Cautious Endorsement of Legal Project Management

Legal project management is a trend slowly catching on in corporate legal departments, according to a recent Today’s General Counsel survey. Departments with fewer than ten attorneys are more likely than larger departments to have at least one project manager on staff. These smaller firms are also more likely to require law firms that submit RFPs to use project managers and/or describe their management techniques, but this remains a relative rarity among departments of all sizes.

Comments from those who took the survey generally indicate cautious endorsement of the project-management concept, along with concerns about cost versus benefit. According to the survey, the tasks most often performed by dedicated legal project managers are managing process improvement, managing risk, managing deadlines and scheduling meetings. Many project management activities – putting retention terms in place, tracking plans, managing budgets, and capturing results – can be handled effectively by someone without legal training, but lawyers involved in the project are still the most likely persons to take on an overall management role.

Among small departments, that lawyer is most likely to be the CLO. In departments larger than ten lawyers, no respondents said that the CLO routinely took on management chores, with the vast majority reporting that it was another attorney from the department.
Microsoft products including Excel, Word and MS Project were the software programs most frequently used to manage legal matters, followed closely by Serengeti and Sharepoint.