What is legal project management?

Flyover at Thirty Thousand Feet To put all that follows in perspective

let’s start with a basic working definition of legal project management.

It is…

for scoping, planning, managing, and controlling legal work

within clearly understood—by both law firm and client—time, budget, and performance requirements

that also captures lessons learned after a project is complete in order to enhance future performance.

Managing Uncertainty

At its core, legal project management (LPM) is about two things:

performing legal work more efficiently

LPM focuses attention on driving greater consistency and efficiency into decisions and judgments that lawyers make in response to widely varying situations.

managing uncertainty

LPM recognizes that legal issues are not always precisely controllable and that a client’s legal goals may not always be attainable, no matter how skilled the lawyers.

The forms of project management that are common in the industrial sector—particularly manufacturing, technology, and research—focus on delivering invariant results and producing identical, repeatable outcomes. LPM is different. It focuses on delivering value as efficiently as possible under the circumstances.

Why This? Why Now?

The crux of the rapidly escalating LPM trend is this