Legal teams need to invest in project management skills

Jul 26, 2024

Legal advice is now only one part of the value-add legal teams provide.

Written by: William Kenny, Counselwell member and Assistant General Counsel at Compassion International Incorporated

Working in-house, I’ve learned that there are some essential non-legal skills you don’t learn in law school or even in most professional law environments. It isn’t anyone’s fault, just a natural lag between evolving business needs and traditional approaches to legal training. As the business environments we serve continue to evolve, legal teams need to learn new skills in tandem and adapt.

Since 2000, the scope of in-house legal teams has transformed. Where legal was once considered a single decision-making input, they are now expected to be strategic business partners, deeply integrated into the business.[1] Legal teams are now brought into a broader range of business questions and processes in recognition of the value their perspective can add. This has increased the amount and complexity of work that legal teams are now involved in. On top of this, legal teams are now being held to the same standards as other business units and are expected to justify costs, timelines, and ROI.

This transformation is also captured in the concept of Legal Operations. A brief read of industry standards such as the CLOC 12 Core Competencies[2] now include non-legal skills such as financial management, project and program management, and information governance within the core skillset of a mature legal team.

Legal teams now need to think completely differently; we are part of the business.[3]

For legal teams already feeling stretched thin, taking time to upskill or build out these non-legal skill sets can seem like a pipe dream.

Thankfully, there are options.

Project Management: The Swiss army knife of Legal Operations.

Project management is a great option for legal teams looking to invest their limited growth resources in a high-return development opportunity. Project management involves much more than ensuring a project runs to schedule; it captures a full range of entry-level skills ranging from knowledge management and information governance to stakeholder engagement and even resource and financial management, all packaged in a cohesive framework.

Let’s examine two simple project management skills and how they can be useful in a legal team context.

1. Actionable metrics for the decision-making process.

Businesses love forecasts. Whether it’s sales per quarter, ROI, or some other metric, businesses use forecasts to make informed decisions. Unfortunately, few legal teams know how to lean into measurable predictions and miss a key opportunity to speak the same language as the business teams who assess our performance and effectiveness. By learning to speak the language of metrics we can build trust within our organization and scale our internal influence (and effectiveness).

Consider litigation as an example. The legal team will be asked three key questions.

How much will this cost?
How long will it take?
What are our chances of success?

If you felt a chill just thinking about how to respond to these questions, you're not alone.

Often, lawyers respond with a high-level answer, subject to significant caveats. Alternatively, the dreaded “it depends” (one of the most hated responses received by business teams). Another common response is to end up mumbling through dozens of highly specific potential scenarios. Business teams predictably react to all three of these common responses by asking for a single, simple answer. Sound familiar?

A simple Project Management tool to use in this scenario is the three-point estimate. It uses the data points in-house teams currently use (their and outside counsel’s expert opinions) but packages that data in a simple weighted formula, that can be used to forecast and budget.

Three-point analysis involves obtaining estimations for Optimistic (O), Pessimistic (P), and Most likely (M) outcomes from either in-house or outside counsel, something most legal teams already do.

This data can then be plugged into the following formula, Estimate = (O+4M+P)/6, which weighs the estimate toward the most likely option while also accounting for the risk of both the optimistic and pessimistic scenarios.

Looking at budgeting for a contract dispute litigation, for example, we might have:

a pessimistic estimate requiring $39,000,
a most likely spend of $20,000, and
an optimistic settlement that only requires a spend of $10,000.

Using the above formula, the legal team would estimate the legal spend for the litigation at $21,500.

The legal team now has a clear answer and rationale to present with their budget request.

Empowered with a clear answer and rationale, the legal team can now confidently present estimates knowing the best and worst-case situations have been factored in and the result weighted towards the most likely outcome. From here, you can begin to build meaningful budgets, business cases and internal benchmarks for team decision-making and accountability.

2. Stakeholder Management

Legal work is a knowledge management exercise. Legal teams often take each task as it comes with little time to consider the component pieces of the work, the assumption being that because the work isn’t physical, we can always just fit in or rearrange inputs. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that.

Consider a takeover transaction as an example. The CEO presents an opportunity “too good to ignore, we have to move, and fast.”

While the legal team might be willing to move fast, it isn’t without cost. Attempting to navigate the various inputs and reviewers (formal and informal) amid a high-pressure M&A transaction is fraught with stress and the potential for mistakes and delays. It often results in organizational tension with critical internal stakeholders inadvertently left out of the process (particularly those with informal influence). Spending too much time in review however might be even worse, and the business team might just go ahead with or without a full due diligence process being completed.

Alternatively, the legal team might rely on informal processes learned from the last ‘too good to ignore’ opportunity. Often these informal processes are only fully known by key, long-tenured team members. While relying on a team member’s informal processes may be better than learning on the fly, it comes with the danger of that team member leaving the team and taking their knowledge with them. Even if they stay, organizations are constantly restructuring and redesigning. The team is likely to find that several stakeholders have changed since the last major transaction and meetings and notifications must be held multiple times just to make sure the right people are on the call. These completely avoidable delays only add to the time crunch and pressure felt by the team.

In both cases, other work in progress (WIP) becomes bottlenecked, and the legal team is forced into taking a reactive rather than proactive position. As a result, a terrible feedback loop of pressure is created and the team will likely defer to unhealthy habits of working harder and longer to get things back on track

When we step back and think about it, then, legal work is not that different from a physical work process where steps and inputs can be identified, inventoried and scheduled in advance. Our ‘knowledge work’ doesn't exist in isolation, it has multiple inputs, quality assurance (QA) processes and other steps along the way to completion that aren't that different from a physical work product. Just like a Bill of Quantities (BOQ) can help define the materials and labor required for physical constructions, taking the time to develop a stakeholder register ahead of time can help legal teams map the inputs for their knowledge work and those who need to review it along the way. This mapping allows us to plan workflows, identify what might otherwise be hidden points of congestion, and, importantly, reduce the stress legal teams face.

For a simple example of how this works in practice, let’s use the example of litigation.

A legal team trained in Project Management would regularly meet to consider potential ongoing risks, develop mitigations and map out response plans before the risks arise. As part of this process, the general risk of litigation (or perhaps even a specific litigation risk stemming from the take-over transaction above) can be identified before it materializes. As part of mapping out a response plan the team would begin writing down the litigation process ahead of time and, importantly, develop a stakeholder register with information about each identified input’s stakeholder as well as their communication needs, influence and role/authority. When the litigation comes, the legal team will be prepared.

A legal team can start this mapping process with three questions, set out in the table below with some explanations.

As that short example shows, a few quick questions can quickly reveal that a legal task actually involves dozens of touchpoints throughout the organization. By asking these questions ahead of time a legal team can also factor in important challenges like identifying alternative contacts for when key stakeholders are unavailable and determining whether they should be contacted by email, phone, or in-person in this situation.

This information can then be neatly compiled into a short register like the below for the team to reference as needed.

Importantly, it also reveals downstream work that may otherwise be hidden such as the Marketing Lead’s media plan. Instead of becoming an added pressure during a litigation, Legal can now work with the Marketing Lead to craft a plan of attack for media responses well ahead of time.

By planning (and regularly reviewing) this information, the legal team will have the information they need when the litigation occurs. This clear structure enables the process to move more efficiently and with less risk of missing essential stakeholders and less pressure when the litigation is in full swing.

Conclusion

Above is a small sample of how entry-level project management techniques can empower in-house legal teams to improve decision-making and processes. As legal teams seek to adapt to new opportunities and expectations in their role as strategic partners, while also balancing financial and capacity constraints, legal leaders should consider investing in basic Project Management skills a broad Legal Operations skillset.

[1] CLOC “What is Legal Operations” 2020 p6

[2] https://cloc.org/what-is-legal-operations/