Fios Presents a Webinar on Litigation Project Management

Earlier today I attended the Fios webinar "Practical Tips on How to Lead Project Management Planning to Balance Scope, Time and Budget," presented by Amy Catton, Litigation Support Quality Coordinator at Kilpatrick Stockton and Kate Billera, Client Services Manager at Fios, Inc.  It was an informative and well-presented program on how to apply traditional project management principles to litigation projects. I recommend it to anyone who would like a basic introduction to legal project management. Fios generally makes its past webinars available on-demand for free at the Fios E-discovery Knowledge Center. 

Kudos to Fios for not being afraid to subject a legal audience to project management speak. Amy and Kate did a great job explaining traditional project management concepts and how they are applicable to litigation projects.  I hope that the audience was not composed solely of litigation-support techies. Lawyers need more exposure to these ideas. They covered a lot of ground in this hour-long presentation, but here are some things that caught my attention.

They discussed how the "triple constraint" theory of project management applies to litigation projects. The "triple constraints" are scope, time, and cost.  "Quality" is often treated as belonging to scope, although some project managers prefer to separate it out and treat it as a fourth constraint. The theory states that any increase or decrease in one area will affect one or both of the other areas. If you have less time for a project, the cost will go up or the scope/quality will go down. In this presentation, they stated that for litigation projects you can not compromise on quality. The example was that you can't risk letting some privileged documents get into a production because you don't have enough time or resources to conduct a proper privilege review.

While I agree with this for privilege review, I think that in a litigation project there sometimes is room for decreasing scope. Law firms, for example, do a cost/benefit analysis when determining how many review phases and what level of sampling, spot checking, and supervision they require for a relevance review.  Rather than scope, for many litigation projects the most inflexible side of the project management triangle is time. Legal projects are run on a court's schedule and missing deadlines can have serious repercussions.  The triple constraints are often referred to as the "iron triangle." In litigation projects, the triangle is often flattened to an iron bar that forces you to either spend more or do less and risk quality.  Yet, as the Fios presenters point out, in legal projects you often can not risk quality by decreasing the scope of the project. Court-mandated deadlines and the high stakes involved can turn a litigation project into a big, heavy, iron ball of cost.  This is why project planning and early assessments are crucial in litigation projects.

One suggestion made in the presentation that I wholeheartedly agree with is getting attorneys involved in the the lessons learned process. Many law firms do not regularly conduct lessons learned sessions at the end of project and do not maintain a lessons learned knowledge base. Also, those litigation support departments and outside vendors who have implemented lessons learned processes often do not attempt to involve the lawyers. A lot of valuable information on what makes a project successful from the legal team's perspective is thereby lost. Law firms and legal departments should require attorneys to participate in lessons-learned meetings at the end of projects and to review lessons learned at the start of new projects.

One interesting point Amy and Kate make is that for litigation support projects, "fast tracking" is the norm.  "Fast-tracking" refers to schedule compression technique of simultaneously performing multiple activities that were planned to be completed in sequence. Traditional project management treat schedule compression tools as anomalies. Litigation projects, however, come pre-compressed. Because of the time constraints that most litigation project managers work under, fast tracking is the norm. Rolling productions are a common example. It would be interesting to study whether the risks of rolling productions lead to higher costs (e.g. from more work having to be redone). Much of the fast tracking in discovery projects is caused by legal teams delaying the start of the collection, processing, and/or review as they try to settle or decrease the scope of discovery. This leads to the wait, wait, wait, RUSH LIKE HELL character of many document reviews. It would be interesting to study whether the higher costs and risks of compressed discovery schedules are justified by the risk of conducting some unnecessary discovery.

In the question and answer session, there was a discussion about the importance of a team approach to litigation project management.  Also discussed was the trend of corporations bringing electronic discovery in-house. The presenters warned that corporations should not lose sight of their core competencies and that there were some risks to bringing everything in house. 

Lastly, in response to a question, Amy and Kate shared the following overall characteristics that a legal project manager should possess: good time management and organization skills, yet also having the ability to "go with the flow" and multi-task. They point out that frequent change is the norm in legal projects and a legal project manager needs to be willing and able to work in such an environment. If you don't like frequent change and interruption, you'll be frustrated in a law firm environment. Not surprisingly, they see good communication skills as an important characteristic of a legal project manager.  One bit of wisdom shared at the very end is that for a legal project manager, time management includes the ability to manage yourself as a resource and knowing what your personal constraints are.

I barely touched upon all the information Amy and Kate packed packed into their presentation. I suggest you view the saved webinar for the rest.