Role of the Project Manager
The project manager can serve as both a facilitator and a decision-maker during the course of the
project. The legal project manager’s role includes the following:
• Upfront planning to define and gain consensus on the scope and required effort
• Coordinating resources – human, financial, and other
• Establishing communication mechanisms
• Identifying interdependencies between tasks and resources
• Managing the work plan and updates
• Connecting people with questions to appropriate people with answers
• Balancing project scope, time, people, and cost to manage quality delivery and hedge risk
Who should perform this role in legal project management will vary depending on the organization.
Whether the project manager should be a lawyer is an open question. It can be argued that a lawyer’s
understanding of the matter’s substantive requirements and issues can be beneficial when making
judgment calls and balancing priorities. On the other hand, most lawyers are not trained in project
management and arguably many are predisposed to focus more on exhaustively undertaking the
scope of the project rather than being attuned to related effects on budget, timing, or staffing. Law
departments sometimes ask their outside counsel to undertake project management. There may be
questions about how that service is integrated into the billing arrangement, particularly if the project
manager is not a lawyer. As an option, the law department’s operations group can provide project
management capabilities and resources. If the law department doesn’t have a dedicated operations
group, it can look outside the department or tap an existing department member. Regardless of who
undertakes project management, however, it is best to define the project manager role on each case
and project instead of simply assuming that someone will take it on.
PRACTICE TIP
Other Corporate Resources
There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. If the law department doesn’t have trained project managers, consider looking to other corporate groups for project management resources and tools.
Other departments may have the following resources:
• IT resources
• Quality Control systems
• Six Sigma programs
• Process Improvement programs
When to Initiate a Project
Once legal departments have an understanding of project management techniques, ideally they should
follow general project management principles when conducting all their work. A defined, formal
project, however, is particularly appropriate for work efforts that have greater scope, longer term,
higher cost, involve a number of stakeholders both inside and outside the department, or involve
considerable tracking of information. Depending on how the department defines a “matter,” it
may be appropriate to initiate a project whenever a “matter” is initiated that is expected to
involve a certain level of spend.
