Introduction\n
\nI'm Helga Butcher. I'm the Head of Legal Project Management and Process Improvement at Ashurst.
Part 1: The role of the Legal Project Manager\n
\nLegal project management to me means working with lawyers and clients, to deliver legal services in the most efficient and the most effective way possible. Working as a legal project management manager definitely presents an alternative for law students or people who are thinking of moving into the legal sector.
Through to other technical skills, a lot of the work that project managers do today involves technology in some shape or form. So being tech savvy and having those skills is really important, they also need to be commercially skilled. So being able to understand and manage budgets and forecasts and doing analysis on figures presented on a regular basis is really important as well. Stakeholder management and change management are all part of the role as well. And finally and very importantly legal project managers also need to have people management skills, whether that's managing stakeholders at all levels of the organization or the client organization, as well as managing team members, remote, as well as onsite. So there's a variety of people's skills are involved in the role of that LPM as well.
\nThe legal project manager's role is to take away, if you like the business of law and deliver that efficiently. A lot of lawyers' time is often spent in the context of a legal matter on coordination, project management in the broader sense, and by supplementing lawyer skills, which are much better placed actually giving legal advice or tackling legal challenges. And ideally the sooner you bring in a legal project manager into the matter, the more value they can add throughout the life cycle,
\nWhat skills does a legal project manager need? It's quite a varied set of skills ranging from obviously technical project management skills, more transferable skills, will move into legal and will help the legal sector to actually grow and evolve and develop over time as well. I think it will become less manual and more technology driven.
\nPart 2: LPM in Practice\n
\nDuring my role at Barclays, I was instrumental in developing a new process for managing their whole portfolio of matters, which involve external counsel or external legal advice. And that really entailed a portfolio management approach and detailed budgeting, forecasting, and financial reporting around that external portfolio of legal matters in terms of initiatives that kind of help to drive that strategy they included things like assigning project managers to a portfolio, a predefined, portfolio of legal matters being commercial advisors and working hand in hand with the in-house legal team facing off to the various law firms. So becoming a key negotiator in negotiating terms and deliverables and outcomes on a, on a legal matter as well.
I think in-house legal teams have an opportunity to use legal project management and legal project managers to help them better manage the external legal spend in particular as well as, actually manage more complex legal matters, which are managed in-house. And by that, I mean you could use LPM as a very effective tool to generate cost avoids and cost saves, which are clearly traceable and therefore adds to the bottom line of the business. And the other way in which project managers can support the legal business in particular is by managing large regulatory driven change programs like a LIBOR, like a Brexit, or like a restructure of a business.
\nLPM is becoming more established. I think, you know, a lot of firms have been providing legal project management services and even some of their in-house legal teams are looking into it as well, or have been doing LPM for a while to support this move towards making the role more professional.\nWe have recently launched a competency framework for legal project managers. I collaborated with, um, a number of senior legal project management professionals in the industry as well as Barclays bank. And we're hoping that this framework will help both people who are thinking of moving into the profession, as well as those actually, looking for candidates and looking to develop their own teams, um, use the framework as a guide and as a way of actually standardizing the offering.
\nSo what excites me about legal innovation is the fact that it's an acceleration, that more and more innovation is visible every day, whether that's in the way that we access justice or in the way we conduct legal cases in the courts which are moving more and more towards a digital world.
\nPart 3: Innovating the law firm model\n
\nI disagree with the myth that law firms are incentivized to charge as much as possible for their services and therefore using innovation, including technology, is not in their interest. And that's because, um, resources are scarce. Talent is scarce. Work is plentiful and so therefore in the legal sector, like in any other sector, we're struggling to retain that talent and you're sometimes struggling to deliver the work. So actually anything that makes our people more efficient, gives them better tools, frees them up to, to actually, add more value as lawyers rather than actually focusing about, you know, how do we get that latest report out to the client? Because actually they don't need to worry about that because that's been taken care of. And so therefore I will challenge the assumption that law firms just want to maximize the use of their resources in all this charge more because I think efficiency is beneficial for law firms, as well as for clients.
Part 4: Fibonacci for Legal Project Management\n
\nLawAdvisor's product in particular, Fibonacci, helps to address some of the challenges that legal project managers are seeing at the moment. It adds a level of transparency and visibility over the work that lawyers and legal project managers are doing on behalf of their clients.
It also helps to cut down some of those difficult conversations and just sort of very general catch up meetings, for example, because the information is stored there and, and can be consumed by any stakeholder who's involved in a project or in a matter. And it means that when you have regular catch-ups or meetings, you can then focus on the challenges where you can focus on next steps rather than worrying about, you know, just get me a general update on what's going on on the matter, for example.
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