On Wednesday, November 25th, 2020 Kevin Bielawski and I had the pleasure of participating in a virtual #bigLPMidea MeetUp with other authors and peers to discuss some of the big ideas from an upcoming book, Legal Project Management 4.0. Our editor, Iganz Fuesgen, who is the Managing Director of Smartvokat, a legal engineering startup, and member of the Global Advisory Council of the International Institute of Legal Project Management, hosted the MeetUp with support from Aileen Leventon, who has authored a number of books on LPM and co-leads CLOC's project management working group, in addition to her own coaching and consulting practice.
Looking to the Future
Kevin kicked off the discussion by introducing our chapter on Matter Types, Task Codes and KPIs. He mentioned how Husch Blackwell has taken some important practical steps to position our firm for a future where we have overcome some of the longstanding challenges of categorizing matters and narratives. Our conversation moved from the range of metrics now being exchanged between in-house teams and service providers to the practical steps we have taken to raise the quality of our data so project managers, pricing professionals and lawyers can analyze and price matters more effectively, and manage budgets over time. We concluded our topic with some lessons learned from our recent proof of concept with Digitory Legal and an outlook towards a day when machines will likely code and categorize narratives more precisely than our current manual efforts.
SALI Alliance
Our topical discussion segued into Jim Hannigan’s, the Director of Legal Project Management at Coblentz, Patch Duffy & Bass, update on the SALI initiative. Jim discussed some of the latest developments in the SALI Alliance Legal Matter Standard Specification, several new partners, plus the future direction of the working group both in linking the standard with task codes and promulgating the approach and categories into international jurisdictions. Kevin and I posed the question to Jim of whether the work behind SALI would eventually lead to a Kelly Blue Book style database where the buyers of legal services could view a range and possibly even a target price of what a matter would cost given certain parameters, including one’s jurisdiction.
Smarter Workflows
The final piece of the MeetUp was led by Julien Weiler, co-founder of Smartvokat, who shared a series of workflow canvases that walks a buyer of legal services through the process of preparing for automating a legal service. The canvas approach blends the principles of human centered design and process of lean thinking with a framework like the business model canvas, so that customers understand the problem to be solved and the impact of the solution on their business.
Harald Evers, David Skinner and others also joined Aileen in the conversation and chat to emphasize some of the big ideas from the MeetUp. The bigLPMidea virtual sessions continue through January 2021. Please join us for a truly global conversation around the future of Legal Project Management. For those who missed some of the earlier sessions, you can find them on the bigLPMidea YouTube channel.
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