Legal Project Management

Legal Project Management is the application of project management principles, processes and practices to the delivery of legal services to ensure the successful delivery of the project.

Applying project management principles, tools and techniques to matters helps legal service delivery teams improve the management of cost, pricing, risk, resources and client communication.

Legal Project Managers will work with legal teams to deliver many types of legal projects. From defining projects, through to planning, delivering and closing projects, we manage legal projects more effectively by managing the scope, budget, risk, resources, stakeholders and communication.

We will work with you to provide effective legal project management, offering several ways to improve the running of matters, including:

• Detailed project planning and accurate scoping;
• Timelines highlighting key milestones, deadlines and dependencies;
• Project governance frameworks setting out the way in which a project will be managed and the key roles and responsibilities for each phase and task;
• Accurate budgets indicating the anticipated cost of each phase and task;
• Ongoing monitoring of the projected budget against actual spend; and
• Regular reporting and management of key stakeholders throughout the project.

Legal project management is essential to managing the scope, budget, risk, resources, stakeholders and communication in the project. For this reason, is not uncommon for clients to request the use of a legal project manager for large-scale legal projects, and a legal project manager is therefore often a vital cog in not just ensuring that the project is completed on time and within budget, but also winning the work in the first place.

From a compliance perspective, the SRA Solicitor Competence Statement recognises the importance of project management skills for lawyers, stating that solicitors must:

“Initiate, plan, prioritise and manage work activities and projects to ensure that they are completed efficiently, on time and to an appropriate standard, both in relation to their own work and work that they lead or supervise, including

a. Clarifying instructions so as to agree the scope and objectives of the work

b. Taking into account the availability of resources in initiating work activities

c. Meeting timescales, resource requirements and budgets

d. Monitoring, and keeping other people informed of, progress

e. Dealing effectively with unforeseen circumstances

f. Paying appropriate attention to detail”