The Project Management in Law Department Management

It is not often that you will see the "work breakdown structure" discussed in the context of providing legal services. This post provides a brief explanation of the WBS and how lawyers can use to organize legal work. If you want to learn more about the WBS as applied to legal work, you might want to check out Meg Dixon's course "Project Management for Lawyers," offered by ALI-ABA. For more information, see my post: "Margaret Dixon on Legal Project Management." Be sure also to see the comments section where a reader asked specifically about her treatment of the WBS and my response.

This post, which touches upon the definition of the term "project management" and introduces a number of tools that firms can use to manage legal projects, sparked an interesting conversation in the blawgosphere. Responding to Rees, I discussed my views on the role of project management software in a post entitled "Buying a Lathe Does Not Make You a Carpenter: Setting Realistic Expectations for Legal Project Management Software." Steven Levy, another must-read blawger for those interested in Legal Project Management, commented on my post on his Lexician blog, in his post: "Rethinking Legal Project Management Tools." I followed up with: "Project Management Tools in the Legal Environment: Can Old Dogs be Taught New Tricks?" The discussion was further carried out in the comments to the posts on our blogs.

LINK: http://www.lawdepartmentmanagementblog.com/law_department_management/2009/09/project-management-software-doesnt-necessarily-mean-the-discipline-of-project-management.html 

Rees ruminates on Richard Susskinds talk at ILTA 20009, where Susskind discussed the difference between project management and process improvement. Rees observes that "in-house counsel often find themselves to be forced to become project managers.... Yet few of them have had formal training in project management skills."

LINK: http://www.lawdepartmentmanagementblog.com/law_department_management/2009/10/in-house-lawyers-are-untrained-project-managers-and-process-analysts.html

This post discusses the trend of professionalism of legal support staff, providing as examples project management certifications, paralegal certifications, e-discovery courses, and six sigma training.

LINK: http://www.lawdepartmentmanagementblog.com/law_department_management/2009/10/credentials-and-professionalism-on-the-ascendancy-in-legal-departments.html

I've discussed this phenomenon and the related trend of the "lawyerfication" of litigation support in my post: "The Lawyerification of Litigation Support: Is a Legal Education a Benefit or Just Baggage for an E-discovery Project Manager?"

In this post Rees highlights Allygroup, an Australian company set up "by a specialist litigation manager specifically to project manage litigation on an outsourced basis." Rees agrees that "it makes sense to import the skills and disciplines of project management to large-scale litigation."

LINK: http://www.lawdepartmentmanagementblog.com/law_department_management/2009/11/retain-a-litigation-project-manager-not-from-a-law-firm-but-perhaps-from-australia.html

I find that it is common for large discovery and litigation support projects in East Asia to be managed by project managers based in Australia, Singapore, or Hong Kong. It is difficult to find qualified e-discovery project management talent in many East Asian locations. Hiring someone with the expertise and experience, and understanding of the legal discovery process to travel to oversee the selection and execution of data collection and processing is, in my experience, well worth the additional expense.