P2P

15 I L T A N E T . O R G L aw firms aren't just for lawyers. When I think about the career trajectory I have followed over the past 17+ years, this simple statement epitomizes what I have learned and demonstrated repeatedly as a professional in a variety of roles. It is also what energizes me as a manager of complex projects and an industry trailblazer in the project management office (PMO) domain. While I have spent more than 17 years working in the legal industry – 16 of those working for Am Law 100 firms – I actually decided after my first year of law school that being a practicing attorney was not for me. Although I had aspirations to be a lawyer from the tender of age of 5, law school made me realize that I am not an adversarial person; I need to believe in my positions to argue persuasively for them. Rather than quit, however, I simply adapted. My plans for a legal career evolved. I decided to complete a joint JD/MBA program that Wake Forest offered, which required an additional year of school. Some people say that sounds a little crazy, but it worked for me for a couple of reasons. For one thing, I like to be busy and I simply function better when I am. But I am also a practical person. As a woman and person of color, I knew I would need to prove myself at every step of my career. Proving oneself is an intrinsic part of the culture I grew up around: To be credible in the eyes of other people, I was taught, you need to make sure you have the appropriate credentials. You have to have a higher level of competency to be viewed the same as other people. You also have to maintain high levels of competency, rigor, fairness and integrity throughout your career so that the people who come after you don't face the some barriers. The law degree gives me credibility among lawyers, the MBA gives me credibility among business people, and the way I do my job every day reinforces that credibility. Getting a foot in the door I felt at the time I needed both degrees just to get a foot in the door, and I think I was right. Also, even though I knew I was not going to become a practicing lawyer, there is an underlying sentiment that is still common in the legal profession that law firms are for lawyers, so having that law degree was essential no matter what my role was. Even with the two degrees, the job opportunities did not come to me right away. (This was shortly after the dot-com crash.) I started in contract review with a hybrid workflow combining automation and manual review. We used Summation, which at the time was new technolo. I could definitely see the potential of automation. Eventually, after proving myself as a reviewer I got more into the technolo side of things and began managing projects. There were ups and downs, of course. I was actually fired from one of my first contract review jobs because – get this – I was too competent and efficient. This was my first exposure to the absurdities of old-school law firm billing models. It shook me, but I powered through it and eventually ended up managing a project as the supervisor of the person who had fired me. Embracing project management and legal operations In addition to being competent and efficient, I had a good work ethic that supervisors recognized, and began to move into progressively more responsible positions, first as an analyst in Paul Hastings' practice support department, then as a senior analyst at Crowell & Moring. Within a year of making that change, I become a senior project manager, and in four years I was managing the entire department. Then I moved to Morrison & Foerster to lead its eDiscovery Resource Management Department. After that, I took a position at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius to manage their eData Practice Technolo Practice Support Group. Eventually, I

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