Digital White Papers

KM PROFESSIONALS: A NATURAL FIT FOR LPM tailored to each practice group. In 2012, the firm's LPM tool was created while the director of LPM and committee were preselecting matters to include in the LPM program. Currently, there are 38 matters from eight practice groups in the LPM program, with budgets-to-actuals and other key metrics monitored daily. •We started work on it about three years ago, gathering and analyzing financial data to determine how to price fixed fee and alternative fee arrangements. We then built out the remaining pieces into a formal program with templates and resources. We are in the full launch phase now. •A formal program is in the works. We are researching and interviewing vendors. We have a small internal group that meets to brainstorm ideas and plan our next steps. Informally, we have components of LPM such as developing templates, checklists and best practices. We have had a budgeting/AFA initiative for several years. This year we are rolling out updated budgeting tools and taking them beyond AFAs. •We started a task force comprising six attorneys (including four board members) and the six heads of our firm's administrative functions. The task force assessed the industry, what our competitors were doing, what internal evidence we had regarding the need to do this (e.g., RFP requirements, increased demand for AFAs and decreased realization/profitability). Once we sized up the business case, we decided to proceed with a committed LPM initiative, wedded with KM and process improvement. We staffed it and launched it in January 2013, following a year-long task force effort. We are currently at work on three pilot projects: one for litigation, one for M&A and one for patents. We hired an outside consultant to train our pilot project teams and provide train-the-trainer for our internal LPM team. All in all, we're just getting off the ground but are off to a great start and have great leadership support. were asking for it). We are implementing Engage as a budgeting tool and for managing AFAs. We are also implementing MS Project and Project Server for task management. We have focused on training paralegals to be the project managers for matters. •LPM has been discussed over the past year. It is in its infancy, and we plan to have a nonpracticing attorney assist our lawyers with creating process maps for different types of work that is repeatable. We intend to hire legal project managers to assist our attorneys with managing the work. We are starting very small with a pilot group on a national portfolio client. •We started in 2011, but for litigation only. We are developing more formal materials and training, and we've hired dedicated LPMs with litigation experience. •We started three years ago. We developed a strategy, created an internal group to be responsible and then hired external resources to drive it. We have created tools, done lots of training and are providing hands-on training now. •Over the past three or four years, there have been various attempts at introducing LPM to the attorneys. An early effort focused on branded templates and boilerplate documents that could be used for managing projects. The sponsor was our e-discovery group in IT (only because that person had the bandwidth to work on it and was always directly involved with attorneys that •We have had LPM for years but are now more formalized, including scalability and a focus on providing top-side client views with explanations of work done, to be done and why. We are also focusing on cost/vendor management, experts, etc. We have developed a system for projecting, recording, monitoring and reporting as well.

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