Legal Project Management | Pam Woldow's At the Intersection

Up Close and Personal – Perspectives from a Managing Partners’ Forum

By Pam Woldow on March 9th, 2013 Posted in Law firm practices

Edge International recently co-sponsored and facilitated a Managing Partners’ Forum in Savannah for medium-sized firms in the Southeastern region, and I came away from the discussions both with some eye-opening impressions and a renewed sense of respect for how hard law firm leaders’ jobs are these days.

My partners and I were there not to lecture, coach, consult or pitch, but rather to listen — to get insights into the way today’s legal landscape looks to the leadership of a group of superficially similar but functionally quite diverse firms. The participants were there to pick each others’ brains, as well as to share war stories and horror stories.

None of these firms is an AmLaw 100 giant or global powerhouse, but all are well-established and well-respected in their markets. Most have at least several offices; some have more. All have diversified general practices containing some particular sweet spots as well as some profitability clunkers. All had survived the recession with scars and pain, but no life-threatening wounds.

The managing partners reported a number of common issues and concerns, chief among them:

Culture. The challenge of preserving the positive aspects of firm culture – that is, the values, norms and practices that create lawyer incentives and sustain motivation and engagement – in the face of sweeping economic and operational changes that foster partner self-interest and internecine skirmishes.

Dead Wood. Mediating the tension between lawyer generations – between lawyers seeking continuing job security and “legacy” compensation based on past contributions to firm growth and profitability, and the burgeoning crop of up-and-comers and high-potential laterals seeking a greater piece of power and compensation.

Laterals. The sensitive balance between providing potentially profitable laterals with enough time and support for the transplant to take root and bloom, but not carrying lawyers whose performance is falling short of their promises.

Transparency & Communication. Effectively managing internal information flow and communication between partners and leadership about finances as their firms grow and diversify.

Balancing Act. Managing their own present and future careers, and trying to strike a balance between time demanded by firm management responsibilities and the need to sustain their own practices and bill an acceptable number of hours.

In the next several blogs, we will talk more about these challenges, and the firms’ responses to them. For now, we offer a few general observations:

1. There is never enough time for managing partners to prioritize and address the myriad operational, governance, financial, compensation, marketing, recruiting, interpersonal and personal practice demands that vie for attention. This group reported feeling like they are constantly fighting erupting fires and being caught up in current controversies. All report that they would welcome more time for longer term thinking/planning about strategic firm development.

2. The voices that shout loudest get the most attention, and for managing partners, the self-interested demands of their partners – often a very small group of particularly discontented and very vocal partners – generally resonate more urgently than clients’ calls for greater efficiency, reduced outside legal spend, and better communication.

3. The past, present and future are in intense competition as the legal profession struggles to accommodate fundamental economic and technological changes. As firms of all sizes and markets compete for market ascendance and economic stability, best practices for mastering “The New Normal” remain in flux. For lawyers and law firms, it clearly will be true that “you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs” (a maxim, incidentally, supposedly coined by Joseph Stalin). The problem for managing partners, of course, is that no one wants to be an egg.

Legal Project Management 101: Why Scoping Matters

By Pam Woldow on February 11th, 2013 Posted in Legal Project Management

Scenario (a true-life debacle, presented with altered identifying information)

In November 2012, Steve, a Senior Vice President at Mega-Bank, hired outside counsel to handle what seemed like a routine corporate transaction. The firm took on the matter and performed the legal work and documentation the Bank needed.

In January 2013, at the closing table, Mega-Bank asked to see the firm’s billings, because they were to be paid from the transaction proceeds. The firm faxed over the bill, which totaled $95,000, to the closing agent. Steve was flabbergasted: in his extensive experience in similar transactions with other firms, the legal bills had ranged between $30,000 and $35,000. The highest bill he had ever seen for this type of transaction was $60,000, and that stemmed from some serious complicating factors not present in the instant situation.

This $95,000 bill almost cratered the transaction because the other parties had expected legal bills in the $30,000 range. To get the deal done, the Bank had to agree to pay for part of the legal fees. The firm also agreed to reduce its bill somewhat.

Afterwards, Steve demanded the billing details from the firm. The firm initially resisted providing individual timekeeper detail – not such a great client relations move — but eventually did provide the requested information. Steve found that in December 2012, the firm had deployed 16 associates to work on this utterly routine matter. Steve had had dealings with only one or two associates during the deal – never 16! He was accustomed to billings, in other similar matters from other law firms, for no more than two associates, one partner and perhaps a paralegal. He was confounded by the use of an additional 14 associates, though he suspected that year-end associate hours targets were being partly filled on his matter and on his dime.

Unlike in fairy tales, there is no happy ending to this story.

True, the Bank and the firm hammered a compromise, but everyone came away unhappy. The Bank had to pay out money it had not expected to spend, eroding the underlying deal’s profit projection. The firm partner had to write off time, which impacted both the firm’s profit and his own compensation. Worst of all, the partner lost a client – though as this is written he may not know it yet. Steve is not the kind of guy who “fires” firms. But I can tell you, paraphrasing Taylor Swift’s words, “We are Never, Ever Getting Back Together Again.”

What Went Wrong? Let Me Count The Ways!

This situation careened off the rails at the very beginning – at the Scoping stage. In Legal Project Management, scoping is an essential first step in clarifying the client’s goals, the deliverables the firm will provide and the expected costs for delivering the work.

It’s easy (and certainly correct) to point the finger at the partner who failed to nail down Steve’s fee expectations. After all, the Bank had done dozens and dozens of similar transactions, and those would have established a solid precedent, or at least set the bar on fees. Did the partner even know that this engagement was one the client considered a “routine” deal? If he didn’t, he was guilty of failing to scope the project before diving in.

But let’s not lose sight of Steve’s failings either. He had a clear, but unexpressed, expectation of the legal fees that he thought made sense for this deal. He had lots of experience with the types of issues that could arise in the deals and what the most typical issues would be. Yet he erred in not proactively providing the law firm any information other than the broad contours of the deal. He could/should have said something like:

We have done 62 of these deals so far and the fees are typically between $30 – $35,000. That’s what we have told the other side, as they will be paying your fees. If issues arise, these are the most likely ones we can anticipate: [a, b, c, and d]. And, if any of those arise, please let me know right away so I can manage expectations.

But he didn’t, thus triggering the winter of his discontent.

The Dimensions of Scoping

Effective project scoping is a number of things:

An opportunity for detailed information gathering and information sharing
A collaboration
A negotiation
A discussion of possible events that can impact costs, scope or timing
An agreement about who will do what and when
An opportunity to assure alignment and build trust and rapport

Bad scoping does not require villainy, greed or incompetence. It just requires a failure to communicate about each of these areas, coupled with the willingness to act on untested assumptions. This war story clearly illustrates a fundamental LPM maxim: Thorough up-front scoping beats damage control, any day.

The Death of Lifetime Partnership?

By Pam Woldow on January 11th, 2013 Posted in Law firm practices

In a recent article entitled “Layoffs Threaten Law-Firm Partners,” The Wall Street Journal broke the startling news — irony intended — that “as firms grapple with continued lackluster demand for legal services, some are handing out pink slips” to unproductive partners. The article quoted one unnamed partner as saying, “you’re only as secure as the amount of money you bring in.”

Given the fact that many firms – big, little and in-between – had begun de-equitizing or even showing the door to unproductive partners well before the great economic downturn, this hardly qualifies as a late-breaking story. The WSJ story, moreover, seemed to suggest that the pink slip trend was primarily the result of partners’ decreasing personal billable hours: “The new round of [partner] cuts comes as productivity among the highest-paid tier of a firm’s lawyers remains stubbornly low, with some partners billing less than 1,300 hours a year, down from the prerecession industry benchmark of 1,900 hours.”

The Money-Making Matrix

The WSJ article misses the point that today productivity goes way beyond the time a partner personally bills (and the firm actually collects). We know of numerous firms who happily tolerate 1,100-1,200 annual billable hours from some of their big dogs in light of their $10+ million in originations or their roles as project executives managing practice groups or engagement teams that include scores of worker bees.

Any measure of partner productivity – particularly senior partners — must consider all the dimensions of their role as driving wheels in a complex economic engine that has a lot of moving parts. In truth, many consider the best measure of productivity to be leverage — a partner’s pivotal role in keeping a bunch of other billers busy and profitable. In addition to handling their own matters and practices, senior partners also must serve as a go-to cog in the money-making machine that requires the profitable utilization of associates, paralegals, of counsel lawyers and so-called service lawyers (i.e., the vanishing breed of legally-proficient practitioners who aren’t good rainmakers).

Slowdown or Change of Direction?

The WSJ article also suggests that partner career stability has become precarious primarily because of a post-recession “lackluster demand for legal services.” This implies that the traditional model of safe ‘n’ secure partner tenure might re-stabilize once the economy fully regains momentum. We can’t agree. We think “alternative demand” is a better description than “lackluster demand.” That is, we don’t believe the total amount of legal things that need to be done has shrunk. If anything, it is increasing in the face of the complexity of the global economy.

What is happening, at an escalating pace, is that clients are redirecting work, whether to internal teams or to external providers – including non-lawyers and other non-law firm vendors – that can deliver work more efficiently and cost-effectively. This means that many senior partners can expect to see a continuing erosion of business and client loyalty, not a return to the “luster” of yore, where clients fell obediently into line, there was plenty of scut-work to rain down on associates and paralegals, and up-and-coming lawyers politely waited their turn at the feeding trough.

Scarce Food, Altered Incentives

Law’s “New Normal” really has changed traditional partner career expectations. The time-honored “complacency model” in which equity partners were assured a lifelong slice of the profits was viable only as long as there were ample amounts of pie to slice. Peak performance was not required in an environment of copious clients, inexhaustible legal work and unprotested annual rate increases.

Productivity was not required at all career stages in a profession that historically cut a lot of slack to fading performers whose earlier efforts contributed much to firm growth and success.

The Young and the Hungry

The successor generation of partners is sending signals that it will not accept a model that compensates past contributions rather than current economic traction. In many cases, they’re the ones who are pushing for those pink slips, or at least are happy to see the firm weed out dead and dying wood at top compensation levels. They themselves are years away from being much concerned about lifelong partnership. For them, the future is now, and they can hardly wait for boomer partners to exit the stage and transfer the keys to the treasury. They are perfectly comfortable with the idea of law firms pushing out low-productivity partners who will not step aside on their own initiative.

Top 5 Bad Excuses for Resisting Legal Project Management

By Pam Woldow on January 3rd, 2013 Posted in Legal Project Management

Before we sing the final Auld Lang Syne to 2012, we must insist on one last year-end wrap-up: a list of the reasons that otherwise rational lawyers trot out for resisting and denying reality, in this case reality being their clients’ escalating demands for greater efficiency and cost-effectiveness in the delivery of legal services.

Change Compels Change

The burgeoning trend toward Legal Project Management (LPM) did not simply materialize spontaneously out of the ether. This rapidly-maturing discipline is the proximate consequence of the enormous pressures in-house legal leaders now face to trim budgets, choke back rampant costs and long-entrenched inefficiencies, and, particularly, keep a tight leash on outside legal spend.

Ostrich Voices

Many lawyers and law firms clearly have seen where law’s future is taking us and have commenced implementation of methods and systems to improve their efficiency, matter managements, collaboration and communication. Yet scores of others still haven’t gotten the memo – or refuse even to open the LPM email. Here are the top 5 reasons lawyers gave in 2012 for trying to sidestep the tides of client-driven change, uttered with varying degrees of complacency, defiance, dismissiveness or hostility,

My clients don’t want or need LPM. This is the biggest myth, the most vivid exemplar of flat-out head-in-the-sand thinking. We find this canard advanced by a lot of lawyers who expend little time or effort asking their clients what they really want or need. Perhaps a few antediluvian clients are indeed content to let their lawyers operate with no controls and bill them silly, but in our formal and informal surveys, clients of all kinds and sizes almost universally described intense and increasing cost-control pressures. While all clients may not understand LPM nomenclature, they all want what LPM delivers: better project scoping, better planning and budgeting, better communication and collaboration, and tighter monitoring and control of budgets and costs. Why else would we be seeing such a dramatic increase in RFPs, demands for hard budgets, and serious movement towards more cost-effective alternative fee arrangements?

If we are efficient, we won’t make as much money. (And the corollary: if we are efficient, we won’t be able to meet our annual hours requirement.) This is the essence both of wrong-headed and nearsighted thinking. Clients do notice which lawyers are careful stewards of their money and which ones deliver great services and great value. They also notice the lawyers who dawdle, churn, reinvent the wheel, communicate poorly, and manage matters indifferently. Clients notice this just like partners notice which associates are efficient and manage assignments well. Efficient lawyers are sought after; inefficient lawyers face tough sledding in 2013 and beyond..

I’ve practiced the way I do for decades, and I’m not going to change now. This attitude, most frequently expressed by senior lawyers, is not merely an expression of resistance to change. It reflects the belief that the best way to organize any legal engagement is to have one all-knowing, all-controlling lawyer at the hub of the wheel, with various other contributors arrayed around the rim of the wheel, often bathed in relative darkness and varying degrees of ignorance about the overall purposes, scope and phases of the engagement. This increasingly obsolete perspective ignores the inevitable collaboration needed by firms that have expanded exponentially, dispersed geographically, and have engagements involving ever more cross-office participation. The fact that the Single Leader Approach no longer works – and that it does nothing to effectively disseminate accumulated knowledge — is not keeping lawyers threatened by change from insisting that it remains the one true service delivery path. Because LPM is, essentially, a collaborative service model it is no wonder the old guard resents it.

All my matters are unique, and LPM imposes a bunch of lockstep protocols that will standardize all legal work and devalue my legal judgment. As a friend once said of a prestigious Ivy-league college, “their problem is that they teach their students that everything they think is important.” So too with lawyers, who are trained to see each matter as a novel challenge and to believe that their wisdom and judgment are unique individual gifts. The Old Guard also has been trained on-the-job to bill every matter to the hilt as they search beneath each stone and explore every conceivable legal nuance. The astronomical growth of Legal Process Outsourcing and other alternative legal delivery vehicles clearly demonstrates that in fact law is a lot more commoditized than most law firm lawyers prefer to think. Yes, bet-the-company matters require extraordinary lawyering. But frankly, a huge percentage of legal work…doesn’t.

LPM is all about monitoring and metrics, and my mamma didn’t raise me to be a math major. Also, LPM will impose a whole new learning curve and add a ton of additional work to my already overburdened schedule. This opinion may derive from incorrectly analogizing LPM with such other forms of industrial project management as Critical Path Analysis, Six Sigma, Lean, Agile or Kaizen. These systems, designed to produce identical widgets with minimal variation, can indeed be highly complex and quantitatively driven. But law is not about clean room manufacturing protocols; it’s about the nuanced affairs and interactions of human beings. Fear not: lawyers will continue to be indispensable. LPM, while it may make productive use of templates and technologies, is fundamentally a matter of common sense and collaborative communication, consistently applied. It sharpens up legal processes, not legal content.

Time to Bite the Bullet

LPM does indeed have its own nomenclature, process models, templates and applied technologies, so LPM mastery does impose a fresh learning curve. So did the computer, legal search engines, automated databases and smartphones. Given a will to learn, it really does not take long for LPM to move from first-impression to second nature – and besides, it is now being taught in law schools as a legal service delivery baseline. Those who have mastered LPM and learned to navigate their firms’ increasingly elegant LPM dashboards and budget-management tools tell us that LPM now eases their burdens rather than increasing them. And, more important, clients say they notice that the lawyering actually improves.

The olde order changeth, so welcome to 2013, y’all – the playing field for those first-adopters who will stay ahead of the pack, those first-followers who are seeing the light and racing to catch up, and those who continue to leave the candle unlit and curse the darkness.

Battling the New Inefficiency Disease: Digital Distraction

By Pam Woldow on December 13th, 2012 Posted in Law firm practices

Today’s increasing drive for more efficiency in the delivery of legal services tends to focus on proactive tactics and technologies to achieve faster communication, faster results, and complete elimination of time that doesn’t add value.

Ironically, however, today’s technological advances are creating an escalating and little-acknowledged source of inefficiency. How? By creating constant and unavoidable distraction – by chewing into our heads-down time, fragmenting our efforts, derailing our thoughts, scrambling our priorities and triggering a state of constant annoyed frustration. The distraction issue is particularly problematic in legal practice because the legal economic model is so fundamentally time-based. Service value still relies heavily on lawyers’ ability to close the door, buckle down, focus on the work and put in the time.

Only we can’t shut out the world and retreat into uninterrupted hyper-focus anymore. Reading and responding to hundreds of email messages now can occupy half of a partner’s or associate’s time. So where are those thousands of billable hours to come from? Checking voicemails, texts, twitters and facebook posts at all hours impinges on our lives, our relationships and our sleep. With today’s technology, every communication operates in real time, all the time. My Edge partner Doug Richardson coined the word “Equimax” to describe the inexorable pressure of digital communication: “Equimax means that all messages are equally important, and all are maximally important.” Just prioritizing our responses constitutes a distraction in and of itself, and we all rankle at the whine, “How come you haven’t answered my email?”

Digital Distraction

The problem is severe enough to be triggering a new research discipline: digital distraction, a sub-discipline of informatics. According to Wall Street Journal columnist Rachel Emma Silverman, academic studies suggest that office workers are interrupted – or self-interrupt — about once every three minutes, and Stanford University research suggests that it takes about 23 minutes for an interrupted worker to re-establish focus. Wasting time on the Web is not just a matter of undisciplined personal habits, she writes, although “the tempting lure of social networking streams makes it easy for workers to interrupt themselves.” She notes that productivity is eroded as well as fostered by our workplace reliance on digital technology, and “the modern workday seems custom-built to destroy individual focus.”

Coupled with the Babel of open-plan office spaces, continuous meetings, or multi-monitor
desktops, digital distraction “has become an epidemic,” says Lacy Robertson, an organizational development expert at eBay.

Preserving Think Time

What can law firms and legal departments do to keep workers focused? They might emulate a program Intel Corp. is piloting that allows employees to block out certain “no interruptions allowed” periods for heads-down work – the equivalent of a closed door. They can dictate a “no device” policy during meetings or institute “standup meetings,” in which no one is allowed to be seated (and hide their iPhone under the desk).

Eliminate Email?

To attack rampant email clutter, they might consider what global IT services giant Atos in Paris has done: committed to phasing out internal email entirely. Or, in a quest to minimize junk, redundant or verbose emails, they can attempt to limit internal email traffic by prescribing acceptable topics, content, length and response expectations. Atos is experimenting with internal social networks to take up the communications slack.

Maybe the most ironic approach is to fight new technology with old technology. A unit of Abbot Laboratories, recognizing that younger employees have become telephone-phobic (having previously become averse to face-to-face interaction), now urges more telephone usage. Workers are instructed to fight back at Equimax and to triage message content by using phones and face-to-face discussions for urgent or time-sensitive communication, reserving email for “it can wait” matters.

An Upstream Swim

It seems unlikely these attempts to reduce digital distraction will stem the tide. We are too in love with the technologies that distract us. But the issue now must be brought to the forefront of workplace planning, organizational development, and lawyers’ professional development. The bottom line is that like all businesses, the legal profession now has to address the question of when and what to communicate, as well as how to communicate. The costs of digital inefficiencies have become much too great to ignore.

Clearing the Technology Bar: Clients Demand Basic Skills

By Pam Woldow on November 12th, 2012 Posted in Legal Project Management

In today’s technology-driven business world, a lot of clients are worried that their outside counsel – and specifically the associate worker bees toiling on their matters — don’t possess the requisite technology savvy and skills to serve clients efficiently. In a competitive environment where clients often instruct firms not to assign first or second-year (and even third-year!) associates to their work, write-offs, write-downs, do-overs and other symptoms of poor performance are major law firm problems. Clients want to know whether outside law firms are cultivating young lawyers who can perform capably and cost-effectively when handling basic, frequently-recurring billable tasks.

This is particularly important when large firms’ 8-to-1 lawyer to administrative assistant ratio means that a lot of lawyers will be performing what often are essentially secretarial tasks. In this highly-leveraged context, all lawyers simply have to master basic technological tools of their trade.

Vetting the Baby Lawyers

Some clients are taking associate skill-vetting by the horns. Kia Motors, for example, has been conducting an informal but sobering four-part audit of basic associate skills. They recently asked nine firms to nominate some of their sharpest associates who would be evaluated by Kia counsel on how they performed several relatively low-level tasks. What they wanted to evaluate, inter alia, was proficiency in Microsoft Office (including sorting, filtering, cleanup and other ministerial functions), use of protocols and best practices for preparing written word product, availability of practical templates, forms and checklists, and the firms’ investment both in current technology and tutelage in how to use it.

None of the firms have passed.

What was Kia’s objective? Surely not to humiliate associates or embarrass their law firms. As Jason Fliegel of Abbot Laboratories observes, these kinds of audits can help both firms and their corporate clients decide on cost savings strategies, including bringing in contract lawyers or managed document review services rather than using associates, or creating “preferred” law firm and vendor programs.

You Need Best Practices…Now

Kia declines to name the firms that took the plunge, but Kia corporate counsel D. Casey Flaherty noted that two were ranked in the AmLaw Top 10 and six were in the AmLaw 100. “The only one that was outside the AmLaw 200 was by far the best,” Flaherty said. Kia stresses that while these firms may still be in the running for legal work, they are likely to face requirements for implementing technology “best practices,” or at least improving measurably. The firms also may have to agree to an across-the-board reduction in fees.

The learning point here is that companies like Kia aren’t willing to pay for the time and money it takes lawyers to learn basic skills.

Equally important in these technology-driven times, they want lawyers to know how to use the basic technology tools, such as Word or Excel, that support efficient and cost-effective service delivery.

Framing the Issue

All this is no minor concern. The technological proficiency issue has become so pressing that last August the American Bar Association beefed up its Model Rules of Professional Conduct to include language requiring lawyers to understand and embrace legal technology tools to best serve their clients.

As Kia’s experiment demonstrates, even bright kids in hot-shot firms are falling short of the bar, a fact that is presumably more the fault of their professional development than of their intelligence, legal aptitude or motivation. Farrah Pepper, executive discovery counsel of GE, put it this way at the E-Discovery Institute’s 2012 Leadership Summit: “By and large, the largest firms are not training associates in technology.” She adds that the increasing popularity of alternative fee agreements “shifts the burden – efficiency becomes the problem of the people doing the work, and value becomes the dominant factor, not just the lowest price.”

Speaking of Efficiency…

A review of recent Requests for Proposal (RFPs) from major corporate legal departments shows that clients are getting a lot tougher in their demands that outside counsel prove – measurably — their ability to operate both effectively and efficiently. It is these demands that are fueling the rush toward Legal Project Management (LPM). Pepper agrees that “project management is the key to success for most efficiencies,” but is saddened that when it comes to adopting LPM, most legal organizations “are notoriously bad at it.”

Obviously, the ability to navigate technology is a crucial skill-set in Legal Project Management. Without marginalizing legal knowledge and judgment, LPM does require a basic facility with tools, templates and technology. New tools and methods mean that scoping can be more realistic, budgets more accurate, and desired outcomes more specific. Today, metrics matter; as we at Edge often say, “if it can’t be measured, it can’t be managed.”

What Law Firms Can Learn from Hotels: Perspectives on Service

By Pam Woldow on October 5th, 2012 Posted in Law firm practices

What do impeccable client service and pornography have in common? As Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart put it nearly 50 years ago (in Jacobellis v. Ohio), “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.”

I saw it this week in Chicago, in the form of my extraordinarily pleasant stay at the Trump International Hotel. As someone whose annual travel mileage is well into six figures, I have seen a broad spectrum of accommodations, and some of the digs have been pretty fine. But nothing, nowhere compares with the planning, responsiveness and attention to detail manifest in the guest experience I enjoyed this week. And I swear I’m not being paid to say this.

It didn’t hurt that the aesthetic of the hotel and of my room were to my taste. I am an unabashed modernist/minimalist, and this place pushed all my design and technology buttons. Subtle, soothing and beautifully coordinated paint colors. Furnishings and linens of superior but understated quality. A built-in Sub-zero refrigerator and full working Miehle kitchen, crystal clear (and free!) wi-fi , an in-room ice-maker, an additional television positioned subtly as a dark black square in the middle of my bathroom mirror. Yes, the physical surroundings were pretty jaw-dropping. But, the most outstanding aspect was the service that the professionals provided.

Why am I writing about this in a legal blog? It’s not just because of the physical plant. I’m throwing rose petals Trump International’s way because lawyers and law firms can learn some valuable lessons from them. Despite every law firm’s claim that it is unique, that its lawyers are unique, and that its work is uniquely excellent, clients generally regard law firms as being pretty much the same. It is surprisingly hard to differentiate your law firm from its competitors, and often it’s the smallest details that resonate with clients and convince them to select you.

The Trump International’s attitude toward all aspects of the client experience clearly reflected several principles that are equally applicable to superior legal service delivery:

They see the service experience through the client’s eyes and anticipate every conceivable priority, need and eventuality.

They know what differentiators will make a lasting positive impression, no matter how minor they may seem.

Whatever events they can’t anticipate, they respond to quickly, effectively and cheerfully.

They personalize and individualize service to an exceptional degree.

An example of #1: I know now that I am not the first person to forget to pack the power cord for my laptop. I know this because when I inquired whether there was any chance they might know where I could buy a power cord, I was shown a well-organized drawer that had every type of cord and fitting for every possible style of laptop, iPad, smartphone, reading tablet or other charge-dependent device. The concierge provided complete relief as he said, “if we don’t have the cord to fit your device, we will solve the problem by getting one that does fit, so there is no need to worry.”

An example of #2: The bar’s extraordinary Manhattans are not made with maraschino cherries out of a jar. They are finished with “real” cherries that have been macerated in cognac. Oh, yes, you can taste the difference, and you willingly pay a premium price for a truly superior product (or service).

An example of #3: I’m doing some remodeling at home, and I was quite taken with the paint and trim colors of my hotel room. My husband scoffed when I said I intended to ask the hotel for the brand, color and computer code of the hues. “They run a hotel, Pam, they don’t build it.” He was as astonished as I at the concierge’s response. “I don’t have that information at my fingertips, but I will get it for you as soon as possible.” Thirty minutes later, he had contacted the build-out department, gathered the information and personally typed it out for me.

The fourth principle was much in evidence at every human touch point: check-in, restaurant and bar service, room service, concierge, even baggage handling. They were responsive, focused on what I needed, and at all times gracious. They called me by my name. They made eye contact. They made me feel important, even though my stay was for a single night.

I’d like to live in that hotel, but I had to accept that my perfect client service experience would only last 24 hours. Equally important, however, as a client, I’d love always to be treated with the foresight, insight, respect, civility and can-do attitude that marked every aspect of my experience with Trump International – from soup to nuts to Manhattans.

In today’s “New Normal,” legal clients are demanding better service, more responsiveness, and an emphasis on value as they define it, not as the service provider chooses to deliver it. Wouldn’t it be grand – and beneficial for business development – if clients didn’t have to ask, if outside counsel anticipated their needs, accommodated foreseeable events and placed the highest priority on responding quickly and collaboratively to unexpected events?

Legal Project Management 2.0: The Pressure to Perform and the Mandate to Deliver

By Pam Woldow on September 25th, 2012 Posted in Legal Project Management

A hot-air balloonist becomes lost in the fog and eventually descends above a pasture where a man is standing. “Where am I?” he calls down.

“You’re in a hot-air balloon about 60 feet above the ground,” says the man.

“You must be a lawyer,” the balloonist says, “because everything you say, while technically correct, is absolutely useless.”

The man replies, “Yeah, and you must be a legal project manager — because you don’t know where you are or where you’re going, yet you expect me to help. When I can’t, you get angry, so you end up in the same position you were in before, but now the problem is my fault.”

This story represents a new genre of humor, the lawyer-client legal project management joke (we trust you can identify who is who in this story). Hopefully, this joke is on its way to becoming obsolete.

The Second Wave

With the benefit of hindsight, it is evident that the Legal Project Management (LPM) movement has entered a new phase. We could call this an evolution from conceptualization to application, or from rollout to broad acceptance…or from early-adopters to running-like-hell-to-catch-uppers. Cynics would say the shift represents the transition from lip service to stand–and-deliver. There is truth in all of these characterizations.

The LPM 1.0 era, from about 2007 to, say, mid-2010, was largely about shaping LPM’s concepts, appreciating its potential benefits for firm and client, building buzz about “this bold new initiative,” and addressing the enormous amount of resistance from various levels of lawyers being asked (or sometimes told) to master an arcane new discipline.

During this period, a lot of effort was spent on cultivating general awareness and on relatively short 101-level training workshops that were basically introductions to LPM-related concepts, phases, budgets, metrics and communication. Though many were well designed and received, these workshops were like asking someone to fly an airliner after watching a film about flying an airliner. To add to the problem, the technological tools created to support project scoping, planning and monitoring were initially overwrought and distinctly un-user-friendly. No wonder there was a lot of frustration among practicing lawyers and a disinclination among many to drink the new kool-aid.

The Light at the Beginning of the Tunnel

After their initial broad immersion rollouts in LPM’s shallow end, some ill-advised firms, bent on creating a first-to-market business development advantage, bragged loudly that they had “implemented project management.” The actions of their lawyers and the feedback from their clients said otherwise. Some lawyers balked and continued business as usual. The young Turks, hell-bent for competency, insisted that LPM training “get granular” and focus more on nuts-and-bolts with immediate and tangible utility.

At the same time, clients grew more adamant in their demands for LPM proof-of-concept, that is, tangible results: reduced legal expenses, manifestly greater efficiency, adherence to budgets, fewer surprises and better communication. Clients’ ever-increasing pressure for greater predictability (often in the form of fixed-fee fee arrangements), moreover, said, in effect, “C’mon folks, call it whatever you want, but make it work.”

Quantum Leaps

Those firms that really got the message led us into LPM 1.0, rev. 2. This period saw first-adopters and first-followers move away from broad introductory “horizontal” rollouts to “vertical” workshops that trained the LPM lens on the here-and-now engagements of specific practice groups or client teams. Case studies became more client or matter-specific, and training included more emphasis on building discrete templates and checklists tailored to particular practice disciplines. Savvy firms built out dedicated LPM infrastructures to assist in post-training LPM application to real-life engagements.

At the same time, technology support improved dramatically, morphing into elegant user-friendly integrated dashboards, budgeting tools and monitoring metrics. For the front runners, project management became a serious work in progress, rapidly maturing into adolescence, impelled to ever-greater effectiveness by client pressures for greater value and objectively-measurable outcomes.

In this “how do we really make it work?” period, a crucial long-term question often was pushed to the back burner: how do we implement and institutionalize LPM throughout the whole firm?

LPM 2.0: Different Emphasis, Different Results

So what’s different about LPM 2.0? In short, it has moved from the design-build era to the implement-refine era. In best cases, successes both in client satisfaction and sustained firm profitability have hit the tipping point, the benefits outweighing the costs and discomfitures of implementation.

In many cases, the passage of time is addressing the challenge of firm-wide implementation. Over time, more practice groups and client teams within each firm are getting bespoke LPM training and tools. Internal LPM functions are becoming more experienced and sophisticated, developing an increased repertoire of matter-specific templates, checklists, pricing modules, and risk intelligence that diminish the need to continually reinvent the wheel, a major cause of inefficiency.

In the course of this change, we have observed some practical pressure points and implementation tips:

Grow LPM from the bottom-up, via practical successes with specific teams and matters, rather than attempt a sweeping top-down transition from theory to implementation. LPM is an applied skill, not a cognitive discipline.
Focus initial LPM training on the client teams that want it most – or whose clients want/need it the most.
Don’t bother trying to mandate LPM acceptance and proficiency to all lawyers at the git-go. Give training first to those who hunger and clamor for it; the foot-draggers will come around when they see their colleagues shoot ahead of them in client popularity.
On the other hand, you must mandate LPM proficiency on teams and groups that are now “onboard with LPM.” That is, once the team has bought into bringing itself up to speed with LPM tools and techniques, individuals cannot be allowed to opt out. LPM is not self-executing and it cannot be positioned as an optional activity.
Identify and change the disincentives lawyers face in becoming more efficient and create incentives for efficiency.

Legal Project Management & Beyond: The Extraordinary Promise of “Collaboration Technology” (Part 3 of 3)

By Pam Woldow on August 20th, 2012 Posted in General Counsel, Legal Project Management, Legal Project Management tools

Arguably the biggest change in the legal profession’s “New Normal” is the extent to which it demands and rewards collaboration to manage scale and complexity. Today’s client-driven demand for greater collaboration is leading us away from the days when rampant individualists thought that everything they did was unique but disconnected, and that every lawyer should be free to do everything in his or her own way (an autonomous mindset that has been no less evident in legal departments than in law firms). Today we need more systematic approaches for planning, controlling and executing legal matters. And oh, yes, for playing effectively with each other. The new maxim: Collaboration Rules.

“What collaboration?” you may ask. “Collaboration among whom?” In the complex business matrix in which legal departments must operate today, the collaborators include a broad spectrum of players and interests: the legal department’s own lawyers, paralegals and staff, their internal clients like finance, sales or HR, outside counsel and outside auditors, and other resource providers (e.g., legal process outsourcers, or LPOs) – plus all the other stakeholders who at all times must be in the loop, fully aligned, fully informed, and speaking the same language.

A Whole New Kind of Collaboration Engine

But what about the technological tools required to support all this collaboration? We’ve seen scores of platforms, templates, dashboards, software solutions designed to fill the bill, most for law firm use in LPM, far fewer for legal departments. By and large, they are high on IT whiz-bang and low on user friendliness for lawyers.

But now comes a potential game changer. Continue Reading

GCs: Are You Looking in the Right Direction for an Efficient Legal Department? (Part 2 of 3)

By Pam Woldow on July 17th, 2012 Posted in E-billing, General Counsel, Legal Department Management, Legal Spend, New Normal, Outside Counsel

Supposedly, General Counsel everywhere have gotten the memo: tough economic times demand better, more business-like management of legal departments and outside vendors. So, are you moving assertively toward becoming a sharper, better-informed manager, or do you run what respected consultant Rees Morrison calls a “passive pusillanimous law department?”

In our last post we talked about management tools and techniques that can drive more productivity and efficiency into internal law department operations. But since 60% of most legal department budgets goes to outside legal spend, let’s look at how well you are monitoring and managing all those law firms you hire.

Take This Test

A fundamental axiom of effective management is “If it can’t be measured, it can’t be managed.” So, how do you stack up on measuring and managing?