LPM Training & Coaching
LPM Training Programs: Legal project management skills are becoming critical for lawyers to minimize write-offs/downs, enhance client satisfaction and manage lean teams. Our training in legal project management teaches many skills but some of the most important are how to engage with clients in a more proactive way that results in winning work and enhanced client relationships.
Our live programs are tailored to the type of matters a firm handles and the specific objectives a firm wants to achieve with its legal project management efforts. The program typically includes teaching a simple but effective four-phase framework for LPM. Our services are customized to your culture, and are tailored to the existing skill sets of your attorneys. Our experience ranges from coaching very senior attorneys about leading project management teams and applying LPM methodologies to their matters to working with associates or paralegals who will function as “legal project managers” to analyzing closed matters to identify best practices and ways to improve similar matters in the future. The program can include any of your firm’s tools or specific approaches. We can also incorporate aspects of your professional development program including any competencies or benchmarks related to management, supervision, delegation or other skills related to matter management. And, where a firm has a LPM technology tool it is using or preparing to use, we can incorporate the tool into the training which has helped many firms achieve higher levels of adoption of their technology tool.
We recommend for some firms that they develop the ability to conduct the training with their own professionals. We offer train-the-trainer programs that equip the trainers to teach these skills to your legal professionals. These programs are typically one to two days depending on the number of trainees, after they have taken the skills training course we teach at your firm or one of our public workshops. For these programs, “trainees” are part of the group taking the in-depth skills training program, followed by a one-day or more workshop for the trainers.
Our goal is to ensure that your trainers are armed with sufficient skills to carry this initiative into the future. In addition, they receive 6 months of access to our online LPM training so they can refresh their memory prior to their teaching the courses to your professionals. We then license to the firm the right to use our LPM training materials and tools.
LPM Coaching Programs: LPM coaching sessions serve as opportunities to help participants implement LPM techniques in their actual matters. Depending on how comprehensive the change they want to make in how they manage their matters, participants can learn all or some parts of LPM through their coaching sessions. LPM tools and techniques are intermingled with the coaching sessions.
A by-product of the coaching program is that it may be used to develop success stories to encourage greater buy-in and with client and matter teams using LPM practices. In some cases they are used at Firm retreats and other meetings. This approach can also be used to complete an after-action-review of (i.e., “reverse engineer”) a matter.