Digital White Papers

14 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT Enhancing Legal Operations by Integrating LPM Techniques with Maer Management, E-Billing and Financial Analytics LPM is more than just doing things better; LPM is about changing the underlying dynamics of the relationship between in-house and outside counsel. The Irrational Belief That Process Improvement Is the First Step Most people understand that process improvement initiatives will provide a positive outcome. Six Sigma, Agile, Lean, TQM…the landscape is full of false prophets claiming these techniques can achieve lower labor costs and mitigate risk. The reality is that not every lawyer or law firm has the skill, expertise or time to apply these techniques and dissect an engagement. Implementing process improvement requires a team that is ready, willing and able to invest the time necessary to focus the microscope on their delivery methods to identify waste and opportunities for improvement. According to Lambert and Rueff in "The Power of Legal Project Management": "While both process improvement and project management offer great opportunity for legal professionals to improve their service delivery model, improve client retention, and win more new business, to date, more lawyers are adopting project management approaches first because it requires less behavioral change. To implement LPM, you do not have to be convinced of the need to undertake an entire overhaul of a type of legal work as would be done through legal process improvement (LPI)." While process improvement offers techniques for determining the best way to carry out a work process, LPM offers a straightforward step-by-step improvement methodology that can be employed in any maer (litigation or transactional) to define, plan, execute and evaluate projects (i.e., maers). LPM does not require the unraveling of all processes associated with the delivery of a legal service, but instead ensures the lawyer or team develops an accurate, realistic budget and actively manages the budget, schedules, staff and deliverables throughout the life of the maer. LPM applies more discipline to the initial engagement with the client and encourages timely monitoring to ensure that the objectives of the client are satisfied. LPM: It Is Much More Than Efficiency LPM is a method for improving efficiency in the management of legal maers. Yet many still believe it is nice but not necessary, particularly when compared to the value behind maer management, e-billing and financial analytics. Most in-house lawyers believe the cost savings to be realized by an MMS overshadow the potential savings of LPM. How can the impact of so dollar efficiency compare to that of hard dollar cost savings? Thinking of LPM only in terms of productivity and efficiency gains completely misses the point. LPM is more than just doing things beer; LPM is about changing the underlying dynamics of the relationship between in-house and outside counsel. Let's look at this in the context of the three main stages of good legal project management: Development: Identify client needs and develop a project plan. This allows us to do a beer job of communicating with the client upfront to set expectations, clarify project details and define parameters. Beer scoping avoids misunderstandings and ambiguity of work to be performed. All of this upfront work is critical to the development of a reliable budget, which not only provides the client with clearer expectations of potential legal 1

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