Here comes Lean for Lawyers! Legal project management in large law firms is becoming a mandatory discipline, rather than a way to differentiate one firm from another. Larger law firms are now marketing their skills in legal project management – the ability to complete a legal assignment on time and within a budget The Law Practice Division of the ABA recently published a book titled: "Legal Project Management for Lawyers in One Hour. " One large law firm, SeyfarthShaw has created an affiliated unit, SeyfarthLean , to apply legal project management technologies plus other lean technologies such as Lean Six Sigma, process management techniques, knowledge management technologies to reduce the price of legal services from 15% to 50%.
Smaller law firms can use off the shelf products like Basecamp, inexpensive and easy to use, to incorporate legal project management technology into their practices. But these off the shelf products have to be adapted to the law practice environment.
At this last week’s ABA TECHSHOW, there was one excellent presentation on visual work flow applications by Aaron Brooks . There were also new developments by vendors on the exhibit floor where project management tools that solos and small law firms can use that embedded into other applications:
mycase,com, a web-based practice management application has a feature that enables a solo or small law firm practitioner to create task templates and work flows.
LawPal has re-launched its web site as a Trello/Basecamp for lawyers to manage transactions online and securely with their clients. It includes project management, document review, markup, storage and signing as part of version 1. They will be adding guided workflow in the next version to allow firms to further automate their transactions. (Disclosure: Author is an advisor to LawPal).
RocketLawyer has now fully integrated the LawPivot Q&A platform into Rocketlawyer and announced at ABA TECH SHOW a new management tool for its on call network of lawyers which has a Lawyer Dash Board that organizes and manages work flow around the provision of legal advice.
RocketMatter, not to be confused with RocketLawyer, has a feature that enables task tracking. You can drag-and -drop tasks to prioritize them and tag them to assemble a "Gettings Things Done" checklist.
I predict that we will see more legal project management tools built into law practice management applications designed for solos and small law firms. If your company is building legal project management tools for lawyers we would like to know about it. Just let us know in the comment section.
I also think that there will be demand for full-time project managers within larger law firms, or lawyers who have project management skills. To this end, we are a launching this summer an on-line course in Legal Project Management through the Center for Law Practice Technology, Florida Coastal School of Law that initially will be open only to law students. The course is being taught by Mark Lassiter, a consultant to law firms on how to implement project management technologies within a law firm.
Lean Lawyering is the next big thing.
