Legal staffing agencies that also stage and manage document reviews have long highlighted their project management expertise to differentiate their services from competitors who only provide warm bodies. In an interview published Tuesday on the Metropolitan Corporate Counsel Web site, Meron I. Hewis, Account Manager at Kelly Law Registry, notes that "law firms are looking for cost savings for their clients with project management expertise by introducing them to [outsourced discovery solutions]," such as those provided by Kelly Law Registry at their Litigation Discovery Center in Troy, Michigan.[1]
Increasingly, legal staffing agencies are touting their project management expertise as a way to distinguish themselves from competitors who simply supply warm bodies. When I worked as a project manager for a legal staffing agency in New York, we employed full-time project managers, which was still unusual at the time. Now, most of the large legal staffing agencies also provide staging and project management services, in addition to temporary attorney placement. With more document-review work going off-shore, legal project management is receiving greater attention as veterans from India's and the Philippine's BPO industries are bringing their project management and process improvement training and expertise to document review work.
In her interview, Ms. Hewis makes some valid points about the benefits of outsourcing document review to on-shore providers, such as the convenience of making site visits. When it comes to project management, however, my experience is that off-shore providers are investing more in project management and process improvement systems and training. I see a legal project management arms race in the making. Slapping the title of "project manager" on recently-graduated contract attorneys is no longer going to cut it.
I'm not saying that every document review project manager will need to be PMI certified or a Six Sigma black belt, but I do predict that staffing agencies will increasingly hire professionally certified project managers and process-improvement experts onto their team, or will at least hire consultants to provide training and design systems to measurably increase the quality and efficiency of their services. At this time, I'm not seeing contract attorney agencies highlighting project management to the same extent as the e-discovery companies who provide computer forensics and ESI collection, processing, and hosting services, but I expect that to change soon. As the later continue to form partnerships with the former, providing one-stop shopping for all your e-discovery needs, project management prowess is only becoming more important as a competitive advantage.
[1] DuPont - Primary Service Providers Kelly Law Registry - One Of The Stars Of The DuPont Legal Model , Periodical The Metropolitan Corporate Counsel, Dec. 1, 2009, available at http://www.metrocorpcounsel.com/current.php?artType=view&artMonth=December&artYear=2009&EntryNo=10390 (last visited on Jan. 1, 2009); see also Ms Lewis's LinkedIn provide at http://www.linkedin.com/pub/meron-hewis/1/979/153 (last visited Dec. 2, 2009); Kelly Law Registry home page, http://www.kellylawregistry.com/ (last visited Dec. 2, 2009).
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