Where did it all begin?
I am one of the founders of the Legal Project Management movement that has changed client expectations forever and led to new ways of working for lawyers. As a result of my work (and the work of other leaders in the field), it is now possible for lawyers and non-lawyers to embark on a new career path as a Legal Project Manager.
It all started when I joined Herbert Smith Freehills (then Freehills) in 2009 to head up their Project Management Office for Business Services. I was their first new hire post the Global Financial Crisis so it was a big deal for them and a big deal for me!
Becoming one of Australia's leading project management educators...
By this time, I had over 20 years of experience as a project delivery professional and had spent the last few years developing and teaching the Certificate of Project Management and Diploma of Project Management for the Institute of Tertiary and Further Education in Northern Sydney.
My path as an educator of project managers all started with my frustration with the lack of formal project management offerings that led to practitioners who could successfully apply the techniques. If you could say project management then you could call yourself a project manager even if you had no skills or in-depth knowledge of established frameworks and methodologies. So I thought I should 'put my money where my mouth was' and contribute to my profession by setting out to develop genuine project management practitioners.
Only a few months earlier I had started as an Adjunct Lecturer for Sydney University's groundbreaking Masters of Project Management. A role I loved and did for 7 years before deciding to concentrate on Legal Project Management.
It is within this context that I start my exciting new role and I am firmly on my path to being one of Australia's leading educators of project managers.
Wondering why lawyers didn't use project management...
I'd never worked at a Law Firm before and this was such a refreshing change for me. After a few short weeks, I began to understand that legal matters had the same characteristics as projects...
So I started to wonder why lawyers hadn't woken up to the possibilities of project management and how these proven frameworks could help reduce stress, gain a competitive advantage, and deliver better legal outcomes.
I dug into the internal training program for lawyers and found there had been an attempt a few years previously, to introduce project management skills to Senior Associates. The basic one-day Project Management course had been run a few times and then deleted from the training program due to lack of interest. I could see why!
None of the content had been tailored for the legal profession and there were no legal examples. I bet the Senior Associates left the training day scratching their heads as to why they had been sent on the training and thinking that it could possibly assist them when they decided to build or renovate a house. It probably increased their stress levels as they had missed a day working on critical deadlines!
At that time there was a lot of discussion within the firm and on blogs by prominent consultants to the legal profession, that lawyers were often extremely reluctant to acknowledge the professional expertise of others, and to adopt good practices from other industries. They simply had no idea how directly applicable and beneficial the adoption of project management practices could be to the conduct of legal matters...and they were TOO BUSY to figure it out for themselves.
Unexpected interest from in-house counsel...
I had been sharing articles from leading thinkers about the future of the legal profession and having discussions with the Managing Partner and Chief Operating Officer about Legal Project Management. I knew these emerging concepts would give the firm a competitive advantage by ensuring on-time and on-budget delivery that BOTH reduced write-offs and provided more effective client engagement.
Finally, I was allowed (yes that's how it felt) to deliver a one-hour CPD session on Legal Project Management for clients. These clients were mostly in-house counsel and often looked to their external counsel to provide value add through CPD and CLE sessions.
I had been so busy developing the business services project delivery methodology and running the project management office that I hadn't had time to check in to assess enrollments prior to the session. So I was rather astounded when I walked in to find I was presenting to a room of over 120 clients in the Sydney offices! I went down to Melbourne the next week and we had over 90 attendees. It was a good thing that I am a confident public speaker with experience delivering lectures to large groups of students.
The feedback from attendees was amazing! I was BLOWN AWAY!! Comments like 'the best CPD training I've ever attended' were on repeat.
My first pilot course in Legal Project Management...
At the same time, there were a few innovative partners that had started to approach me to find out more about Legal Project Management.
This was mostly due to pressure from clients, such as major banks and property development companies, who were applying pressure on our legal teams to adopt project management techniques and would often send in GANTT charts of the matters from their perspective and expect our legal teams to understand these and respond with similar structure around the legal work.
After a specific request for Legal Project Management training (that didn't exist at the time) I was asked to develop Freehill's first course in this area. It was a two-day introduction to Scoping, Costing, Scheduling, and Team Delegation principles that are core to project management. I had spent time before the course reviewing the Letter of Engagement produced by the team. This allowed me to understand their matters and to build Matter Structures (core LPM tool) for their major types of matters to include in the training.
I tend to prefer the Socratic method of teaching that relies on asking questions to help students learn. My take on this is to ask lots of questions and to get students to undertake lots of activities to test their understanding of the concepts. Otherwise, they walk away with some great theories and no idea how to apply them to their work.
They couldn't believe that I had been able to create visual tools to represent the scope for their matters and could immediately see how these would support their client conversations, as well as become precedents to use for future matters of the same type.
At one point I asked them challenging questions like -
Why don't you have regular team meetings?
Why do you write off so much of the fees?
How do you share knowledge with new team members?
What is the difference between a deliverable and an activity?
Some of the answers were truly surprising and all could be resolved through the application of legal project management techniques and the introduction of small disciplines across the team. Once again, the feedback was excellent and I knew that I was onto something!
That's when I decided to develop the world's first Legal Project Management framework!
Sure, there were a few post-GFC examples of innovative approaches by forward-thinking law firms that could see other firms going out of business. Seyfarth and Shaw decided to adopt Lean Six Sigma across the firm and these frameworks are now more broadly known as Legal Process Improvement (another of my specialist areas).
Several leading US consultants started to use the term Legal Project Management and the first book on Legal Project Management was published - a light and easy collection of stories with no formal frameworks and only a few tools that could be applied in practice.
None of them had approached LPM from a holistic perspective, and none of them had my academic experience in designing, developing, and delivering effective training content. Just after I finished writing my first university textbook - Project Management Essentials, Cengage, 2014...
I started writing the first practice management book on Legal Project Management, LexisNexis 2014.
Now it's time to create momentum and share Legal Project Management
I left Freehills shortly after delivering their first, very successful Legal Project Management training course, mostly because I wanted to share Legal Project Management across the entire legal profession.
And that's why I am here now...to give this information and knowledge to you!
