Legal Project Management is about asking five questions, and everything else is commentary. We often hear about work breakdown structure, project charters, workflows, after-action reviews — all that apparatus may seem daunting if all you hear is the jargon. But project management- or matter management – or whatever one calls it is simply about taking a systematic and repeatable approach. Law Strategy Coach is launching a blended-learning course, including online resources for legal project management. Sign up to learn more.
Consider the five questions:
Why? What? When? How? Whom?
Not everyone asks those questions. And often they are not asked in the correct order. Why informs everything else. Do professionals often jump to Whom? without considering the context and the client’s best interests. If you ask those 5 questions you will have a laser-sharp focus and a clear roadmap. To break it down:
Why? Why are we handling this matter?
Why is this important to the client? Why is it important to the law firm? In other words, what’s the definition of success? That’s a complicated question. Is it to win the case or establish a policy?
Is success about closing the deal or is it about generating revenue or entering a new market? Maybe it’s to gain a competitive advantage.
Those are business questions that a client has to answer. And those answers inform the legal strategy. Legal work starts with the client’s needs, not just the legal issues.
The next question is what?
What are we going to do in handling the matter?
Now that’s the substantive legal work. But what we are going to do is dictated by the client’s definition of success and the timetable that the client has for when things need to get done. That in turn has an effect on what the client is willing to pay and fee structures. And that has implications for the profitability of a law firm.
Corporate Counsel handling the matter exclusively internally will be asking the why and the what questions, and also considering available resources, demands on productivity and how to balance new work with whatever else is already on their plate.
So why turns into what we’re going to do, which then turns into when.
When? Are there any time constraints?
Does the matter have to be completed by a particular time because of any circumstance? Is time our friend or our enemy? Do we need to get this done by the end of the calendar quarter or fiscal year? Or is delay a good thing for us in helping accomplish our business objectives, particularly when we’re in litigation and we’re on the defense side of it? And if this is a situation where you have no control of the time, counsel or the project manager needs to be able to articulate what those time constraints are and what the uncertainties are, and their implications. It is critical to manage client’s expectations about when things will get done.
Next is How and Who – in that order.
How comes before who because we have to think about what the work is and who is best suited to do.
Experts know what is available and how to break the work into its component parts. What are the different phases; what are the tasks and activities that are undertaken within those phases? What are the outcomes of a phase, such as making a motion to dismiss or completing due diligence? What are the outputs or deliverables? Is there a document that’s going to be created? A memo, perhaps.
From there we develop a work plan. Consider whether to structure it by phase, which is not necessarily temporal or contiguous. Or structure the plan by output or by some milestone events. What best communicates the flow of the matter or project? These are also important questions that have to be understood in planning a matter.
What’s the highest and best use of the participants? Who should do the work at the right level, given the client’s needs and expectations?
There are many considerations. For example, how to balance the law firm’s desire to make money and have a profitable matter while simultaneously providing professional development opportunities for people (which may require write-offs). What about the client’s needs and expectations around law firm staffing in regards to relationships and outside counsel guidelines.
If you approach the planning and handling of matters with these five questions in mind, then you understand the basics of legal matter management or legal project management, or whatever we decide to call it. The point is that the answers to the five questions are nuanced.
Law Strategy Coach is launching a Legal Project Management blended-learning course, including online resources. Sign up here to learn more.
