LPM Assessments

Many legal organizations have been implementing legal project management over the past decade and the maturity level of the programs and approaches has increased dramatically. For law firms, it is gone from being something you could put some language in a proposal about (even if you had no formalized approaches) to a situation where the clients ask in-depth questions about your approach, your successes, your tools and more.

If your law firm or legal department is interested in ensuring that it is implementing “best practices”, achieving competitive advantage and more, the consultants with LawVision can help you evaluate your LPM efforts or initiative compared to other organizations and today’s client expectations.  Or, if you are just getting started, we can help you determine where to begin your LPM efforts or initiative to have the greatest impact – saving time by learning from firms that have been leaders in this area.  We have also conducted audits of current LPM initiatives of some firms vis-à-vis the leading firms in these areas, to help them understand their current position and make decisions on next steps and resource allocations.

We identify your current level of legal project management capabilities, the gaps between your objectives and your capabilities and the necessary steps to take it to the desired level. We assess your capabilities in the core elements of a successful LPM initiative (including lawyer buy-in, budgeting and planning tools, professional support of the function, training, knowledge management, incentives and compensation alignment and more) and benchmark your firm against the competition and/or client expectations in these areas. Having worked with many of the leading firms on their LPM initiatives and researched and written the most comprehensive books on the topic, LawVision consultants are very familiar with what it takes for a firm to develop a high-functioning and cost-effective LPM approach, program or initiative. Whether your firm is just getting started or wanting to take its investment and efforts to date to the next level, LawVision consultants can help.

We are helping firms on the change management aspects of implementing LPM. We have assisted firms through speaking at partners’ retreats, helping firm leaders build the “business case” to overcome skeptical partners’ concerns and more.  We can help your firm understand how other major firms are implementing project management approaches.  The key areas for success in implementing a LPM initiative include: (1) partner buy-in and accountability; (2) alignment of compensation/incentives; (3) training; (4) tools and resources (pricing/budgeting tools; project management tools, project managers, etc.); (5) knowledge management; and (6) positioning/marketing.

Between our consulting work, books we have written for the American Bar Association and a variety of conferences we run, we have extensive knowledge of what law firms are doing in this area and what in-house counsel expect.