P2P

16 P E E R T O P E E R : I L T A ' S Q U A R T E R L Y M A G A Z I N E | S P R I N G 2 0 2 0 created a project management office there specifically for the eData Practice. I also taught a legal project management course at the Georgetown Center for Continuing Education from 2011 to 2016. The class examined how to apply legal project management to the delivery of legal services. At the time it was the only PMI-certified legal project management class in the country that enabled students to apply the course credits toward PMP certification. People from all over the world took that class, and I become known as an expert and evangelist for legal project management. This was when I realized that the strategic value of rigorous project management across a broad range of legal workflows was being recognized even at the highest levels of law firms. After all these years, it's really exciting for me to see how fast the field of legal operations is expanding. In part, that's because law firms have finally adopted a corporate paradigm that recognizes the value of having professionals in other fields. Firms now understand that they need diverse professional teams to compete in a fast-paced global economy where large accounting and consulting firms are now very much in the legal services mix. But it certainly wasn't that way when I began my career. In retrospect, I think I was fortunate to begin my project management work in litigation support, and specifically in eDiscovery, because project management principles like structure, definition, clear goals, transparency, consistent templates and so on were highly applicable to eDiscovery, and combining those principles with targeted technolo was very powerful. When I began as a project manager, I quickly realized that lawyers were the hardest resource to manage, but in some ways that was also where applying project management principles could have the most profound effect. My teams were able to add demonstrable value to projects to the point where clients were actually asking for our participation on new projects and paying for it as a billable line item. I am very proud of that. It's important to remember that law firm efficiency is client- driven. Clients are no longer interested in paying into a black box. They want to see the value add of everything they pay for. That's why the legal services industry has become so important in recent years. People providing legal services who aren't lawyers – whether they are embedded in firms or work for legal services providers or consultants – are now routinely driving down prices, streamlining workflows and adding new efficiencies. Law firms that hope to compete will need to embrace these competencies and get on board. Developing a leadership style When I recently accepted a new position as Vice President of Client Services at Casepoint – a leading provider of eDiscovery technolo and the creator of a platform that integrates a broad range of legal workflows – I had an opportunity to reflect on my philosophy as a manager. I think my management style comes from my mom, who became a colonel in the US Army after being one of the first F E A T U R E S "It's really exciting for me to see how fast the field of legal operations is expanding."

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