Why Shouldn’t Lawyers Be Scared Of Project Management?

Ask any lawyer about project management, and they will probably say they don’t want to do it. 

Turns out, experts say most lawyers already are — just not in the structured way that will make the biggest difference to their bottom line. 

But don’t worry, says Joyce Brafford, director of partner relations at ProfitSolv, which owns CosmoLex and several other legal tech solutions. Project management sounds more intimidating than it is. 

“It’s just a checklist,” she said. “It’s a really nice, fancy checklist.”

Establishing a Workflow

On a recent episode of the Non-Eventcast podcast, Brafford equated project management to establishing a workflow that helps you understand how to get from point A to point B. 

She said many lawyers think of creating a document for a client as one task. Instead, they should consider it a series of tasks that need to be completed by certain deadlines by certain people — collecting data from the client, getting information from opposing counsel, doing research, writing memoranda, reviewing materials, etc. Then the document is produced.

“Not only are you talking about understanding what you need to do for your clients from day one,” said host Jared Correia, “but you’re also understanding the work that it’s going to take to get that done.”

To do that effectively, every task has to be assigned to a specific person, Correia said. And that person needs someone else supervising them for accountability. 

Why Does Having a Workflow Matter? 

Without the right workflow in place, things fall through the cracks, which can waste billable time and expose you and your clients to unnecessary risks.  

On the money side, you could miss a statute of limitations, forget to track down a bill or neglect to follow up on client inquiries. 

“If you’re doing the same thing every time, you’re more likely to do it better and faster, and be less likely to make mistakes,” Correia said. “You end up using less mental energy for that.”

On the ethical side, Brafford pointed out it’s been over 10 years since the American Bar Association declared that legal competency also requires technological competency. 

“We have to be able to focus on the legal work,” she said. “But we need to be able to integrate these technological tools that we have in front of us to minimize the risks for our clients, while increasing our level of competency.”

How Do You Put It in Place? 

Long before you consider putting any system into a piece of software, start with imagining the best-case scenario. Then take some time offline to construct a workflow on how to get there. 

Get together with the staff members who will be most involved and make some decisions. Who is going to get notifications? What happens if they go on vacation? Who is going to make sure these things are connected?

Then test, test, test — a crucial step law firms often skip.

“This whole thing is, measure nine times, cut once,” Correia said. “So review it, launch it, test to get the team involved, and then you can feel pretty confident about what you’re doing.”

Yes, all these meetings will require valuable time, but experts say you should consider how much you save over the course of six months or a year when things don’t fall through the cracks. 

Is That Workflow Actually Working? 

Whenever you build something, you have to maintain it. To evaluate a workflow’s success rate, you have to implement an easy way to give feedback, remembering that staff members usually don’t want to speak up.

“Generally speaking, staff people don’t like to bring issues to attorneys because they don’t want to cause problems,”  Correia said. “So you have to give them measures to be able to do that. If you don’t, the workflow is going to fall apart.” 

A great way to evaluate your system is looking at variance. That’s just the difference between an expected outcome and the achieved outcome, but the key to finding it is consistency. 

“If you are consistent, you ultimately can understand where your process hangups are, and you cannot do that without the data,” Brafford said, adding that Cosmolex collects data that helps evaluate those processes. “Sometimes we just need to say, there 17 steps to get to our endpoint, we got stuck on step No. 3, so how do we take an alternative route to get to our endpoint?”

For more details on project management workflows — as well as a panther-like North Carolina beast and a number of highway metaphors — listen to an informative 39 minutes with the podcast link below.