Juicy bite-sized morsels of legal project management from the week ending Saturday, August 28, 2010.
- Toby Brown examines and graphs out the commoditization of legal work in a recent post to 3 Geeks and a Law Blog. He notes that while "legal project management is a first line of attack to adjust the delivery model to lower cost levels..., LPM will probably not reduce delivery costs enough to maintain positive margins as this is merely providing service with the same basic model - only more efficiently."
- Rees Morrison shares his thoughts about the Textron litigation group's Six Sigma initiative in a post to his Law Department Management blog.
- I hadn't thought about searching YouTube for Legal Project Management before and was surprised to come across a video by Hudson Legal discussing their legal project management and contract services for document-review projects. It is a well-done example of how staffing agencies and legal vendors can highlight their LPM expertise in their marketing.
- Jerome Kowalski discusses the challenges of managing an alternative-fee legal project in part II of a series of posts on alternative-fee arrangements at his Kowalski & Associates blog.
- In an article for Law Times, Michael McKiernan writes about how in-house counsel are seeking lawyers as project managers.
- In a post to his company's blog, Eric Elfman, CEO of Onit Software, which offers a legal-project-management SaaS solution, discusses why Onit has decided to build their budgeting functionality to focus on high-level, life-of-project and annual budgeting capabilities.
- Steve Levy returns from vacation with a post on why legal-project managers don't like to gamble and why lack of project management decreases your firm's odds of remaining competitive. In another post, he draws a lesson about the economics of commodity versus premium legal services from his observation that high-end hotels' charge for wi-fi, whereas cheap hotels and campgrounds provide it for free.
- Proving that a good vacation can make you more productive when you return to work, Steve writes a third post taking issue with the explanation of LPM provided by a speaker at the International Legal Technology Conference. Specifically he objects to the characterization of LPM being about metrics and process improvement. In yet another post, he shares four traits you should look for when selecting a LPM trainer.