planning in more detail. This part covers the inter-related elements of developing our budget and breaking this down into logical steps or tasks, staffing, how we plan to communicate to our client and within our teams, and how we intend to manage any scope change of variation conversations.
The last two steps in particular are often not given sufficient attention at the start but getting both right can significantly help to minimise billing surprises, ensure you get fairly paid for the work you do, and have a major impact on your matter’s profitability.
Let’s look at each of these in a little bit more detail.
“The most important thing to do is to give yourself some time at the beginning of the matter to adequately prepare and set yourself up for success before diving into the tricky legal issues in front of you.”
(1) Phases & Tasks
Once you have a clear idea of matter scope through your discussions with the client, you can now start to group the key parts of work into main areas (with good practice suggesting no more than five – seven, so we can remember them!). Going through this step is always helpful, as it gives you a very good overview of what you need to make you think through all the aspects of the project, helps prevent work “slipping through the cracks,” encourages you to focus the team’s experience to where it will add the most value, and provides a solid basis for estimating staff cost and time.
We should capture these key steps ideally in sequential order. Using a very simple example of ordering takeaway food, the key steps in sequential order may be to ‘take the order’ (and payment!), ‘prepare the order,’ ‘transport the order’ and ‘deliver the order’. Each step may then be broken down a bit more, for example the ‘prepare the order’ step may be broken down further into ‘preparing the food’, ‘cooking the food’ and then ‘packaging the food’.
Adopting this approach allows you to check and review progress much more easily when the matter is underway, and also makes it easier to provide your clients with appropriate and helpful status updates.
(2) Budgeting
There are a number of ways we can develop our budget. We can develop it from the ‘bottom up’ (i.e. how many hours do we need for each person), by looking at what we have done on similar matters previously, through using a simple template we may have previously prepared (typically done for frequent matter types) or by asking fellow ‘experts’ within the firm (an often under-used but extremely valuable approach). Each individual approach works well in isolation but are often even better when two or more are used in parallel to act as a ‘sense check’ on our final budget.
A quick word of warning too. We should be careful to guard against ‘Optimistic Planning Bias’. If a task normally takes five hours (and has the previous 10 times), we should not now suddenly think we can now do it in two hours - especially when preparing our budget and fee estimate.
(3) Staffing
How we choose to staff the team at the start of the matter has a key impact on overall success, profitability, and client satisfaction. We should therefore make sure we spend time to “get it right.” Luckily, there are a couple of simple ‘rules of thumb’ that can help you do just that.
Adopt the rule of one, in other words ‘One Task, One Owner’. Each task should have only one owner. You, as the matter or project management lead, need to know who is responsible for conducting the task. The responsible lawyer also has a better sense of ownership of the task at hand. If ownership is blurred, too much time is wasted either chasing status or coordinating responses.
Good practice is also to staff by level, not individual, if you can. This makes sure you are staffing for the right skills, supporting both better value for your client and also appropriate career development for your team. Finally, we also often forget (or are, at best, reluctant) to be clear on those areas and responsibilities that our client needs to perform during the matter. We don’t need to be specific about who in the client team will actually perform each activity (unlike us, where we want that visibility and clarity) but we do need to be explicit about what the client responsibilities are overall.
(4) Communication
One of the keys to successful project management is making sure there is regular (and effective) communication throughout - there really should be no surprises to either your client or your own teams.
Proactive and consistent communication helps promote commitment, involvement and contribution, and ensures wider awareness and understanding within the client and client team. We often don’t give enough attention to this step. A good first point is to identify to whom we need to communicate (client, team and other parties), who should communicate (matter lead, project management or other), how often, and by what method (e.g. face-to-face or email). If feeling adventurous you may want to put this into a ‘communication plan’ to help provide more structure to your approach.
There are likely to be a number of difficult or awkward conversations that need to be had during the course of a matter. But by having regular communication with your client through a combination of ongoing dialogue and proactive status reporting, these conversations become a lot easier and have a more solid foundation. It pays to remember that “unlike wine, bad news does not get better with age” which brings us nicely to our final point . . .
(5) Planning for variations
As part of the very first step (confirming the client’s wants and expectations), we should have already gained a clear picture of what is required to successfully deliver the project, including a clear definition of the initial scope required. However, in the real world, the initial scope is very rarely that which is executed by the end of the matter. This could be due to either additional complexity, parties, or change in overall business intent and objective when compared with the start.
Where I have seen or heard many projects fall down is not through lack of a clear scope at the outset (although this certainly has an impact), but rather ineffective management of scope during the lifetime of the matter. This is, in part, due to the lawyer’s reluctance to have “the difficult conversation.” Having a clear process agreed at the outset makes this conversation much easier.
This could be as simple as an agreement to inform your client by email in person as soon as something is flagged as being out of scope. What is important for you as a lawyer or project manager (and also for the client) is that any scope change is documented and that any agreed action is similarly documented. Another top tip here is to have a phase or even a separate matter to capture potential out of scope activities. It provides you with a record of what has been done, and also acts as a reminder to speak to your client.
In closing, the most important thing to do is to give yourself some time at the beginning of the matter to adequately prepare and set yourself up for success before diving into the tricky legal issues in front of you.
Adopting approaches to ensure better communication, greater clarity, and enabling easier matter review should be your key themes from the start. And the key things to do at the beginning of the matter? Well, these can easily be summarised as follows:
- define and agree a clear scope and expectations (this going along way to helping remove ambiguity and managing uncertainty during the lifetime of the matter);
- group work into phases to support easier internal review and also client reporting;
- ensure regular and targeted communication, with this covering the client team, your client, and not forgetting any other third parties who may also be involved; and finally,
- agree how to address scope changes ‘up front’.
In our final article in the next issue of Centrum, we will look at what we need to do during the matter itself and also at the end of the matter, a step often missed by even the very best of firms!
Stuart is co-founder and principal of Positive Pricing, a professional services-focused pricing consulting firm and board member of the Legal Value Network. With nearly 30 years professional service firm experience, he was one of the first and longest serving pricing and LPM directors in the industry (with Linklaters and Baker McKenzie). He is the author of the first book covering law firm pricing, negotiation and LPM, 'Smarter Pricing, Smarter Profit' by the American Bar Association), a frequent speaker at legal-industry conferences, and is extensively quoted in pricing and project management publication and journals.