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Last week, I had the pleasure of attending the LMA’s P3 conference, which brings together "pricing, project management and practice innovation experts to discuss the use of various tactics to explore solutions to real issues face by law firms today." 

I’ll be publishing some recaps for the conference in the coming days, since there was a LOT of high-level meaty topics and conversation happening in and around the event. But today, I wanted to bring you my two takeaways from the conference. As always, there are more than just two to discuss, but we’re focusing on these today! Feel free to add any other takeaways in the comments below, or just add your comments to the discussion! 

Takeaway One: Pricing & Process Improvement Can’t Happen in Silos

Just before the conference, ALM Legal Intelligence released a special report on Pricing Professionals: Essential to Law Firms, an Ally to Clients (report available for purchase). I’ll be talking a bit more about this in the coming days as well, but I read through it in preparation for the conference, and the main thing that struck me is that we’re only now seeing an increase in integrating process management with pricing. 

Tim Corcoran (@tcorcoran) (who was on a unique panel at P3 with Catherine MacDonagh, John Byrne and Amy Hrehovcik) put it perfectly in a post-conference interview he conducted with LexBlog: 

We spend all this time coming up with the right budget, and then we go deliver the work the same old way and we don’t adhere to the budget. And either the client says ‘I don’t want to pay anymore’ or we end up taking a hit to our profits because we can’t bill more but we spent more time working than we needed to."

Continue Reading Two for Tuesdays: Takeaways from P3

Last week, we had the first part of our recap from Tim Corcoran’s excellent webinar on Legal Project Management. Today, I bring you the second half, which covers: 

  • Legal Project Management (LPM): Concepts – should they be embraced or avoided? Is LPM a friend, an enemy or a frenemy?
  • Process improvement versus LPM: Two different disciplines, though they are related.
  • LPM 2.0: The advanced level of LPM. 

Continue Reading ILN Webinar Series – An Introduction to Legal Project Management Part II

This week, we kicked off our three-part webinar series with Tim Corcoran, of the Corcoran Consulting Group. Tim’s first webinar addressed an Introduction to Legal Project Management, which is a fascinating topic, which I’ll recap in two parts. 

Tim offered his best practices, based on years of experience, and condensed what is normally a half day session into an hour – so there’s a lot of information in this webinar!

The themes for the part of the session covered in today’s recap: 

  • What happened to our ecosystem? The wonderful world where clients paid handsomely for good legal work is gone – something changed, and now clients are pushing back more on rates, talking about whether they’ll pay by the hour or not, the kinds of attorneys that will service various matters, and alternative providers of services. There is also competition from other sized firms, including big firms that are becoming more savvy about pricing. 

Continue Reading ILN Webinar Series – An Introduction to Legal Project Management Part I