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Construction supervisors have used project management techniques for decades to complete buildings. Now several legal consultants are urging attorneys to apply similar tools to their practices and cases.

“Project management has a long history in many industries, and almost no history in legal,” said Steven Levy, a legal/technology consultant in Seattle and author of the Lexician blog.

Levy’s book,  “Legal Project Management – Control Costs, Meet Schedules, Manage Risks and Maintain Sanity,” encourages lawyers to view their cases as “projects” to be managed, rather than battles to be won.

“The truth is that everything we do, we manage – consciously or not,” Levy said. “If it’s done consciously, not only do you manage the project better, but you stress less.”

Sarah Read, a communications consultant in Columbia, Mo. (www.buildingdialogue.com), said project management principles can help solos and small-firm practitioners better manage their practices.

“In addition to completing things on time … you can delegate more effectively and complete more things on time,” Read said.

But just the term “project management” turns off some lawyers, she conceded.

“The key is to get a basic understanding of the concepts because, like most other lawyers, solo and small-firm lawyers have very good logical skills,” Read noted. “But they haven’t necessarily applied them to the administrative end of their practice.”

Hoisting the sails

Essentially, project management involves figuring out how to best complete a specific task, and then doing it.

Think of a ship, suggested Read. Rather than navigating the course, project management means tackling the nitty-gritty aspects of the journey: getting people aboard the ship, hoisting and lowering the sails and fixing the leaky bow, she explained.

A project, she said, has a clear objective, a defined beginning and end, and specific constraints – usually time and money – to factor in.

For a solo lawyer, a project could be: writing a brief, establishing a training program for staff or setting up a filing system.

Applying project management principles means that each project needs “to be broken down into steps, and calendared and watched,” she explained.

Levy said the concepts can also be used in litigation.

The question to ask in any litigation, said Levy, is: “What’s the objective? That’s the question attorneys fail to ask. Most projects, when they go bad, go bad at the very start.”

He recommends attorneys work with clients to determine what the client hopes to achieve from the litigation.

For example, he said, a client who is being sued for patent infringement may want to continue manufacturing the product. So one thing to evaluate might be how much the client is willing to spend to settle the suit.

Basic project management techniques include:

• A project charter.

The charter spells out the scope and objectives of the project.

“Sit with the client and understand: What do they want to get out of this? What will determine the success of this matter for them? From there, you can figure out the level of effort that will make sense to both you and the client,” Levy advised.

• A timeline and schedule.

Levy puts index cards on top of a timeline to track important deadlines.

• A “critical path” analysis.

Determine how long it will take to complete each part of the project, and which actions are critical.

“There are some things that are ‘critical path’ and some things that aren’t, and they can be shifted,” Read said. For example, she explained, “You can wait until the day your brief is due and type your notice of filing, or you can do that 30 days beforehand when your legal assistant’s workload is slow, and then you’re not scrambling.”

Questions or comments can be directed to the writer at: nora.tooher@lawyersusaonline.com

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