Carla Landry

>> Legal Project Management Consultant
>> Legal Process Improvement Lead Consultant
>> Author
>> Lean Sigma Yellow Belt

“Turns out that law firm profitability depends on people finding the balance between coloring inside the lines and thinking outside the box … then getting excited about what comes next.”

Carla Landry partners with her clients at the intersection of legal project management and legal process improvement. Sometimes it’s just one or the other, but regardless of the approach, her satisfaction comes from pulling the levers that make a significant difference. At the end of the day, Carla relies on data. But before she trots out the facts and figures, it’s important for her to hear her clients and understand how she can best help them.

“Sure, my toolbox includes LPM and LPI. But I have to meet my clients exactly where they are. Frequently, what they tell me has nothing — and everything — to do with how we’re going to get the work done.”

For nearly three decades, Carla has worked with dozens of firms to streamline legal service delivery, teasing out the ideas that will improve their processes. Sometimes those ideas are low‑hanging fruit. Oftentimes, however, they are discovered after seemingly wandering discussions about, say pets, or the latest movie, or whatever. No matter. When the efficiencies are there, Carla will find them. She was helping law firms and law departments work more effectively long before the business of law became quite so complicated.

As an ever-changing legal market steadily emerged, Carla was asking critical questions about how law firms could respond to the challenges and be more efficient and strategic. In 2010, Carla, her colleague, and a team of certified project management professionals created the first legal project management certification course. They also created the first LPM e-learning courses. She subsequently developed two more e-learning courses for the Practising Law Institute, one on law firm profitability and the other on legal process improvement.

For her efforts, she was recognized with a Telly Award honoring “the very best in film and video.” The Telly may not elevate her to celebrity status, but it does carry a certain cachet. When firms want to launch their e-learning programs, they turn to Carla.

It’s more than just experience and the ability to deliver training that differentiates Carla. She believes that the key to creating an efficient and effective legal team in today’s environment is collaboration. Carla enjoys nothing more than being embedded with the matter team. More often than not, she is brought in just in time, i.e., when the matter is in dire straits, deadlines, not to mention profitability, are slipping, and the team is churning. Whether it’s at the beginning or the middle of the process, Carla’s quality-versus-quantity approach to consulting has her tackling each new challenge with an endless supply of positive energy and the patience to make order out of chaos while, at the same time, inspiring brilliant lawyers and legal professionals to do the things that make them most productive.

Prior to LawVision, Carla served as a senior director in Hildebrandt Baker Robbin’s law firm strategy group, where she advised law firms on financial, strategic and operational issues. At The George Washington University, Carla was an adjunct faculty member in the master’s program in law firm management. Her most challenging professional role was one of her first. In early days, Carla served as a manager at PricewaterhouseCoopers in a subterranean bank vault, where she faced constantly shifting deadlines, continuous process improvement, and non‑stop project management, a dream job for the consummate course-corrector.

With a complete arsenal of tools at her disposal, Carla is also a certified Yellow Belt in Lean Sigma/Process Improvement for Law Firms and is a certified master in legal pricing. The combination of her experiences, education and personal philosophy give Carla unique insights into helping firms optimize their performance.

Carla lives in Arlington, Virginia, with her incredibly gifted teenage son, Michael. Having put aside the backpack of her youth when she studied, worked, or traveled through more than 100 countries, Carla can often be found discussing pressing social issues over homemade pasta and trying to convince said son to travel abroad. Meanwhile, there are horses in the Virginia countryside to canter.