Gleanings from the LPM Blogosphere (A/K/A Regurgitating a Couple Months of Content from People Smarter than Me)

By Paul C. Easton on April 7, 2010 5:27 AM | Comments | No TrackBacks

There have been a lot of good posts on legal project management (LPM) in the Blogosphere over the past couple of months that I've starred, tagged, taken notes on, and then neglected because other things have taken my attention hostage. So, before my attention is recaptured, I'm taking this opportunity to dump into one post the various tidbits I've been saving to share with you. These are in no particular order, I'm just grabbing them from Evernote. I'm probably breaking whole lists of blogging best practices with this post, but you were warned in the title.

Steven Levy weilds his B.S. detector--and Shakespeare--against those who seek to cloak Six Sigma in mysterious garb and points out in his Lexician blog that Six Sigma looks best in its original, bare-naked glory.^[1] Also, see an earlier post where he undresses Six Sigma in a three-minute fireside chat.^[2]
Mr. Levy has also written a number of posts on checklists, including providing sample checklists, but I'm planning a whole post on the importance of checklists in LPM and will summarize and fully cite to his work in that post. If you can't wait, click here, here, here, and here.
A blog post by Ron Friedman prompted Mr. Levy to share his favorite Risk Analysis worksheet.^[3]
If your job involves attending trade shows and giving demonstrations (or, really, any sales presentation), be sure to read Mr. Levy's post on the Good and Bad of LegalTech Demos. He provides an insightful and entertaining look where many of the LegalTech show's vendor demos fell flat.^[4]
By now you should have figured out that if you are interested in LPM, you should subscribe to Steven Levy's Lexician blog. The last recent post by Mr. Levey I'd like to bring to your attention is his list of 12 critical success factors for legal project management. ^[5]
Rees Morrison notes in his Law Department Management blog that a "large portion of corporate attorneys neither manage people nor lead them."

Upwards of 80 percent of all US law departments have fewer than 10 lawyers. Even at the top of the range, assuming at least four or five direct reports to the general counsel, none of the other lawyers manage more than one or two lawyers and maybe they share management of a paralegal and a secretary. A sizeable chunk of in-house US lawyers manage not a single professional.^[6]
Jim Hasset has posted the first two parts of a five-part series of posts on "what every lawyer needs to know about project management" on this Legal Business Development blog. I plan to discuss these content-rich posts when he completes the series.^[7]
Joshua Kubicki discusses the issue of (human) resource management in LPM in his Legal Transformation blog, noting the difficulty law firms have in getting the right people at the right time when today's legal project teams are becoming increasingly decentralized and dispersed. After discussing the resource-management challenges of today's legal project environment, Mr. Kubicki summarizes the five elements of resource management (identification, audit, access, utilization, and control & direction). Steven Levy responds in a comment to this post, highlighting the problem of assuming the human resources on a legal project are fungible. Not understanding that you can't easily "swap" attorneys is a common cause of the downfall of many a legal project.^[8]
Matthew Sullivan, on his Global Legal blog, exhorts general counsel to consider the project management burdens when deciding whether to retain legal-process-outsourcing (LPO) vendors directly or through their outside counsel:

As GCs seek to reduce the total cost of all steps in the model [for legal advice creation], the importance of the management role -- planning and measuring projects -- becomes much more important.... Ultimately the question becomes, for a given corporation, does the GC function have the inclination and the appropriate scale and resources to manage an LPO vendor, or should the LPO vendor management function be left to an outside law firm.
Mr. Sullivan suggests that "law firms are often better positioned to retain LPO vendors for litigation matters" because while "GCs often have litigation expertise," they "generally do not have sufficient qualified resources to manage the other voluminous aspects of a large litigation such as discovery."^[9] While his overall point about the importance of project management to the success of legal outsourcing arrangements is correct, I must respectfully disagree with Mr. Sullivan about outside counsel being in the best position to select e-discovery service providers, including LPO companies.

In my experience, corporations with a heavy litigation footprint are generally better off selecting preferred e-discovery service providers and tools, and managing them internally according to standard procedures. This is especially true for those corporations with high volumes of litigation involving similar legal issues. Now, Mr. Sullivan does recognize that the specific needs of a company or legal matter will determine whether to manage LPOs in-house or though outside counsel, but he hasn't convince me that outside counsel is usually--or even often--in a better position than a corporate legal departments to make legal-support-sourcing decisions.
This is a bit off topic, and from way back in January, but Matt DeVries shares a secret in his Best Practices Construction Law blog that I've been in on for some time. How do you stay current with industry news to support your blogging activities? The answer: Google Reader.^[10] Google Reader is my lifeline in the sea of information.

Unlike Mr. DeVries, however, I do not use Google Reader to track Twitter feeds--or any other status or "microblog" feeds for that matter. I use Hootsuite to keep on top of Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. I'm not sure I would want them converged. Having Google Reader and Hootsuite open in separate tabs of the same Chrome browser window is enough convergence for me. All-in-one solutions like Gist have just never worked for me, but info & social aggregator tools are evolving rapidly, so who knows. Maybe in the near future I'll digest my e-mail, news, social updates, documents, and chats all in a single browser tab.

This it for now. Hopefully you found something new and useful and new blogs to add to your blogroll.

^[1] Steven B. Levy, "Lean Six Sigma(TM)" and Other Malarkey, Lexician, Mar. 30, 2010, http://lexician.com/lexblog/2010/03/lean-six-sigmatm-and-other-malarkey/.

^[2] Steven B. Levy, Fireside Chat: Lean Six Sigma in Three Minutes (Well, Sort Of...), Lexician, Mar. 30, 2010, http://lexician.com/lexblog/2010/01/fireside-chat-lean-six-sigma-in-three-minutes-well-sort-of/.

^[3] Steven B. Levy, Simple Risk Analysis, Lexician, Jan. 26, 2010, http://lexician.com/lexblog/2010/01/simple-risk-analysis/, citing Ron Friedman, Deciding How Much to Invest in Legal Work (or what is "good enough"), Strategic Legal Technology, Jan. 26, 2010, http://www.prismlegal.com/wordpress/index.php?p=1031&c=1 (last visited Apr. 6, 2010)

^[4] Steven B. Levy, The Good and Bad of LegalTech Demos, Lexician, Feb. 4, 2010, http://lexician.com/lexblog/2010/02/the-good-and-bad-of-legaltech-demos/.

^[5] Steven B. Levy, Twelve Touchpoints for Legal Project Management, Lexician, Mar. 5, 2010, http://lexician.com/lexblog/2010/03/twelve-touchpoints-for-legal-project-management/.

^[6] Rees Morrison, Most in-house counsel neither manage nor lead others - they do work, Law Department Management, Mar. 9, 2010, http://www.lawdepartmentmanagementblog.com/law_department_management/2010/03/most-in-house-counsel-neither-manage-nor-lead-others-they-do-work.html.

^[7] Jim Hasset, What every lawyer needs to know about project management, Part 1 of 5, Legal Business Development, Mar. 24, 2010, http://adverselling.typepad.com/how_law_firms_sell/2010/03/what-every-lawyer-needs-to-know-about-project-management-part-1-of-5.html; Jim Hasset, What every lawyer needs to know about project management, Part 2 of 5, Legal Business Development, Mar. 31, 2010, http://adverselling.typepad.com/how_law_firms_sell/2010/03/what-every-lawyer-needs-to-know-about-project-management-part-2-of-5.html

^[8]Joshua P. Kubicki, Resource Management Within Legal Project Management, Legal Transformation: The Changing Legal Profession, Mar. 16, 2010, http://joshuakubicki.blogspot.com/2010/03/resource-management-within-legal.html.

^[9]Matthew Sullivan, Should GCs Retain LPO Vendors Directly or Through Law Firms?, Global Legal: An exploration of legal services globalization, Mar. 11, 2010, http://globallegal.wordpress.com/2010/03/11/should-gcs-retain-lpo-vendors-directly-or-through-law-firms/.

^[10]Matt DeVries, How Do You Do It All: Work? Family? Blog? Answer: Google Reader, Best Practices Construction Law, Jan. 11, 2010, http://www.bestpracticesconstructionlaw.com/2010/01/articles/technology/how-do-you-do-it-all-work-family-blog-answer-google-reader/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+BestPracticesConstructionLaw+(Best+Practices+Construction+Law)&utm_content=Google+Reader.

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Steven Levy weilds his B.S. detector--and Shakespeare--against those who seek to cloak Six Sigma in mysterious garb and points out in his Lexician blog that Six Sigma looks best in its original, bare-naked glory.^[1] Also, see an earlier post where he undresses Six Sigma in a three-minute fireside chat.^[2]
Mr. Levy has also written a number of posts on checklists, including providing sample checklists, but I'm planning a whole post on the importance of checklists in LPM and will summarize and fully cite to his work in that post. If you can't wait, click here, here, here, and here.
A blog post by Ron Friedman prompted Mr. Levy to share his favorite Risk Analysis worksheet.^[3]
If your job involves attending trade shows and giving demonstrations (or, really, any sales presentation), be sure to read Mr. Levy's post on the Good and Bad of LegalTech Demos. He provides an insightful and entertaining look where many of the LegalTech show's vendor demos fell flat.^[4]
By now you should have figured out that if you are interested in LPM, you should subscribe to Steven Levy's Lexician blog. The last recent post by Mr. Levey I'd like to bring to your attention is his list of 12 critical success factors for legal project management. ^[5]
Rees Morrison notes in his Law Department Management blog that a \"large portion of corporate attorneys neither manage people nor lead them.\"

\n
Upwards of 80 percent of all US law departments have fewer than 10 lawyers. Even at the top of the range, assuming at least four or five direct reports to the general counsel, none of the other lawyers manage more than one or two lawyers and maybe they share management of a paralegal and a secretary. A sizeable chunk of in-house US lawyers manage not a single professional.^[6]
Jim Hasset has posted the first two parts of a five-part series of posts on \"what every lawyer needs to know about project management\" on this Legal Business Development blog. I plan to discuss these content-rich posts when he completes the series.^[7]
Joshua Kubicki discusses the issue of (human) resource management in LPM in his Legal Transformation blog, noting the difficulty law firms have in getting the right people at the right time when today's legal project teams are becoming increasingly decentralized and dispersed. After discussing the resource-management challenges of today's legal project environment, Mr. Kubicki summarizes the five elements of resource management (identification, audit, access, utilization, and control & direction). Steven Levy responds in a comment to this post, highlighting the problem of assuming the human resources on a legal project are fungible. Not understanding that you can't easily \"swap\" attorneys is a common cause of the downfall of many a legal project.^[8]
Matthew Sullivan, on his Global Legal blog, exhorts general counsel to consider the project management burdens when deciding whether to retain legal-process-outsourcing (LPO) vendors directly or through their outside counsel:

\n
As GCs seek to reduce the total cost of all steps in the model [for legal advice creation], the importance of the management role -- planning and measuring projects -- becomes much more important.... Ultimately the question becomes, for a given corporation, does the GC function have the inclination and the appropriate scale and resources to manage an LPO vendor, or should the LPO vendor management function be left to an outside law firm.
\n\nMr. Sullivan suggests that \"law firms are often better positioned to retain LPO vendors for litigation matters\" because while \"GCs often have litigation expertise,\" they \"generally do not have sufficient qualified resources to manage the other voluminous aspects of a large litigation such as discovery.\"^[9] While his overall point about the importance of project management to the success of legal outsourcing arrangements is correct, I must respectfully disagree with Mr. Sullivan about outside counsel being in the best position to select e-discovery service providers, including LPO companies. \n\n\n

In my experience, corporations with a heavy litigation footprint are generally better off selecting preferred e-discovery service providers and tools, and managing them internally according to standard procedures. This is especially true for those corporations with high volumes of litigation involving similar legal issues. Now, Mr. Sullivan does recognize that the specific needs of a company or legal matter will determine whether to manage LPOs in-house or though outside counsel, but he hasn't convince me that outside counsel is usually--or even often--in a better position than a corporate legal departments to make legal-support-sourcing decisions.
This is a bit off topic, and from way back in January, but Matt DeVries shares a secret in his Best Practices Construction Law blog that I've been in on for some time. How do you stay current with industry news to support your blogging activities? The answer: Google Reader.^[10] Google Reader is my lifeline in the sea of information.

Unlike Mr. DeVries, however, I do not use Google Reader to track Twitter feeds--or any other status or \"microblog\" feeds for that matter. I use Hootsuite to keep on top of Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. I'm not sure I would want them converged. Having Google Reader and Hootsuite open in separate tabs of the same Chrome browser window is enough convergence for me. All-in-one solutions like Gist have just never worked for me, but info & social aggregator tools are evolving rapidly, so who knows. Maybe in the near future I'll digest my e-mail, news, social updates, documents, and chats all in a single browser tab.

This it for now. Hopefully you found something new and useful and new blogs to add to your blogroll.

\n\n\n\n

^[1] Steven B. Levy, \"Lean Six Sigma(TM)\" and Other Malarkey, Lexician, Mar. 30, 2010, http://lexician.com/lexblog/2010/03/lean-six-sigmatm-and-other-malarkey/.

\n\n

^[3] Steven B. Levy, Simple Risk Analysis, Lexician, Jan. 26, 2010, http://lexician.com/lexblog/2010/01/simple-risk-analysis/, citing Ron Friedman, Deciding How Much to Invest in Legal Work (or what is \"good enough\"), Strategic Legal Technology, Jan. 26, 2010, http://www.prismlegal.com/wordpress/index.php?p=1031&c=1 (last visited Apr. 6, 2010)

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^[4] Steven B. Levy, The Good and Bad of LegalTech Demos, Lexician, Feb. 4, 2010, http://lexician.com/lexblog/2010/02/the-good-and-bad-of-legaltech-demos/.

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^[5] Steven B. Levy, Twelve Touchpoints for Legal Project Management, Lexician, Mar. 5, 2010, http://lexician.com/lexblog/2010/03/twelve-touchpoints-for-legal-project-management/.

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