Recently in Project Management in Practice Category

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,...

Bierce & Kenerson, P.C. share their version of the electronic-discovery process in a recent post to the firm's Outsourcing-Law.com blog,[1] which they refer to as the "Electronic Discovery Resource Model, not to be confused with the Electronic Discovery Reference Model ("EDRM"). Bierce & Kenerson's diagram provides another way of looking at the e-discovery process and may be more user friendly for some lawyers.  [1] Bierce & Kenerson, P.C., E-Discovery and Legal Process Outsourcing: ESIM Process Design and Choices between Outsourcing vs. Insourcing, Periodical Name, Dec. 21, 2009, available at http://www.outsourcing-law.com/2009/12/e-discovery-and-legal-process-outsourcing-esim-process-design-and-choices-between-outsourcing-vs-insourcing/ (last visited on Dec. 31, 2009).(Note, the title when I originally...

Carol Watson, Associate Director for Information Technology at the University of Georgia School of Law, refers to project management as a "survival skill" in a recent article published on LLRX.com, a popular Web journal dedicated to the legal research community.[1] Ms. Watson's article provides a high-level overview of standard project management, focusing on defining the project scope, developing a work breakdown structure and communication plan, and closing out the project with a "debriefing" (i.e. a lessons-learned exercise).I was a bit disappointed that the article doesn't provide examples of law-library projects. Ms. Watson states that "[m]any of the techniques librarians intuitively use...

A recent post to the Discerning E-discovery Blog by Aaron Pippen, a Senior Project Manager at Fios, got me thinking about about gold-plating again.[1] By gold-plating I'm not referring to the dental procedure I've been saving up for, but rather the practice of enhancing a product or service beyond a customer's requirements. Mr. Pippen asks whether gold plating on e-discovery projects is necessary, concluding that while e-discovery project managers should provide value, delivering more than what is asked for is generally unwise and "can lead to undesirable issues."  For example, if a client asks for a specific report, they...

Owners of successful businesses are generally adept at controlling costs, managing risk, verifying quality, and increasing proficiency. When it comes to their legal matters, however, that is not always the case. The main reason law firms have been slow to adopt project management and process efficiency best practices, I believe, is that clients haven't demanded it. This is changing, especially with the recession causing companies to cinch their belts even tighter and looking for new areas to squeeze out inefficiency. Smart business owners are not only pressuring outside counsel to lower bills and offer alternative billing options, they are also...

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...

Today I attended, via Web cast, the American Law Institute and American Bar Association (ALI-ABA) continuing legal education course on project management for lawyers.[1] The instructor was time-management-for-lawyers guru Margaret Spencer Dixon.[2]Ms Dixon's two-hour lecture provided a crash course in project management, tailored for a legal audience. I had predicted that this would not be a standards-based course, but rather a discussion of general principals of "project management" as the term is loosely defined.[3] I was wrong. Although Ms Dixon kept the presentation lawyer-friendly, I was surprised at how much standard project-management terminology and practices she covered. Unlike most project-management-for-lawyers courses...

Seyfarth Shaw is featured in the cover story of the current issue of iSixSigma Magazine.  Lisa Damon, Managing Partner; Andrew Perlstein, Partner; and Carla Goldstein, Director of Strategic Management, discuss the firm's Seyfarth Lean program.[1]  Seyfarth Lean is the firm's adoption of Six Sigma methodologies to the practice of law.This is the most detailed explanation of Sayfarth Lean that I've seen to date and is well worth a read for any firm considering Six Sigma. I took away two tips for successfully implementing Six Sigma in a law firm: adopting a less statistics-heavy training for attorneys, and making sure that implementation is a top-down, firm-wide initiativeFor the...

Those of us who promote better project management in the practice of law sooner or later stumble into the debate over whether project management is a transplant from the business world that will eventually sap the professionalism out of law.  Is running a law firm like a business antithetical to law as an honorable profession? Last week the ABA Journal's News blog published a post about William Lancaste, a Seyfarth Shaw partner who is suing the firm after they demoted him to non-equity status. Mr. Lancaste claims that although he had a productive practice, he was a victim of the firm...

Laura Bandrowsky, Practice Support Director at Duane Morris, writes about her firm's search for a project-management solution for their litigation-support department and why they selected iFramework.[1] Like many firms, Duane Morris was using spreadsheets and a homegrown MS Access database to manage their litigation-support projects. Although these tools had served them well, as the firm began moving from traditional processes to electronic ones, their Litigation Support Department made a necessary move away from using multiple systems, such as paper, e-mail inboxes and folders and/or Excel files, and began implementing centralized, online, real-time technologies that include integration with processing tools and online review platforms that...