No place for inertia

If you stopped someone on the street and asked them, “what do lawyers actually do?”, they’d probably say that they draft documents, advise on legal matters and get people out of sticky situations.

This is all true. But with most legal work – especially the high value and complicated legal work – the bulk of many lawyers’ time is taken up by project management. Good project management is an important but often forgotten-about skill, rarely taught by law schools and universities. 

For this reason, many lawyers don’t focus enough on designing a project management system that works well. They often turn to using a table in Microsoft Word as their project management tool of choice (see figure 1).

Figure 1

A typical Microsoft Word table used to manage the moving parts of a legal transaction closing can quickly get muddied or out of sync with competing versions.

This way of managing projects may not cause difficulties for straightforward legal work. But for more complex legal work, managing projects without the right tools or processes can be directly responsible for missed deadlines, overblown budgets and disjointed teams.

Chasing down updates

Project management in a legal setting usually involves a single person – usually a trainee or junior associate – creating a table in a Word document with columns such as ‘name of task/work stream’, ‘status’, and ‘date’ to track each task, document or deliverable. 

That same person is then responsible for the thankless task of chasing team members for updates, which they will type into the Word document. They will then perform a comparison against the most recent version of the document and circulate this by email (see figure 2).

Figure 2

Updated Word document for circulation

 
Changes made to the MS Word table are prepared in a ‘legal blackline’ format – which can often look chaotic and difficult to read.

This methodology is generally consistent across all types of legal work, including both transactional (where the Word document might be called a closing agenda, CP checklist, steps plan, etc) and disputes work (where the Word document might be a workstreams tracker or action list).  

This methodology leads to three consequences:

1.    Unnecessary noise is added to the in-boxes of everybody involved in the project. 
2.    It relies on a junior member of the team to reword or retype complicated and esoteric updates that they have received, but don’t really understand. 
3.    Team members are only updated on project when the Word document tracker is emailed to them. This means the Word document being used to track the project can easily end up being wrong or out of date.

Ultimately, these consequences manifest themselves in missed deadlines, wasted time (some of which may be billed to the client) and confusion. These things are hugely damaging to the firm and client relationship. 

Poor project management

Could firms approach project management differently? Keeping technology to one side for a moment, the most important thing for a team is not to sleepwalk into bad project management practices. Instead of making things up as they go along, teams should sit down at the outset of a project and discuss how they are going to manage things. 

They should consider the type of work the team will do; the processes to manage that work; and the tools to enable that process. 

Consider the work that needs doing – It’s a good idea to ensure that processes are managed at a milestone level (ie high level) and an individual task level (low level). 

In general, transactional teams focus on the former through closing checklists, steps plans, CP checklists etc. 

Lower-level task management is often ignored and left to individuals to manage themselves. This can give rise to duplication in work and poor resource allocation within teams. Disputes teams, on the other hand, tend to focus on lower-level project management through action lists and workstream trackers. The higher-level focus is often lost, which can cause teams to go down rabbit holes and not focus on the most valuable work.

Most legal teams that take time to consider project management conclude that both high level deliverables and low level tasks need managing. The most joined up teams will draw up a list of the most common things they are likely to need to manage, such as producing revised drafts of documents or responding to angry letters in litigation. The next question is, “how can we build a process to manage these things effectively?”

Define your processes – Following defined processes allows teams to track things more easily. It also brings a whole host of other benefits such as ensuring nothing slips through the net. A useful concept to keep in mind is the ‘pre-flight checklist’. You can use this to define the steps that should occur upon certain triggers. For example, a litigation team may prescribe certain steps to occur whenever an angry letter is received from the other side:
-    Trainee immediately saves the letter down into their document management system (DMS) with a defined naming convention. 
-    Letter is immediately sent to the client with a note that further context will follow.
-    Associate drafts a note summarising the letter and proposed next steps, etc.

Once the type of work is identified, along with suitable processes, it is a good idea to turn your mind to how technology can enable those processes to be managed.

Tools – Microsoft Word is a wonderfully useful application, but it is a word processing program not a project management tool. While many legal technologists would love to see lawyers adopting sophisticated project management tools immediately, it is generally better to adopt a staged approach.

A good starting point may be the co-authoring function in Microsoft Word, that is – the ability of multiple people to simultaneously edit a document and enter their inputs.

Using this function relieves one person of the task of chasing down updates to a central document. Instead, team members can update workstreams themselves. 

Furthermore, anybody with access to that document will see a live picture of the document when they open it – as opposed to waiting for an email to be sent to them.

Once people have become comfortable with that approach, you can start to think about introducing project management tools that have been designed for legal workflows and can be easily integrated with the firm’s DMS. 

For both transactions and disputes, such tools can bring automatic deadline management and integrations with other services, such as e-signature or e-discovery platforms.

Moving project management into a structured form can also allow data to be analysed in order to improve reporting and improve processes for next time.

Inertia or innovation?

A body in motion tends to stay in motion; and one wonders if it is sheer inertia that has kept Microsoft Word as the ‘go to’ project management tool in law. 

Legal teams should consider their processes and adopt systems that are up to the task. At the very least, project management should be something that is scrutinised and developed by legal teams – rather than growing organically. 

Those firms that are willing to pause and examine their processes, and invest in technology that is more purpose built, will find it well worth the time and effort.
 

Jack Shepherd is legal practice lead at iManage RAVN imanage.com He was formerly an associate solicitor at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer