Listening: The Non-Delagable Component of Project Management

Posted on February 9, 2010 by Pete Salsich

Have you ever driven by a construction site and wondered "Who actually knows what's going on here?" Somebody must. Even the Empire State Building was completed ahead of schedule.  But what does this have to do with a law practice? 

The other day we had a very productive meeting with a client for whom we had just completed a fixed-fee engagement. That engagement had been short in duration, limited by a date-certain event, and we were able to meet the client's needs at a price all agreed was reasonable and appropriate.

We were very happy, then, when the client engaged us again. At first, however, this new project appeared to be more open-ended, with less clearly defined parameters, and we grappled a bit with how to price it. Nevertheless, by the end of our meeting, we all felt fairly comfortable that we had defined what was in the engagement and what was not. 

When we got back to the office, we started to identify the specific tasks needed to achieve the client's goals, how much time they would take, who would do what, and--most importantly--how we would keep ourselves on task to make sure we could deliver the quality the client expected in an efficient manner. In short--how were we going to manage this project?

Professional project management is a robust and well-defined discipline in many professions--architectural engineering, advertising and construction leap to mind--but in the legal profession, it has rarely been a separate and distinct part of how law firms and lawyers work. There typically has not been a person whose sole job it is to make sure everyone and everything stays on task--the lawyers have just had to do it themselves, some better than others.

Jim Hassett of Legalbizdev.com has a provocative post asking the question: "Should Law Firms Hire Outside Project Managers?" It's a good read, as is his three-part series on Project Management and Alternative fees. Jim concludes that some lawyers CAN be made into effective project managers, on a case-by-case basis, but all lawfirms need to make project management a priority:

"...firms that fail to figure out how to manage more efficiently are ultimately at risk of going out of business. But success is going to require flexibility, patience, resources, the right kind of  training programs, and more than a little psychology." 

The discussion has also been going on at 3 Geeks and a Law Blog, where the conclusion seems to lean more towards making project management a full-time, separate function from the practice of law.

A full-time project manager might be a good idea in some firms, especially larger ones with a wide range of attorney skill-levels, etc. Ultimately, however, the most important part of project management--listening to the client--cannot be delagated. It must be part of the attorney's skill set. 

If you think about it, we've always had to manage projects, particularly in litigation. There are court-set deadlines, multiple parties, witnesses, depositions, expert witnesses, etc.--without some pretty good project management skills, any lawyer would be swamped. Most aren't, so they must be doing something right. However, typically lacking in the bigfirm hourly billing model was any emphasis on how to manage a project to be cost-effective for the client. That's the challenge we face today.

As Jordan Furlong of Law21.ca points out in a great post today entitled "The Boutique Exodus", many lawyers--like us--are leaving or have left large law firms to form boutique firms because clients are demanding not only lower costs but more certainty in their legal expenses. One main feature of many of these new boutique firms is the willingness to offer alternative fee arrangements, like the fixed fee engagement I mentioned above.   

There have always been professional incentives to manage a project's court-imposed deadlines, but in an hourly billing system, there are no incentives to meet those deadlines more efficiently. For example, in an hourly system, the default is to do everything possible to cover all the bases, even where it's pretty easy to tell which small segment of the work is actually going to matter at the end of the case. 

By contrast, in a fixed fee engagement, the lawyer has to take some risk along with the client--often to make the tougher decision about what NOT to do. To do that effectively, the lawyer has to really listen to the client, to understand the client's business from the inside--in short, to discover the client's real goals in any given situation. That takes time and it takes trust.

There are all sorts of tools to manage projects--software programs, vendors, internal and external training--but none of them can take the place of the hard work of getting to know our clients better. That will ultimately determine whether we are truly successful.
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