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

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The Posse List Predicts E-discovery Project Management Gets Serious in 2010

By Paul C. Easton on December 21, 2009 9:30 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Today the Posse List published its list of seven trends in e-discovery for contract attorneys for 2010. Trend number four is "project management gets serious."[1]  [L]itigation support costs will continue to be reduced with the combining of document review services with more traditional litigation support services. Merrill Corporation, Fios/Ajilon and other companies are doing this, and quite successfully. It offers new roles and more opportunities for contract attorneys. And the key to all of this is project management, often a misused phrase in this industry. [2] I believe that the Posse List is spot on in this prediction. After years...

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Julian Ackert on the Key to Successful E-discovery Project Management

By Paul C. Easton on December 19, 2009 2:19 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
What is the key to being a successful e-discovery project manager? It is a topic that I've written on before. Julian Ackert , Director of Washington, DC based Intelligent Discovery Solutions, Inc ("iDS"), shares his analysis on Georgetown Law's E-discovery Law Blog (hat tip to the Electronic Discovery Reading Room).[1]  So what is the key to successful end-to-end e-Discovery project management? In my experience, it is an equal balance of practice, methodology, and technology. Consider involving at least one project manager familiar with e-Discovery challenges during every phase in the lifecycle. This direct experience "in the trenches" is key to ensure that...

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LPM Jobs Listings

By Paul C. Easton on December 3, 2009 3:05 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
In addition to this blog, I also maintain a Linked In group by the same name. While the group's activity levels remain only light to moderate, membership continues to grow. One benefit of the Linked In group is the jobs board. If you are looking for legal project management job, I suggest you join the legal project management group on Linked In. Also, going forward, I'll be posting jobs listed on the Linked In group to this blog. In addition to helping get the work out about new jobs, I'm also doing this to focus on what project management experience,...

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Project Management in Legal Staffing Companies

By Paul C. Easton on December 2, 2009 6:10 PM | 3 Comments | 1 TrackBack
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...

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The Importance of Project Management to Attorney Job Satisfaction

By Paul C. Easton on December 2, 2009 11:47 AM | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks
Jeremy, a mid-level associate at a large New York law firm (Firm A), thought he had a bad cold. One night while toiling on a brief due in a week, his condition worsened. "I couldn't breathe, and I thought I was going to pass out." He called the partner, notorious for working her teams hard even in the absence of deadlines, and told her he was seriously ill, and that he thought it best to leave. She told him to "tough it out," and stay to finish the brief. Jeremy stayed all night and left the office the next morning....

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Tomorrows Corporate Lawyers: Some thoughts on Richard Susskind's Five Categories

By Paul C. Easton on October 18, 2009 9:12 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
I just read a very interesting article by Richard Susskind (author of The End of Lawyers) on Law.com today.[1]  In it he discussed what he predicts will be the five types of corporate lawyers in the future. These are:expert trusted lawyer"[T]he provider of bespoke legal service." Predicted to become increasingly rare as legal servers are commoditized, but there will always be some occasions where it will be unavoidable.enhanced practitionerThis is the lawyer who will support the provision of "standardized,  systematized and (when in-house) packaged legal service." Again, the amount of such work in the future will be less than today....

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Job Advice: Legal Project Management is Swell, but it Won't Make Up for Technological Ineptitude

By Paul C. Easton on October 12, 2009 12:32 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
In the current economic climate, it is prudent to find ways to distinguish yourself from your competition, whether you're a firm looking to gain and retain clients or a lawyer looking for a job. I've written in the past that attorney job seekers should highlight project management skills and experience. I have also created a "Careers" category on this blog as I expect that current changes in the legal industry will give me many more opportunities to write on this topic.In a post made last Friday to the Brooklyn Law School Library Blog, Reference Librarian and Adjunct Professor of Law, Harold...

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The Lawyerification of Litigation Support: Is a Legal Education a Benefit or Just Baggage for an E-discovery Project Manager?

By Paul C. Easton on September 25, 2009 11:41 PM | No Comments | 5 TrackBacks
If you have a legal discovery project that will cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars for data collection and processing, document review, and production; in a litigation with millions of dollars at stake; who do you want managing the e-discovery? A lawyer? A paralegal? A litigation support professional? I would say any of the aforementioned professionals is fine, so long as he or she has the right experience, personality, communication ability--and project management skills. It seems, however, that others in the industry touting the importance of project management in e-discovery projects seem to favor one professional background over the others....

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Do You Have What it Takes to be an E-discovery Project Manager?

By Paul C. Easton on September 15, 2009 2:13 PM | No Comments | 4 TrackBacks
In this month's issue of ALSP Update, Brett Tar, General Counsel of Emag Solutions discusses what he sees as the new breed of electronic discovery project managers. Brett Tar, Skills, Savvy and More: The New E-Discovery PM, ALSP Update, Sept. 2009, at URL.Tarr makes the important point that expertise in e-discovery law, budgeting, or firm management do not guarantee success as an e-discovery project manager. He argues that "[i]n today's multimillion-dollar, multimillion-document lawsuits and regulatory inquiries, the ideal PMs are a new, absolutely unique breed."As General Counsel of a top electronic discovery vendor, Tarr is well positioned to observe the development...

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Attorney Job Seekers Should Highlight Project Management Skills & Experience

By Paul C. Easton on August 8, 2009 12:33 AM | 7 Comments | 1 TrackBack
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...

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