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August 8, 2011

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LAw times • August 8, 2011 NEWS PAGE 3 Project management key to survival Tough times prompt permanent changes to legal services BY MICHAEL McKIERNAN Law Times rthy Tétrault LLP has turned to a discipline more associated with architects and engineers than lawyers by placing project management at the heart of its approach to legal matters. While large law fi rms once W could name their price and dic- tate their approach to clients, the recent downturn has forced a change in the legal market- place. And in their new book, Proj- ect Management for Lawyers, McCarthys' Barbara Boake and Rick Kathuria warn the new dynamic is permanent. Th e economic crisis, they write, was "merely the catalyst" for an "inevitable shift in the balance of power from seller to buyer" of legal services. Th e book draws on the fi rm's experience developing its in-house Dialogue Project Management program. Ac- cording to Boake, a partner in McCarthys' bankruptcy and restructuring practice group, the foundations were laid al- most four years ago during her stint on the fi rm's executive committee. "It was in that capacity that I recognized a real demand for some kind of project manage- ment training or component to legal practice," she says. "Cli- ents are looking for better value and more cost predictability. Th ey want to see systems that encourage effi ciencies in legal work, and project management is really a response to that." Kathuria, who is a certifi ed project management profes- sional in addition to his role as director of information tech- nology development at McCa- rthys, says defi ned budgets for outside counsel are a relatively new development in business. "Many of our clients run their own organizations and they ask for each of their de- partments to give budgets for how much things are going to cost," he notes. "Lawyers from legal departments within com- panies have never really had to do that in the past, but we're seeing that happen more and more often. We're trying to help them meet that need." Jim Hassett, the founder of Boston-based consultancy LegalBizDev, which helps law fi rms improve their project management and business de- velopment practices, agrees that client expectations have changed and show no signs of going back. "If you want to survive in the coming years, you're going to have to become more effi cient because that's what clients are asking for," he says. "People in other busi- nesses have been doing that for a long time through project ith the heady days of the economic boom long gone, McCa- management, and what's hap- pening is people at McCarthys and some other fi rms are fi gur- ing out which pieces of that matter to law fi rms and which pieces don't." Boake says the team at Mc- Carthys built the foundation of its Dialogue Project Man- agement program on estab- lished project management principles and tweaked them for the legal environment. It also used a custom-built suite of tools based on Microsoft Ex- cel spreadsheets. Under the program, lead lawyers on matters are tasked with guiding each project to completion through a process involving four steps: defi ne, plan, monitor, and evaluate. "It's based on project manage- ment theory but it's very much a custom-designed program for use by lawyers," says Boake. "We really took only what we thought would be useful from project management theory. Lawyers don't get any train- ing in project management or budgeting in law school, so understandably those are the skills that require some work. We wanted to make it as sim- ple as possible and very much directed to lawyers." Templates based on the most common types of work the fi rm does have been developed to help lawyers break down cases into phases and even spe- cifi c tasks that will need to be completed. But Kathuria says litigation projects are particu- larly challenging to manage. "You don't know what the other party is going to do in a legal matter," he says. "Th at adds a lot more risk or uncer- tainty in a legal project than you fi nd in an engineering project." In the early stages of a proj- ect, McCarthys' lawyers can provide a quote by virtually assigning professionals from a fi rm-wide database of partners, associates, and paralegals based on time estimates for each pre- dicted task and known hourly rates. Clients are sometimes shocked by the size of an esti- mate, according to one exam- ple cited in the book, but the system lends credibility to it. In this case, the fi rm won the con- tract despite delivering a higher quote than some competitors because the client trusted it and was willing to place a pre- mium on predictability. As time passes, the fi rm re- fi nes its existing templates and develops new ones based on feedback from lawyers, all of whom have now been trained in the system. Boake notes McCarthys built its own program in part because the relative youth of the legal project management fi eld left it with few other options. Still, she says going in-house also helped lawyers buy into the concept. LawPro_LT_Aug8_11.indd 1 www.lawtimesnews.com 8/3/11 12:29:29 PM LegalInnovators but only very recently. People here are embracing it. Th ere's lots of opportunity for col- laboration and participation by a lot of people, and I think that contributes to the success of it." Hassett notes McCarthys Project management is 'gain- ing popularity but only very recently,' says Barbara Boake. "Th e legal profession has been fairly slow to embrace project management," she says. "It's gaining popularity has established a name for it- self as a pioneer of legal proj- ect management along with international giants Dechert LLP and Eversheds LLP, both of which developed their own programs. "At McCarthys, they are taking it very seriously, and I'm a huge fan of what they've done," he says. However, Hassett says the structured and top-down ap- proach favoured by those fi rms isn't the only way to imple- ment project management. Many other fi rms, he says, are dabbling with project manage- ment on a smaller scale led by key lawyers who spread the practice more gradually among colleagues. "Th ere are hundreds of law fi rms where you get a kind of entrepreneurial experimenta- tion where people are given the freedom to meet their cli- ents' needs however they want and then picking up the best practices." Hassett's fi rm off ers work- shops and continuing educa- tion on project management for law fi rms across the con- tinent, including at Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP. He notes he has been particularly struck by the interest shown by large Canadian fi rms. "If you ask my opinion, Ca- nadian fi rms are more involved in this and doing more things to make this happen than U.S. fi rms on average right now [to an extent that's] completely out of proportion to the size of the marketplace." Th is is the third in Law Times' summer series on innovation in the legal profession. LAWPRO® APPOINTMENT SIMON BERNSTEIN Lawyers' Professional Indemnity Company (LAWPRO) announces the appointment of Simon Bernstein to the position of Vice-President, Specialty Claims Department. In this capacity, Mr. Bernstein will be responsible for a team of claims professionals handling, among others, TitlePLUS and Excess Insurance claims and claims involving coverage issues. Mr. Bernstein brings to his new role extensive experience in claims management, loss control, risk management and underwriting in the insurance industry. A graduate of Osgoode Hall Law School, Mr. Bernstein practised in private practice before moving into the fi nancial services sector where he held positions of increasing responsibility in claims management and risk assessment. As Assistant Vice-President, Financial and Professional Services Claims (Canada) at St. Paul Travelers Insurance, Mr. Bernstein directed a staff responsible for managing a diverse portfolio of claims and setting litigation strategies. He is currently Assistant Vice-President, Underwriting at LAWPRO. LAWPRO provides malpractice insurance and risk and practice management programs to more than 22,800 Ontario lawyers, and title insurance in all Canadian jurisdictions. LAWPRO's TitlePLUS® title insurance program is the only all-Canadian title insurance product on the market today.

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