Legal Project Management (LPM) is extremely important in teams and projects of all sizes.

Good project management in short brings efficiency, budget control, and happy team members. Bad project management or complete lack of any management creates nothing but chaos.

Luckily, you can start today by adopting some of the best practices that differentiate improvisation and directed PM approach.

This is a short introduction, so pick your track:

Why legal project management matters?

Legal Project Management is intentional use of project management tools and methodologies in the context of law.

Project can be anything: due diligence, preparation of large documentation, or big repapering in light of GDPR obligations.

The task of a project manager is to make sure that subject-matter experts can focus only on their actual job (not on formatting, searching for information, merging documents, or else).

Legal Project Management is one of the most important untapped resources in law.

Law firms keep on assigning the control over large projects to semi-senior or senior fee earners. These are usually brilliant lawyers but quite often never really received any training on how to run a project.

Don’t get me wrong – there are many managing associates that do a splendid job. But why do lawyers that manage projects have to reinvent the wheel by combination of experience and imitation?

Luckily, you can get happier clients and colleagues with some steps in the right direction. While it takes time to become a fully fledged project manager, see below my favourite best practices to get you started.

Do These 10 Things to be a Great Legal Project Manager

#1 Know your project lifecycle

Before your project starts, sit down and mark what is going to happen, start to finish.

Typically you would start when signing an engagement letter with your client. Then it would usually go like this:

• Team onboarding
• Team kick-off call
• Substantive work – including any status updates (internal/external)
• Delivery of preliminary product
• Feedback and incorporation
• Delivery of final product
• Closing the project
• Invoicing

These will obviously differ based on what work you are performing. Once you know these steps, write them down.

#2 Create structure and processes

Your task as a LPM is to think about the lifecycle that you wrote down before and think: what will you do? What will your team need?

Usually, you would like to cover:

• How will you communicate
• What will the deliverable look like, how will you gather it
• How will you keep the client updated
• How will you react to any changes in the process
• …

The last thing anyone needs when its 3am negotiation is not having a support system to rely on.

#3 Make very good project documentation

Now it is time to write everything down in a nicely digestible way. I prefer to make one document and then link it within my onboarding information. This, however, differs based on your team, the way you operate, its size, etc.

Your documentation should cover especially:

• Deliverables (report, contract, term sheet, whatever)
• Deadlines
• Budget
• Scope of your work
• Who is responsible for what
• Communication guidelines
• Templates
• Any org info (like billable number or who should be CCed)

Make this a living document and update it often. Think syllabus at university or weekly specials menu at your fav restaurant.

#4 Keep your team informed

As a legal project manager, you have to strike a perfect balance of keeping your team informed, but not totally overloading them.

This can be achieved by a combination of the following:

• Create good project documentation
• If you team will need some information, give it to them (before they ask)
• Kill the call – save fee caps for calls on substance, not org info
• Set clear expectations (=I will send a weekly update)
• Rely on visuals (I put emojis in subject lines to catch attention of those who read my messages on phones 👀)
• Be curious about the preferences of your team (some prefer email, some like instant messaging or in-person meetings)

#5 Use technology

Project Management Tools

Most lawyers use written to-do lists to track their tasks. But as a project manager, your communication needs to be transparent and no amount of handwritten scribbles can achieve that.

Find yourself a tool to help you. These don’t have to be law-specific. There are tons of tried and tested project management tools, such as Asana, Jira, smartsheets, Trello, etc. etc. etc.

If your law firm has something in-house (including Planner, which is quite often included in Office 365 license), use it.

Automate

I am a big fan of snap automation – the act of automating small batches of similar documents on one project. Saves time and nerves of our associates.

Make sure you prepare every automation in advance, so that you don’t have to debug when things get tough.

Share

The last thing you want to do is to swamp your client OR your team with a lot of emails.

Look around if you can find a better solution how to share information (maybe a sharepoint site or other intranet solution can come handy).

#6 Remember your constraints

• Bank holidays, time zones, days off
• Issues with scope (confirm that you have a team member for each item)
• Client availability (especially if you need – yikes – wet signatures)
• IT maintenance
• Travel time
• Other massive projects that your colleagues are taking care of that have signings on the same day
• Confidentiality guidelines, data protection and other limits (especially when looking at tech tools)
• and whatever else you think would be relevant

#7 Measure

Make sure that you know what is going on not only by your feel but also by hard data and metrics. These include:

• Budget
• Scope coverage (= who is doing what)
• Review progress (= how far they’ve come)
• Big milestones (big deadlines, big deliverables)

There is one good thing about current billable hour system – it gives you a pretty decent understanding on how individuals on your team approach the workload.

Do you see that a key team member hasn’t even started? Reach out, maybe they are having some issues.

#8 Look back & Feedback

Legal Project Management is not static. Try to improve all the time. Ask your peers for feedback on your approach and your tools. Evaluate how things went.

• Did you miss a deadline? Think about why.
• Was the Client hyper happy? Think about why.

It is also a good way how to evaluate your own work and iterate as necessary. The way I do manage projects now looks different from what it did years ago when I started.

To give you an example, I created a whole lot of tailored templates, and I tweak them basically after every project.

#9 Celebrate

Once you are done with any big milestone, make sure you celebrate it with your team. Praise is one thing that is usually overlooked in law.

Rule of thumb?

• For all small tasks that were done well – send a nice email/other message
• If someone goes the extra mile – reach out directly to tell them they are awesome
• For all big milestones – hold a celebration (in person or virtual)

#10 Learn from others

While legal project management is just gaining traction, it is standard in many other disciplines (especially manufacturing and tech).

Look for templates and methodologies (and there are many). Somebody somewhere most likely already dealt with the challenge you are facing.

For example, I took the Google Project Management certification programme, and found it incredibly helpful.

There is a ton of resources out there!

Final Provisions

Becoming a good legal project management takes a lot of skill, time, and effort.

You can go very far with intentional practice and a little help from those who walked the walk before you.

This was a zero-to-hero under 7 minutes introduction – but if you subscribe, we’ll be talking about LPM much more in the future.

If that is something that you have implemented in your firm?

What are your tips / best practices?