Page 221 - Leaders in Legal Business - PDF - Final 2018
P. 221
The report recommends that law firms need to accept, anticipate, and act on the growth in market
share of non-traditional competitors.10
The trend is becoming clearly observable, but we are often asked why this is happening.
Why, seemingly out of the blue, are LMS companies are growing so quickly, and why are they
able to tackle this work better, faster, and cheaper than the traditional legal players? Part of the
answer depends on circumstance and the forces creating a crucible of efficiency after the Great
Recession in 2008. But a more interesting answer comes from the business world, which has
always implemented project management, specialization, and technology optimization to
improve quality, efficiency, and low costs. LMS companies represent the long overdue
application of these practices to the law.
Legal Managed Services: Project Management, Specialization, and Technology
LMS businesses do not include providers of temporary staff augmentation or part-time
contractors.
As the name indicates, managed services employ full-time professional staff, business
excellence, principles, and process efficiencies, while leveraging a globalized workforce and
adopting technology.
Project Management
This is where the traditional legal industry has simply lagged. For the most part, and with
some modern exceptions, law schools simply do not teach project management. As a result, most
of the powers-that-be in Biglaw firms simply do not know anything about project management
and do not see it as a core skill their new attorneys need to grasp. Some firms are seeing the light
(employing project management strategies in the practice of law), but many attorneys resist the
change, protesting that bespoke, tailored legal advice should not be jammed into a predetermined
workflow. It is fair for Biglaw partners to debate the merits of project management in their
practice of law, which is often as much art as science. But there’s no debate that for process-
driven legal tasks (large-scale contract analysis, derivative documentation, or litigation document
reviews), proper workflows, and team management are of paramount concern.
In fact, as the volume and complexity of legal support work has increased (due to the
exponential increase in electronic communications), managed services providers gained
prominence by proudly implementing the business world’s best practices and statistical error
reduction methodologies.
Methodologies such as Lean Six Sigma ensure statistically validated work and allow
errors to be tracked, corrected retroactively, and eliminated going forward. These project
management techniques both reduce the number of errors in large-scale legal support projects,
while ensuring attorneys complete tasks in a measurably efficient and productive way. Better,
faster, cheaper.
10 Id.
207
share of non-traditional competitors.10
The trend is becoming clearly observable, but we are often asked why this is happening.
Why, seemingly out of the blue, are LMS companies are growing so quickly, and why are they
able to tackle this work better, faster, and cheaper than the traditional legal players? Part of the
answer depends on circumstance and the forces creating a crucible of efficiency after the Great
Recession in 2008. But a more interesting answer comes from the business world, which has
always implemented project management, specialization, and technology optimization to
improve quality, efficiency, and low costs. LMS companies represent the long overdue
application of these practices to the law.
Legal Managed Services: Project Management, Specialization, and Technology
LMS businesses do not include providers of temporary staff augmentation or part-time
contractors.
As the name indicates, managed services employ full-time professional staff, business
excellence, principles, and process efficiencies, while leveraging a globalized workforce and
adopting technology.
Project Management
This is where the traditional legal industry has simply lagged. For the most part, and with
some modern exceptions, law schools simply do not teach project management. As a result, most
of the powers-that-be in Biglaw firms simply do not know anything about project management
and do not see it as a core skill their new attorneys need to grasp. Some firms are seeing the light
(employing project management strategies in the practice of law), but many attorneys resist the
change, protesting that bespoke, tailored legal advice should not be jammed into a predetermined
workflow. It is fair for Biglaw partners to debate the merits of project management in their
practice of law, which is often as much art as science. But there’s no debate that for process-
driven legal tasks (large-scale contract analysis, derivative documentation, or litigation document
reviews), proper workflows, and team management are of paramount concern.
In fact, as the volume and complexity of legal support work has increased (due to the
exponential increase in electronic communications), managed services providers gained
prominence by proudly implementing the business world’s best practices and statistical error
reduction methodologies.
Methodologies such as Lean Six Sigma ensure statistically validated work and allow
errors to be tracked, corrected retroactively, and eliminated going forward. These project
management techniques both reduce the number of errors in large-scale legal support projects,
while ensuring attorneys complete tasks in a measurably efficient and productive way. Better,
faster, cheaper.
10 Id.
207
