Digital White Papers

KM PROFESSIONALS: A NATURAL FIT FOR LPM •A director of LPM, director of pricing, business managers, information data architects and a finance committee primarily comprise our LPM support team. •IT, litigation support, marketing and a COO. •We have a full-time director who serves in a PM role, two part-time partners (200 hours per year) and budget analysts who develop "budget vs. actual" reports and assist with pricing out AFAs. •We have a pricing department that works with KM on our LPM initiatives. •While we don't have any formal project managers, we have pricing specialists across pricing, practice management and KM. •We have budget and pricing specialists, project managers and support from IT. •We have pricing specialists. •We have pricing specialists and support from finance, as well as two internal consultants writing RFP responses and pitches, assisting with scoping and AFAs, and running projects. •We have pricing and practice management roles. •Our firm has one legal project manager and one financial analyst. •Our professional development department researches and engages training specialists on PM concepts. Our assistant comptroller and finance department train attorneys on the use of Engage and provide one-on-one assistance managing engagements. We also have five paralegals trained as project managers. IT provides training on Microsoft Project. We have two IT project managers managing the Engage and MS Project pilots that are currently underway. established programs or had more details of the history versus current- and future-state comments. However, it is worth noting a number of firms still getting started mentioned the use of LPM consultants and the development of attorney training programs, versus just focusing on tools. How did your LPM program get started? •After hearing a presentation by Pam Woldow a couple of years ago, I met with our managing partner, and we discussed what our next steps would be to achieve better efficiency for our clients. We hired Jim Hassett, coached three partners prior to a partners' retreat, used the same three partners as the LPM panel at our retreat and showcased their successes. Then we offered LPM coaching to any other partners who were interested. One year later, over 50% of our partners have been through Hassett's coaching program. We have a business analyst in place to assist with AFA templates (many of them have been developed by the partners), and we are about to implement Engage so our monitoring and budgeting capabilities can be more robust. Overall, it sounds like most programs only started within the last one to three years — 13 responses fell into this category — with the oldest program beginning in 2008. Because most of the comments for newer programs were similar, I've focused primarily on the responses that were from more •Our firm is a recognized leader in the development of AFAs and value-based billing. As a natural extension of the commitment to valuebased billing and increasing client demand for project-based budgets, the firm's LPM program started in 2011 with a series of training programs A few commented there are no formal or full-time roles as of yet, but that some are being developed (such as the pricing specialist role), recruited for (e.g., manager of pricing) and/or are supported by several roles and departments.

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