Speaker: Lucy Dillon, Director of Knowledge Management at Berwin Leighton Paisner.
[These are my notes from the 2013 Lex Mundi Knowledge Management Roundtable. Since I’m publishing them as soon as possible after the end of a session, they may contain the occasional typographical or grammatical error. Please excuse those. To the extent I’ve made any editorial comments, I’ve shown those in brackets.]
NOTES:
- “Project management in law firms is like the global environment: everyone knows it’s an important issue, but very few people are willing to change their behaviour in order to address it.”
- The 5 stages of a project
- agreeing with the client on what needs to be done
- planning the work
- doing the work
- closing the project
- reviewing the project
- Required Skills
- communicate, communicate and communicate
- empower someone to take charge
- delegation and supervision (these are skills, not just something people do)
- What effective project management in law firms needs
- resource — documents, checklists, practice guides
- small group training that has been customized to specific practice areas and approaches
- champions and guides with the practice groups and client teams
- The Client-Driven Approach
- the process improvement only takes hold on matters (and in practice groups) where the partner in charge acknowledges the for efficiency. When this happens, the process mapping effort helps the team understand how to push the work down to less expensive staff. This improves the price for the client, the time management of the partner and the experience of more junior lawyers.
- when you create the project map that shows the actions required and the actors involved, it quickly becomes very clear if the work is being done at the right level within the firm. It also shows where there are imbalances in workload.
- in the course of process mapping, highlight everything that represents an improvement or innovation.
- measure outcomes so that you can establish clearly what’s working and what’s not
Above and Beyond KM 