Steven Levy sets out the differences and the key elements of successful LPM in a blog post that describes “The Stages of a Legal Project” (http://lexician.com/lexblog/2010/01/the-stages-of-a-legal-project/):

——————————————–

The four stages here represent the lay of the land for Legal Project Management. The stages are slightly different from those of, say, an IT project. The largest variances are around post-execution steps: a technology project has long adoption/deployment and maintenance stages, for example, that rarely apply to management of a legal case.

Consider an LPM project as consisting, in brief, of four stages:

1. Initiation. Get the ducks in a row. Should we take this case? Is it one we can manage? For a firm, can we do so profitably? Let‘s say we take it. Who‘s the lead attorney? Who‘s managing the project, if not that attorney? Who are the key players? What do they need? Do we know what success – “Done” – looks like? If this stage is skipped – and it too often is given the most cursory attention – failure is predictable.

2. Planning. Who should work on the project? Are they available? What does the schedule look like? Does it fit within the deadlines? What are the big risks – and how can we mitigate them? What are our costs? For firms or departments that charge back, do we have agreement with the client on fees? Many projects hit the failure track when Planning is skimped to jump into Execution.

3. Execution centers on the actual legal work and generally consumes the vast majority of work time in Legal Project Management. (In other project management arenas, Planning may be the longest stage.) Execution corresponds to the core legal work such as research, drafting, pre-trial or trial work, and so on. Note that planning your legal strategy is actually part of project Execution.

4. Delivery and Evaluation. What does the client get when we‘re done? (Most but not all legal projects have a small delivery stage.) What‘s the client‘s feedback? What‘s our own? What could we do better next time? Don‘t skip this stage no matter how rushed you are – especially the client-feedback part.

I have read very recently that lawyers and others are considering applying for PMP (Project Management Professional) certification to increase their worthiness in the job market.

I have to say, however, that Project Management, applied in Legal, is a little contradictory. In Project Management, every project is “unique”, it is not a repetitive process, a project has a start date and an end date, and Project Management is about getting that project done in a timely manner, on budget, and according to the specifications defined in the project plan.

Jordan, would it be possible for you to explain how Project Management, in a legal context, will still abide by the above (specs I mentioned)?

Lawyers like the billable-hour system for three reasons: (1) it’s easy, (2) it’s risk-free, and (3) it’s profitable. (And who wouldn’t like it, under those circumstances?) All three of these characteristic are important, but I sometimes think that (1) is first among equals. The easier a financial system is to understand and deploy, the less serious business acumen you need — and lawyers tend to like systems that don’t require much business savvy.

Lawyers, speaking generally, don’t have much business proficiency and even less business training, but what they have least of all is respect for business. How many lawyers have you heard arguing the hoary angels-on-a-pin-head question of whether law is a profession or a business? It’s an argument that presupposes a dichotomy — it can be one or the other, but not both — and most lawyers (especially in the more experienced ranks) come down decisively on the “profession” side. They seem to have this sense that the work of a lawyer is beyond normal marketplace concerns, that it’s a calling more than a career. It’s a prime example of the ways in which our profession tells itself stories about ourselves that have little relevance to how the rest of the world operates.

It’s this distaste for mere entrepreneurial concerns that I think motivates, at least in part, both the love of the billable hour and the reluctance to take project management seriously: they both spring from a strong preference to avoid business thinking as much as possible. Lawyers want to do the law and little else — another great lawyer refrain is “I didn’t go to law school to do X,” making you wonder what they thought they were going to law school to learn how to do.

This is what I mean by referencing lawyers’ love of creativity and intelligence — not that these excellent and admirable traits themselves cause resistance to project management, but that lawyers’ disproportionate pride in and fondness of them do, coupled with a general distrust of business that seems to line up on the opposite side of the ledger. Many lawyers seem to mistakenly believe that you compromise your ethics, professionalism, creativity and nobility by taking “business concerns” seriously. That’s a cultural, attitudinal problem — one that we absolutely can overcome, once we identify it.

Regarding the reasons for lawyers failing to adopt project management, I wonder if you give too much importance to lawyers’ self-perceptions and not enough about the perverse incentives created by the hourly billing model. As I recently wrote when discussing this post on my blog:

[I]t is a stretch to blame lawyers’ reluctance to adopt project management methodologies on their intelligence and creativity. I agree that smart people are drawn to the law, but I believe that the reason project management is abhorred by lawyers is that law firm incentives are stacked against it. Hourly billing discourages efficiency. I’m sure smart people were drawn to the law before the 1940s, when U.S. lawyers began adopting the practice of hourly billing. Also, I know that smart people are attracted to the practice of law in countries where hourly billing is the rare exception. I don’t think that lawyers will run from the law if they are forced into fixed-free arrangements and have to start worrying about inefficiency eroding their profits.

In short, it is less a matter of project management crimping lawyers’ style and more a matter of it crimping their wallets. Change the perverse incentives of hourly billing and watch attitudes towards project management and process improvement magically change.

Looking forward to your further thoughts on the subject.