[Ed Note: Terri Gavulic, Director, Legal Support at Fisher & Phillips, is our guest blogger today.]
The ABA recently published “The Power of Legal Project Management,” a robust how-to guide for firms looking to implement project management programs. I’m leading that effort at my firm, and have already found this handbook to be more useful than anything else out there on the topic. What this “practical handbook” (as the cover touts) has that some other LPM guidebooks lack, happen to be the exact kinds of things I was beginning to research for our program.
When the book arrived on my desk, I realized it was going to save me scores of hours of research. Specifically, the book includes 17 case studies that are written almost like stories, and share each of the profiled firm’s paths to their LPM programs. This is helpful to avoid some of the same pitfalls they experienced and to leverage their successes, as well as to give me an idea of which firms are similar enough to my firm that I might contact them with questions.
Everyone in this burgeoning space seems really willing to share information and advice, but sometimes it’s not relevant if the firm is significantly different in size, scope or practice than ours. I also appreciated a section of interviews with the top LPM technology companies. We’ve been meeting with many of these companies, and the profiles in the book have been great preparatory reading for our firm’s management.
Also in the book, there’s a unique discussion about lawyer personalities vis-à-vis LPM, by the always-insightful Dr. Larry (Richards) of LawyerBrain. So far, in the two weeks that I’ve had the book, I’ve turned to it multiple times a day – I’m really grateful. We have an internal LPM blog as part of our training and education efforts in this space so we’ll be using the ABA handbook to help keep our blog current and practical.
Kudos to the authors, Susan Lambreth of LawVision Group and David Rueff of Baker Donelson, as well as their many experienced contributors, for writing the definitive handbook on developing and implementing successful LPM programs.