Legal Project Management: Thoughts, tips, and discoveries related to the management of legal projects.

September 2010 Archives

PMI Launches Legal Project Management Community of Practice

By Paul C. Easton on September 30, 2010 3:20 PM | Comments | 4 TrackBacks
The Project Management Institute has just launched its Legal Project Management Community of Practice:The PMI Legal Project Management Community of Practice provides access to practitioners who have a shared interest in promoting project management in the legal world. The community develops and disseminates consistent standards of project management terminology and practices, promotes the economic value of legal project management, and provides opportunities to shape its future.Currently, subscriptions to all Communities of Practice are free to all active PMI members. If you are a member of PMI, please subscribe to the Legal Project Management CoP and join other PMI members in promoting...

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Is Your Report an Arrowhead or a Moai? Fiddling with Artifacts While Your Project Dies

By Paul C. Easton on September 30, 2010 12:33 PM | Comment | 1 TrackBack
In a recent post to his Lexician blog, Steven Levy reminds us that, just as the map is not the terrain, the artifact is not the project.[1] He points out that: "[t]oo many project managers, bad project managers, don't get this. They see their job as the production of such artifacts. They turn out beautiful Gantt charts, multi-page budget worksheets, process maps, and hundreds of other such museum pieces." Yes, if you work with enough project managers long enough, you'll eventually come across instances where a project manager sits fiddling with his daily dashboard report while the project burns down around him.I've always liked the...

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LPM Tidbits for Week Ending 9/25/2010

By Paul C. Easton on September 24, 2010 3:34 AM | Comments | No TrackBacks
Juicy bite-sized morsels of legal project management from the week ending Saturday, September 25, 2010. Steve Levy uses the news of Blockbuster filing for bankruptcy as an opportunity to discuss the importance of change management. In other posts to his Lexician blog this week, he explains how legal-project management can help law firms improve in eight of the 12 traits the U.S. News & World Report uses to rank them, the challenges and rewards of teaching legal-project management in public.In a post to the Onit blog, Eric Elfman argues that the value of early-case assessment goes beyond litigation. He argues...

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LPM Career Advice: Getting Back in the Game

By Paul C. Easton on September 21, 2010 10:00 PM | Comments | 4 TrackBacks
I was recently asked a great LPM-career question and thought I would post it, and my answer, here. Feel free to add to or counter my advice in the comments section. The question is: I have over 20 years of experience in the legal arena on both the vendor and client side. I have been out of the market for about two years and will be returning. How do I quickly come up to speed on the technology side? Most of my experience has been client facing (which I enjoy the most) and some project management. I prefer to delegate...

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ACEDS E-discovery Certification Will Test Project Management

By Paul C. Easton on September 20, 2010 8:03 PM | Comments | 6 TrackBacks
The Association of Certified Electronic Discovery Specialists (ACEDS) is introducing its Certified Electronic Discovery Specialist (CEDS) certification with the first exam scheduled for November 1st. It will test 78 e-discovery topics grouped into 15 major areas. Project management figures prominently and is one of the 15 major areas the exam will test. The ACEDS is one of two vendor-neutral e-discovery certification organizations that I'm aware of. The other is the Organization of Legal Professionals (OLP). The OLP plans to offer three levels of certification: PEDD (Professional in EDD), SPEDD (Senior Professional in EDD), and GEDD (Global Professional in EDD). California state certifications will also be...

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LPM Tidbits for Week Ending 9/18/2010

By Paul C. Easton on September 18, 2010 10:00 PM | Comments | No TrackBacks
Juicy bite-sized morsels of legal project management from the week ending Saturday, September 18, 2010. Over at the Lexician blog, Steven Levy explains why honesty is the best policy (though keeping your mouth shut is sometimes an even better policy) and in another posts gives advice on how to avoid becoming road kill on the project-management highway. Later in the week he explains why you need need to pull LPM into an organization, rather than trying to push it in, and he tells you how to do this. Lastly, he shares a lesson about translating PM-speak into everyday English, but only as a pretense to share...

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Law Firm PM Watch: Forum Advokater Claims "Legal Project Management" as a Registered Trade Mark

By Paul C. Easton on September 18, 2010 5:32 AM | Comment | No TrackBacks
Danish law firm Forum Advokater highlights the importance of legal-project management and advertises its LPM expertise in a page dedicated to the topic on the firm's Web site. Interestingly, the firm uses the registered trademark symbol every time it uses the term "Legal Project Management." A search of the Danish Patent and Trademark Office shows that, indeed, Forum Advokater has registered "Legal Project Management" as a trademark in Denmark. http://onlineweb.dkpto.dk/pvsonline/VaremaerkeIt is currently in the investigation & assessment stage. If there are any Danish IP lawyers reading this, I'd be interested in your whether Forum Advokater can succeed in claiming "Legal Project Management" as...

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Don't Cut Out the Middle Man

By Paul C. Easton on September 17, 2010 4:03 AM | Comments | No TrackBacks
I just finished attending an ALSP webinar titled "Spotlight on E-discovery Project Management." As I've come to expect from ALSP webinars, the presentation was timely and informative. The presenter, Jacques Nack Ngue, Founder and President of eClaris, Inc., obviously has a deep understanding of e-discovery and much experience in managing e-discovery projects. He packed many excellent suggestions into an hour, including a good discussion of how to assess an organization's project-management maturity. That said, he gave one suggestion that I find very dangerous.One of the points Mr. Ngue made in his presentation is the need to empower the entire team, not...

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LPM Tidbits for Week Ending 9/11/2010

By Paul C. Easton on September 11, 2010 10:00 PM | Comments | No TrackBacks
Juicy bite-sized morsels of legal project management from the week ending Saturday, September 11, 2010. Steven Levy has written a number of thought-provoking posts to his Lexician blawg: He draws a lesson from a recent performance of Hamlet about the importance of "mad in craft" to a project manager's success. In another post, continuing to on the Hamlet theme, he compares the cutting of the final scene of the play from the movie with skipping over lessons learned on a project. The "after-action review" may be anticlimactic, but it is necessary. He comments on a post at the Adam Smith,...

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Arras People Offering Legal Project/Program Management Recruiting and Staffing Services

By Paul C. Easton on September 11, 2010 1:46 AM | Comments | 1 TrackBack
It was interesting to come across this page from Arras People advertising their staffing services for legal-project managers. This is the first time I've come across a staffing agency, outside of litigation support, that advertises a specific service for recruiting and staffing of programme and project maangers for the legal departments.Do you know of any other agencies, other than those specifically focused on litigation support, that are focusing on placing project managers in legal departments?  Let me know in the comments.Related articlesJerry Kowalski on the Importance of Recruiting and Building LPM Talent (legalprojectmanagement.info)PMI: Legal One of the Hottest Sectors for Project Management...

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eCLARIS & the ALSP Present " Spotlight on E-discovery Project Management."

By Paul C. Easton on September 9, 2010 3:34 PM | Comments | 3 TrackBacks
On September 16, 2010, at 11:00 U.S. Pacific time, the Association of Litigation Support Professionals (ALSP) and eClaris, an e-discovery consultancy, will co-host a webinar discussing e-discovery project managment. Title: "Spotlight on E-discovery Project Management"  Format/Location: GoToMeeting Web cast. Cost: Free Organizations: Association of Litigation Support Professionals; eClaris Description: Are your firm's eDiscovery project management policies keeping up with advances in technology? Text messages, email, Internet trails, and the prevalent use of electronic communication presents an increasing challenge to litigation support in the area of discovery.  Learn how to prepare your team for litigation that involves electronic evidence by leveraging eDiscovery...

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LPM Tidbits for Week Ending 9/4/2010

By Paul C. Easton on September 4, 2010 10:00 PM | Comments | No TrackBacks
Juicy bite-sized morsels of legal project management from the week ending Saturday, September 04, 2010. Larry Port writes a short introduction to Legal Project Management in a post to the Legal Productivity blawg. The post is the first of a series that will "explore the growing interest in project management for legal professionals and discuss advantages and pitfalls learned from experience in the software industry." As I noted in a comment to his post: I think that the "same series of progressive experiments with project management that [you] witnessed in software development" is already occurring in the legal industry....

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    This page is an archive of entries from September 2010 listed from newest to oldest.

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