Legal staffing agencies that also stage and manage document reviews have long highlighted their project management expertise to differentiate their services from competitors who only provide warm bodies. In an interview published Tuesday on the Metropolitan Corporate Counsel Web site, Meron I. Hewis, Account Manager at Kelly Law Registry, notes that "law firms are looking for cost savings for their clients with project management expertise by introducing them to [outsourced discovery solutions]," such as those provided by Kelly Law Registry at their Litigation Discovery Center in Troy, Michigan.[1]
Increasingly, legal staffing agencies are touting their project management expertise as a way to distinguish themselves from competitors who simply supply warm bodies. When I worked as a project manager for a legal staffing agency in New York, we employed full-time project managers, which was still unusual at the time. Now, most of the large legal staffing agencies also provide staging and project management services, in addition to temporary attorney placement. With more document-review work going off-shore, legal project management is receiving greater attention as veterans from India's and the Philippine's BPO industries are bringing their project management and process improvement training and expertise to document review work.
In her interview, Ms. Hewis makes some valid points about the benefits of outsourcing document review to on-shore providers, such as the convenience of making site visits. When it comes to project management, however, my experience is that off-shore providers are investing more in project management and process improvement systems and training. I see a legal project management arms race in the making. Slapping the title of "project manager" on recently-graduated contract attorneys is no longer going to cut it.
I'm not saying that every document review project manager will need to be PMI certified or a Six Sigma black belt, but I do predict that staffing agencies will increasingly hire professionally certified project managers and process-improvement experts onto their team, or will at least hire consultants to provide training and design systems to measurably increase the quality and efficiency of their services. At this time, I'm not seeing contract attorney agencies highlighting project management to the same extent as the e-discovery companies who provide computer forensics and ESI collection, processing, and hosting services, but I expect that to change soon. As the later continue to form partnerships with the former, providing one-stop shopping for all your e-discovery needs, project management prowess is only becoming more important as a competitive advantage.
[1] DuPont - Primary Service Providers Kelly Law Registry - One Of The Stars Of The DuPont Legal Model , Periodical The Metropolitan Corporate Counsel, Dec. 1, 2009, available at http://www.metrocorpcounsel.com/current.php?artType=view&artMonth=December&artYear=2009&EntryNo=10390 (last visited on Jan. 1, 2009); see also Ms Lewis's LinkedIn provide at http://www.linkedin.com/pub/meron-hewis/1/979/153 (last visited Dec. 2, 2009); Kelly Law Registry home page, http://www.kellylawregistry.com/ (last visited Dec. 2, 2009).
Thank you for this post!
Just a note that PMI fully recognizes the advent of Agile approaches, and has formed a community of practice to help introduce and train PMBOK-focused project managers in Agile practices. I'll be working with them to support this!
For those who don't know, the major differences are that in Agile, 1) the people doing the work are a real team,--not a hodge podge of "scaled resources," 2) change is embraced, not seen as a risk to be stamped out, 3) short iterations mean course correction is less painful and 4) the emphasis on prioritization means that business value gets returned as soon as possible in full collaboration with the client and other "ecosystem" stakeholders (such as the court and opposing counsel).
Since the "long tail" invariably gets trimmed [ to paraphrase A. Cockburn ] in document review and change is a 'given', --why not use methodologies that remove as much work-in-progress as possible and fully utilize the collective wisdom of a legal team to get the job done?
That's why I am advocating for use of Scrum at the team level, but insisting that it can only work when the entire process is infused with Agile/Lean principles. It's not going to be easy, but I suspect most dedicated document review teams WILL end up with a mesh of PMBOK+Agile.
Regina, thanks for your comment. I'm looking forward to learning more about your endeavors in building a document review service around Agile principles. Please keep me in the loop!
Not to be a skeptic here but Agile and Scrum come from the world of software development and their roots are in the idea that software development really is constant experimentation. Therefore, Agile and Scrum are used to minimize the risk of moving too far down the wrong path. These methodologies allow for a quick course correction.
In the legal world things are much more rigid and require much less experimentation. My initial thoughts are that a project management in the legal world will fall much closer to the waterfall world than the agile world. Don't get me wrong, I think process improvement will be a constant in this field and technology will help a lot. However, the very nature of some of these projects seems to not afford itself to Scrum and Agile very easily.