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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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Last Thursday, Exterro gave an on-line presentation that discussed e-discovery project management in the context of their suite of legal work-flow tools.[1]  Co-presented by Natasha Keitges, Exterro's Senior Director of Business Development, and Pete Warner,[2] a litigation technology specialist at Sandia National Laboratories (an Exterro client),[3] the Web cast discussed how e-discovery project management fits into a company's government, risk, and compliance program and, more specifically, how applying project management processes to the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM)[4] can establish key efficiencies, cut costs, and allow legal departments to more effectively monitor the successes and failures of their e-discovery projects.  The presentation...

Productivity Guru David Allen's recent newsletter discusses two "project management" problems that should resonate with any legal project manager: (1) having a system that covers various projects requiring different levels of planning detail, and (2) integrating "horizontal vs. vertical" control.[1] Mr. Allen defines a project as "anything ... that is not likely to be finished with one action step."[2] This might be a broader sense of the term than most people intend when they talk of "projects," but adopting this definition helps highlight a common issue faced by legal project managers: I've never seen any two . . . projects that needed...

Lary Port, a founding partner of Rocket Matter, a practice management SaaS solution, recently spoke about legal project management at MILO Fest [1], a "a conference for Mac-Lovin' Lawyers and their families."[2] His talk was entitled "Running an Efficient and Error-Free Law Firm" and its goal was "to delve into the world of project management, applying techniques long known in manufacturing and software industries such as Agile Software Development to the practice of law."[3] He has posted the presentation's slides to SlideShare[4].The slides do not have much text, which is an indication that Mr. Port is a good presenter, but which...