August 2009 Archives

Working in Taiwan as an American attorney provides an interesting perspective on the practice of law in the United States. I'm always amused by the debate over "alternative billing" that flares up from time to time in the States. In Taiwan, fixed-fee billing is the norm, not an alternative lifestyle. Taiwanese legal consumers expect fixed-fee billing and are, generally, uncomfortable with hourly billing. This has required that I give increased focus to building models based on past time and expense records to improve the accuracy of my estimates.Project Management standards and methodologies provide powerful, well tested tools for planning, tracking,...

I get excited when I learn of law firms who apply project management standards and process improvement methods to their services (I know, I'm odd). I get even more excited when the lawyers who are responsible for implementing these programs read and comment on my blog. Therefore, I was elated to see Christopher J. Spizzirri's comment  on my first post in a series on ABA material discussing Six Sigma.Chris is the e-Discovery Coordinator at Morris James LLP and author of the Delaware eDiscovery Report blog. I was interested to learn that his firm has begun a program of implementing Six Sigma techniques into its e-discovery...

Not long ago, if someone applying for a job in a law firm was emphasizing his "project management skills," he was probably applying for a litigation support or IT position. In the current economic climate threating traditional law firm models, however, project management skills can help differentiate attorney job seekers.The author of recent post to the Fight the Hypo blog about finding a job as a non-traditional law graduate emphasizes her "complex project management" experience as an example of a non-legal skill "that a 24- or 25-year-old T20 law school grad lacks even if he goes to a "better" school than...

This is the third and final post in a three-part series looking at ABA materials discussing Six Sigma. Hat tip to Rees Morrison and his excellent Law Department Management blog for bringing these articles to my attention. In Parts One and Two, I discussed two papers on Six Sigma and electronic discovery presented at the 2009 ABA Litigation Section Annual Conference (Atlanta, GA). Here I'll discuss additional material discussing Six Sigma available on the ABA Web site.  A search of "six sigma" on the domain ABANET.COM ("six sigma" site:abanet.org) returned 30 hits. A search for "six sigma" in the ABA Web site's search field, while logged in, returns...