Project management in law firms
Partners say that they are good at project management. Clients disagree. Why the difference?
It seems they mean different things. The primary challenge of project management is to achieve all of the engineering project goals and objectives while honouring the preconceived project constraints. Typical constraints are scope, time, and budget. The secondary—and more ambitious—challenge is to optimize the allocation and integration of inputs necessary to meet pre-defined objectives. To the typical partner, project management focuses on the secondary internal challenge of co-ordinating work streams. This is not a trivial task. Lawyers neither like to manage or be managed. Yet the core skills required for this internal efficiency are the core of Henri Fayol’s original description of the management task: forecasting, planning, organising, commanding, coordinating and controlling.
But clients expect more. The client is playing on a bigger playing field, and is looking for a law firm who ask wider questions, define a clear project initiation document which explores risk and pre-decides what happens when things inevitably need to change and allows the client to partner with the firm, not drive them.
This isn’t to say that efficient matter management isn’t important. It’s just not enough. Henri Fayol was writing in 1916. Law Firms need to accelerate through the twentieth century to join the rest of the corporate world in the 21st century.