Project Management for Lawyers

There are many ways to fail and sometimes few ways (or one) to succeed. Many lawyers tend to view the whole concept of legal project management with some suspicion and wariness. They view themselves as creative problem solvers and do not want their thought processes to be limited to following a flow chart. Besides, just how professional could following a flow chart be?

Every now I then I want to say PLEASE read this article everyone. Today is such a case. The anonymous curmudgeon Otto Sorts has posted an article on the AttorneyAtWork site titled Life Is Complex and Uncertain which contains an easy six point approach to project management. (Go ahead and read it now. I'll wait for you.) Great work, Otto. I have no idea why your editors called you "Strange" in the bio section.

But at the risk of incurring some curmudgeonly disapproval, let me suggest that this is only the first part of the roadmap for law firm success. I have mentioned before how I think lawyers would benefit from reading The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande. Otto Sorts has outlined project management for a particular project. Atul Gawande encourages us to then take that work product and, at firm expense, build a template (aka checklist) to institutionalize this thinking process to benefit the firm and the next client for the next similar project. We should let the project plan/template/checklist evolve just the way our standard form documents are modified when the law changes or unexpected difficulties are encountered.

Using Checklists in your Law Practice

Using Checklists in your Law Practice is the title of my Lawyers USA column that was just posted to the Web. I'm sure everyone reading this uses checklists in many different ways. But I hope my column on this very important topic will give you some new ideas. One idea that I recommend to every single lawyer is to get a copy of The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande and read it! The book is not very expensive and may be the book that shows you the way to a more successful practice. You can also "check out" his online checklist for checklists to help evaluate your personal checklists.



Five Best Personal Project Management Tools

A phrase that is being used a lot these days is Legal Project Management. I think we are going to hear much more about this concept in the next year or two. Examining the component parts of legal projects is not something many firms have done exhaustively, mainly because the team is focusing on getting the work done. But today, I want to start this thinking by passing along this LifeHacker post on the Five Best Personal Project Management Tools. The post notes that there are a lot of project management tools for groups, but some do not work as well for individuals. Some lawyers may include a mix or professional and personal tasks when using these tools, while others may be on top of the professional tasks, but can use some help with all of the rest of life's tasks.

Where does all your time go?

So many things to do, so little time. For a profession with a long tradition of recording time task-by-task as the day goes on, we still seem to lose time during the workday. Every lawyer has had the experience of working hard all day and noticing completed time sheets total far less than hours worked.

David Whelan does a review of three time-tracking products in his "Lost in Time" piece in Law Technology News. I've been hearing a lot lately about Chrometa, one of a class of these programs that can record everything you do on your computer for help in recovering lost billable time. It was good to learn more about Chrometa, along with Nestersoft's Worktime and Black Hill Software's TimeSprite.

Sure it will take you some more time to review the data from these, but if you just capture an additional half hour of billable time (or a single completed task under an alternative billing mode) each day, it would be a nice return on the review time.

(And it was good to hear from David Whelan, too. You can read more of his work at his site. He is someone we never should have exported to Canada!)

It's about Time! Websites dealing with time.

In our Sites for Sore Eyes column this month, Courtney Kennaday and I cover Websites having to do with time. We hope you can make time to read it. *rimshot* But seriously, folks, there are times you need to know how to determine the time anywhere. Now you can.

Just Too Busy

Here are a few words of wisdom on "Why Are We So Busy?" by Robert Harris. These points are very brief so you do have time to read them.

Do you have the time?

My feature article in the August 13, 2005 Oklahoma Bar Journal was "Do You Have the Time? A Few Thoughts About Time Management  for Attorneys." It was inspired in part by a great program on time management given by Tahlequah, OK attorney Tery DeShong at our Oklahoma Bar Solo and Small Firm Conference. Tery's much better at living time management principles than me. Most lawyers are well aware of the need to efficiently use time and probably do a better job in this area than they think they do. But I do think that is one of these topics that we all need refreshers on from time to time. It's short so you can read it in a brief time.