Legal project management (LPM) is the strategic approach that any law firm must incorporate into its services. It is based on adapting project management techniques used in other business branches to the legal sector with the aim of adopting new operating models that optimize the costs of law firm services.

Lawyers need to play a project manager role or participate in a team to achieve this. This is where Legal Project Management intervenes, helping companies to be more competitive, saving time and costs, by enhancing the skills of their professionals and offering a more efficient service to clients.

When applying this method, the first thing that any office must do is define what its objectives are and the scope it wishes to have in order to plan the project to be carried out. Establish the budget, an organization chart, and staffing parameters. Once this point has been reached, the firm is ready to execute the project to be carried out, but it must maintain a constant review and evaluation of the results to verify that the objectives are met,

Applying LPM brings with it benefits that any company should take into account if it wants to continue growing. Well, planning processes are improved by knowing the resources available for each task and the deadlines in which lawyers must fulfill them. In this way, spaces are generated to meet others and delivery times are optimized.

It allows anticipating possible risks and correcting errors during the development of the project while measuring the chances of success or failure. But the advantages are also extrapolated to the relationship between client and lawyer, since it facilitates communication between both parties by allowing the lawyer to always keep his client informed about the progress of the case.

Best practices

The objectives set in a project are not always achieved, resulting in frustration for all the team members who have invested time and resources in their participation. We must try to ensure success in what we work on, therefore, legal teams must apply some of the best practices of Legal project management to manage their projects efficiently.

Understanding the objectives that the client wants to achieve and communicating them to the team members will allow the delivery of quality work, for this there must be both internal and external communication, that is, between those who perform the services and between the interested parties.

If a project is made up of several people, the most normal thing is that each member is assigned a specific task to dedicate time to, but it is also essential that they be informed at all times of the progress of the other parties so that there is no lack of coordination. In addition, it is good that a second person on the team checks each component in order to ensure that there are no errors. This will ensure quality in the process.

As already mentioned, each member will be assigned a specific task. The person in charge of managing the financing, that is, the budget and monitoring the expenses during the project, will have the mission of ensuring that it is economically viable. We must not forget that a law firm is still a company and, like any company, if a product is not profitable it will harm all workers.

We must take advantage of all the opportunities offered by technology in the legal sector. Digital tools such as software centralize access to documentation, resulting in a management solution that saves time and resources.