Project management principles for small firms

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 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,” said Levy, who is based in Seattle, Wash. “If it’s done consciously, not only do you manage the project better, but you stress less.”

Sarah Read, a Columbia, Mo.-based communications consultant who operates buildingdialogue.com, said project management principles can help solos and small-firm practitioners better manage their practices.

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 said. “But they haven’t necessarily applied them to the administrative end of their practice.”

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

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 said.

According to Levy, the concepts can also be used in litigation.

The question to ask in any litigation, Levy said, 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 recommended attorneys work with clients to determine what the client hopes to achieve from the litigation.

For example, 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:

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 said.

Timeline, schedule

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

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.

“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,” she said.