Optimising Project Management Skills for Effective Legal Projects.

This is a true story. During my time as an intern, I witnessed an exchange between a Senior Partner and the Head of IT. The Senior Partner demanded additional support because without his secretary, he couldn't work with "the system", which she had always printed for him to review and handwritten his responses. The year was 2014 and the system was Outlook.

Luckily, most of us are more adept to transitioning to “the system”, and just like Outlook has become part of our lives in the 2010s.  Similarly, by the 2030s many legal tech programs will transition from cutting edge to become the new status quo. Are you going to be comfortable working with "the systems"? Is it more training in the system you need, or a change of mindset? See in my view, once your mindset changes, everything on the outside will change along with it. In the case of the Senior Partner, he had never accepted Outlook as part of his working tools and therefore he never sought to understand the reasons for its adoption. In return, instead of learning to use the tool, he avoided it like the plague.

Future Trends in Project Management Skills for Lawyers

Looking ahead, several key trends will shape the future of project management skills for lawyers. The integration of AI and automation will streamline repetitive tasks and enhance data analysis, requiring lawyers to adapt and collaborate effectively with these technologies. Additionally, data-driven decision making will become essential, as lawyers will need to analyse and interpret data to inform their strategies. Cross-disciplinary collaboration will also be crucial, as legal professionals work more closely with experts from IT, finance, and other fields. By embracing these trends and continuously upskilling, lawyers can stay ahead in the evolving legal landscape.

Leveraging Project Management Skills for Lawyers to Excel in the Digital Era

To begin any changes, we need to change our mindset. The legal industry has been late to the tech game which means we need to leapfrog ahead to the point that our customers and clients are rapidly achieving.  For example, this means that lawyers and their legal technology will be expected to integrate other departments’ tools, such as legal project management tools and software, and become part of a seamless process. These are high expectations to meet for tech newbies.  In order to thrive in the coming decade, lawyers will need to focus carefully on non-traditional skills to get to the finishing line.  Here is my list of skills, I think, lawyers should be equipped with (based on 10 years of legal project management experience) to quickly understand and implement “the system”. Some essential legal project management skills include:

• Adaptability and Planning Skills 

  These project management skills will need to move out of the deal rooms and litigation war rooms and into the day-to-day operations and service delivery methods for lawyers;
  
  

• Collaboration

  Collaboration skills are crucial for effective project management and will be required for the legal operations and processes to integrate with other key stakeholders. We need to be out of the legal ivory tower and join the crowd (their systems and developers). To that end, I find legal hackathons to be a great venue for legal students to change their mindset about LegalTech, install innovative design skills and confidence as well as learning to appreciate and work with others in a non-legal role. It’s also a great opportunity for more seasoned professionals to practise legal practice project management and mentor/lead up and coming legal enthusiasts.
  
  

• Decisiveness

  In execution and deployment phrases, decisiveness is vital in legal project management. Many leaders are concerned about making the wrong decisions, lawyers are risk averse and qualify everything(!), but the consequences of indecisiveness (simply not making progress for one) are much greater than occasionally making the wrong decision (e.g. picking a less than perfect tool). Strive for excellence not perfection.

Transforming Legal Practice through Process Mapping and Project Management Skills

We cannot accept something, we don’t understand. I was a part time law student, working full time as a project manager. With limited time on my hands, I deviated from the traditional method of reciting legal theories, precedents and statute references and focused on mapping out the entire legal process in a process map, then labelling my statute book according to the order the statutes occurred within the process. I begin with a granular understanding of the tasks involved in each legal process, i.e. the order and conditions of their occurrences. Then I assign value to each of these tasks and evaluate if they contribute to the ultimate goal (my passing of the exam). For example, you may be looking at improving efficiencies, so the value you are trying to create may come from removing duplicative stages from the process. In others, you may look to reassign tasks to improve quality and accountability. The bottom line is, you must have a thorough understanding of the tasks, stages and people involved before you can determine which changes will drive the goals you are hoping to realise.  These processes might sound revolutionary to the average lawyer, but in legal project management this is normal.  Imagine if a lawyer formally learnt these project management skills from the on-set of their career?  I think it would revolutionise not only legal processes but also traditional legal practice.

We accept, we understand then we learn. Though, there are no requirements for us to become tech programmers¹ to understand and adopt legal technology; we simply need more background knowledge on legal tech development. Legal tech is not something new, in fact it started as early as 1973² and yet the industry as a whole knows so little about its successes and failures, aspirations and future areas of development. Now, legal technology is benefiting the whole legal industry with advanced technology such as Legal AI and project management software.

Upscaling Legal Project Management Skills for Success in the Evolving Legal Landscape

All in all, the season of change is finally upon us. To step up to the challenge, we will need to upscale our project management skills in the areas of people, process and legal technology. Universities in US³ and Europe⁴ have begun changes to their curriculum as early as 2012 and Asia has joined with the rise of the LITE Lab@HKU program at University of Hong Kong and the FLIP program from the Singapore Academy of Law.  In Australia, The College of Law recently introduced its Master of Legal Business Course.  As for current legal professionals, joining different courses and seminars on the skills discussed will provide use with the tools to move forward and manage “the systems”, all the while keeping pace with the ever-changing legal universe.

If you want to know more about innovative legal education opportunities in APAC or understand more about legal project management, please get in touch https://www.korumlegal.com/contact-us.

¹ Unless you are looking to build a tech tool, in which case you will require design thinking skills in addition.

² Lexis first introduced a computerized terminal for case search instead of laboriously searching through books

³ Stanford Law school with Legal Design Lab, University of Miami Law School with the Laws Without Walls (LWOW) programme and Institute for the Future of Law (IFLIP).

⁴ IE Law School in Spain, Bucerius University in Germany