Legal Project Management Series: Defining Fundamental Principles

First Principles, Clarice. Simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius. “Of each particular thing ask: What is it in itself? What is its nature?”

- Hannibal Lecter, Silence of the Lambs

One topic that’s been earning more and more mindshare in the world of e-discovery is legal project management (LPM). Thinking about what article or articles to write on the topic, I vaguely recalled a famous quote, perhaps from a Sherlock Holmes story, about “starting with first principles.” Understanding the fundamental principles of legal project management felt look a good place to start. 

It turns out the citation was wrong--after all, Sherlock and Dr. Lecter are on opposing sides of the law and mystery-solving spectrum--but the content of the quote remains valid. Since there’s more to legal project management than we could possibly cover in a single blog post, start with the basic, defining characteristics and build from there. While this article will explore the principles behind project management, future ones will deal with topics like understanding the people, processes, and technology involved in LPM; measuring its effectiveness with metrics or KPIs; and developing the fundamental and advanced competencies required to manage legal projects.

What is Legal Project Management?

According to Wikipedia, it’s “the application of the concepts of project management to the control and management of legal cases or matters.” Borne out of the desire to improve efficiency and effectiveness of legal services (chiefly caused by clients sick and tired of being billed by the hour), legal project management encompasses skills from scheduling to budgeting, legal department workflows, tools ranging from spreadsheets to SaaS platforms, the increasing number of legal operations professionals, and more.

While the concept of legal project management has been around for a decade or so (with Steven Levy’s Legal Project Management: Control Costs, Meet Schedules, Manage Risks, and Maintain Sanityfrom 2009 being the first notable book on the topic), it has only begun to be codified and documented more recently. The International Institute of Legal Project Management, which trains and certifies legal project managers, was founded in early 2017, and the Legal Project Management Competency Framework (LPMCF) defines global professional standards for legal project management.

What Are the Fundamental Principles of Legal Project Management?

As LPM is, at a fundamental level, an application of project management principles to legal matters, we can turn to that more mature field’s widely accepted authority, the Project Management Institute, for a definition of basic principles. Starting with a definition of a project as having “a beginning, an end and a set of deliverable end products,” Herbert Spirer, Professor Emeritus of Operations and Information Management at the University of Connecticut, lays out some key principles of project management as directives in his article, The basic analytical principles of project management.

If one were to ask, as Dr. Lecter reminded Clarice, of LPM, “What is it in itself? What is its nature?” this article would be an excellent place to start. Analyzing these principles and boiling them down yields some fundamental requirements of a well-run project.

1. Define project objectives as deliverables.
2. Break down the work in terms of deliverables (higher level) and manageable amounts of work (lower level).
3. Define all tasks required to accomplish the project, their dependencies, and start and finish times. Assign accountability for each task to only one person.
4. Schedule the project and assign resources based on this understanding of the tasks required. Estimate project and times (pessimistic, most likely, and optimistic) based on experience and/or data.
5. Create milestones in the project to use as motivators, progress checkpoints, and critical decision points.
6. Use the plan and budget (whether financial or resources) to monitor progress. Use a control loop of planning, measurement, analysis, corrective action, and revision to refine schedules and remedy variance.

In our next blog article in this series, we’ll dig into the people involved in legal project management. In the meantime, if you’re interested in finding out about how project management principles apply in e-discovery specifically, check out our Comprehensive Guide to E-Discovery Project Management.

I’d love to hear your reactions, comments, or questions on these posts—so please feel free to email me at [email protected].