Legal Project Management: Thoughts, tips, and discoveries related to the management of legal projects.

January 2010 Archives

A Book, An Old Article, and Plenty of Blawgs: January Kicks 2010 Off to Good Start for Legal Project Management

By Paul C. Easton on January 31, 2010 5:47 AM | 2 Comments | 1 TrackBack
A lot can happen in two weeks. Due to a number of positive and negative work-related and personal challenges, I've not posted for a couple weeks. In 2009, that wouldn't have been an issue. There just was not a great deal of news and analysis of legal project management on a month-to-month basis. If January is any indication, however, 2010 looks to be a much more exciting year for those interested in the subject. I was put back into a writing mood this past Friday as I started reading Stephen Levy's book, Legal Project Management, on the high speed rail...

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Legal Project Management Blog Featured in the First Episode of the Not The Status Report Podcast

By Paul C. Easton on January 17, 2010 8:17 PM | No Comments | 1 TrackBack
I was honored to learn today via Twitter, that Cornelius Fichtner (@corneliusficht) featured the Legal Project Management blog in the inaugural episode of his new podcast. Mr. Fichtner is already well-known in project-management circles for his PM PodCast. His new podcast is entitled Not The Status Report (NTSR).  Each week, Mr. Fichtner and Josh Nankivel (who also authors the PM Student blog) "report on and recommend one project management related tool, gadget, website, methodology, blog, game, software, product, or service." In NTSR's first episode, Cornelius recommends this blog and highlights my post on project management in legal staffing companies. I appreciate the...

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Ark Conference on Alternative Fee Arrangements Puts Legal Project Management on the Agenda

By Paul C. Easton on January 17, 2010 6:59 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
On March 10, 2010, the Ark Group is hosting a conference on alternative fee arrangements (AFA) at the AMA Executive Center in New York, New York. On the agenda is a one-hour "problem-solving session" titled "Project Management and AFA's: Achieving Cost-certainty for the Firm, Enabling Cost-certainty for the Firm's Clients." The session's co-presenters are Steven B. Levy (company profile / LinkedIn), Principal at Lexician and a prolific writer and speaker on the topic of legal project management, and Patrick J. Lamb (company profile / LinkedIn), a Partner at Valorem Law Group.The details of the conference are as follows:Alternative Fee Arrangements--From...

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Don't Wait Around to See if your S.P.O.C. Died

By Paul C. Easton on January 13, 2010 9:23 PM | 4 Comments | No TrackBacks
This recent Dilbert cartoon is a fun reminder that it is important to create triggers and develop habits to force you to keep in touch with your client/vendor contacts.  try{for(var lastpass_iter=0; lastpass_iter For both lawyers and project managers, and especially for legal project managers, communication is the single most important skill for success. Communication, however, is more than articulation. The truly great legal project managers I've worked with can not only explain highly technical information to non-experts and create a professional and positive atmosphere in meetings, they also excel at capturing and following up on information. There are so many great,...

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SharePoint "Killers"

By Paul C. Easton on January 10, 2010 10:00 PM | 4 Comments | 2 TrackBacks
In a recent post, I showed how SharePoint is a powerful tool for legal and litigation support teams to manage their legal projects.[1] I began using SharePoint five years ago, which is a lifetime in social-media development. In this post I look at a number of applications that may become SharePoint Killers.  I exaggerate. I say "SharePoint Killer" in the same way folks throw around the term "iPhone killer." These are viable alternatives to the SharePoint platform, giving much of the same functionality, and they will keep/take some marketshare away from SharePoint in the legal environment, but they'll no more kill SharePoint in law firms and corporate...

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Social Networking & Project Management (and the blahness of LinkedIn Polling)

By Paul C. Easton on January 10, 2010 3:57 PM | 5 Comments | No TrackBacks
Jason Wade, Sales Manager at iFramework, has posted a simple poll to LinkedIn that asks:try{for(var lastpass_iter=0; lastpass_iter Social Networking & Project Management - is it possible? How often do you check social networking sites using a smart phone?I'll be more interested in any discussion about this at the poll itself or in the Legal Project Management group on LinkedIn than the results itself.  I find the whole LinkedIn polling feature to be a bit half-baked at this time. If you want to seek input from beyond your first-degree connections, you have to pay per response (US $0.75 + $1.00 for "seniority," i.e.,...

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Virtualizing SharePoint at Fenwick & West

By Paul C. Easton on January 9, 2010 9:32 PM | 2 Comments | No TrackBacks
This is off topic, but given my recent posts about SharePoint for legal project management,[1] I found Mark Gerow's recently article in Law Technology News about virtualizing SharePoint for law firm deployments to be quite timely.[2] Mr. Gerow heads the application development team at Fenwick & West. Mr. Gerow does not discuss how or why Fenwick & West uses SharePoint. He instead focuses on the benefits of virtualizing SharePoint extranets and the challenges faced and overcome when migrating from physical to virtual servers. The article is refreshingly detailed and should be of interest to law firm IT managers currently running...

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Caselawg: Bringing SharePoint to Legal Project Management

By Paul C. Easton on January 7, 2010 10:00 PM | No Comments | 1 TrackBack
SharePoint is a powerful yet easy to use team collaboration platform. It is very useful to e-discovery project managers,[1]  but it does have a number of out-of-the-box limitations that more demanding users will quickly butt their heads against in frustration. Such users may want to consider Caselawg by Legal Science. Caselawg is a "software and process methodology [for] electronic discovery departments."[2] I recently had the pleasure of speaking with the Caselawg team who led me through a demonstration of their product. They agreed to answer some question by e-mail that I could share with readers of this blog.  Tell me...

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Project Management an Important Legal Recruitment Trend

By Paul C. Easton on January 7, 2010 6:35 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
An article by Anne Jennings, a managing director with Kelly Law Registry, in last week's Connecticut Law Tribune looks at "trends expected to shape legal recruitment throughout 2010."[1]  In addition to discussing the merits of onshoring services and document review staging capabilities, Ms. Jennings discusses the growing importance of project management capabilities as a competiive advantage for legal staffing agencies:  There is a growing need for project management services across corporate legal departments and law firms nationwide.... For those firms without a paralegal manager or similar employee to take on large document review projects, specialized recruiting agencies offer experienced legal...

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Dennis Lamb Predicts that "Project Management" are the Watchwords for 2010

By Paul C. Easton on January 7, 2010 6:06 AM | 2 Comments | No TrackBacks
Patrick Lamb predicts on his In Search of Perfect Client Service blawg that "[t]he watchwords for 2010 are project management."[1]  [1] Patrick J. Lamb, Watchwords for 2010? Project Management, In Search of Perfect Client Service, Jan. 5, 2010, http://www.patrickjlamb.com/archives/commentary-watchwords-for-2010-project-management.html (last visited on Jan. 7, 2010)....

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SharePoint for Legal Project Management--A Retrospective

By Paul C. Easton on January 7, 2010 12:59 AM | 4 Comments | 3 TrackBacks
SharePoint has received a lot of buzz in legal and litigation-support communities over the past few years and with good reason. SharePoint provides a decent set of collaboration and knowledge management tools that are easy to implement and simple for end-users to learn. I began using SharePoint around five years ago when an IT consultant who was setting up a server for one of my projects asked if I wanted him to set-up SharePoint, a version of which came free with the Windows Server licenses. I had been reading about SharePoint and was interested in checking it out, so I said "sure, go ahead." As soon as it was...

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Legal (E-discovery Mostly) Project Management Software Lists

By Paul C. Easton on January 4, 2010 11:41 AM | 10 Comments | No TrackBacks
UPDATE (1 JAN 2010): I create a separate Web page from this blog post to maintain an updated list of Legal Project Management applications, see:http://legalprojectmanagement.info/legal-project-management-applications.htmlFor some time now, Mark Kerzner has provided weekly summaries of information shared on the LitSupport Yahoo Group discussion board at his "Legal Technology" blog. Last month he launched "LitSupport Q & A" that provides this information in a question and answer format as a free service to the litigation support community. One of the first answers published is a list of "EDD Project Tracking Dashboard software."The list is not meant to be complete as it merely records responses to...

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