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SKILLS TRAINING WORKSHOP

While no one- or two-day course can provide all the skills development or education needed to become an accomplished project manager, these workshops will provide participants with the basic skills to start to manage legal work in a new and more efficient manner. These workshops utilize a skill-building exercise as well as case studies for litigation and transactional practices. When this training is conducted for a specific engagement team, participants can use a current client matter as the case study and develop many elements of the project plan during the course. 

These training programs are most effective when the lawyers feel they have tools to use so that the techniques for implementing project management are not overwhelming. We have worked with firms to incorporate their own proprietary project or matter management/budgeting systems (including KM tools, profitability tools, or other financial tools), or to use publicly available tools like Budget Manager, Thomson Reuters Engage, Data Fusion or Redwood Analytics matter planning tools. 

In some firms we have included their internal experts (KM, finance, IT, or others) in the training sessions to present those tools, so that your legal professionals know where to turn for assistance when they start to use new matter management approaches.  We can incorporate into the training any aspects of your professional development program for lawyers or paralegals, if you have competencies or benchmarks related to management, supervision, delegation or other skills related to project management.  

 

Our live programs are tailored to the type of matters a firm handles and the specific objectives a firm wants to achieve with its legal project management efforts.  The program typically includes teaching a simple but effective four-phase framework for LPM.  Our services are customized to your culture, and are tailored to the existing skill sets of your attorneys. Our experience ranges from coaching very senior attorneys about leading project management teams and applying LPM methodologies to their matters to working with associates or paralegals who will function as “legal project managers” to analyzing closed matters to identify best practices and ways to improve similar matters in the future.  The program can include any of your firm’s tools or specific approaches.  We can also incorporate aspects of your professional development program including any competencies or benchmarks related to management, supervision, delegation or other skills related to matter management.  And, where a firm has a LPM technology tool it is using or preparing to use, we can incorporate the tool into the training which has helped many firms achieve higher levels of adoption of their technology tool. 

 

Our live training and our online courses cover the same framework and concepts if you decide to use a mix of each.

 

Resource Materials Provided to Our Clients

 

We provide a notebook of resource materials, which includes:

  • A sample law firm project charter and a template to create a project charter

  • Sample Gantt charts and high level matter timelines

  • Stakeholder analysis framework

  • Project plan outline

  • Templates for work breakdown structures for various practice areas

  • Template for Responsibility Assignment

  • Budgeting templates

  • Project risk assessment grid

  • Communications plan template

  • Issue log template

  • Sample matter team meeting agenda

  • A quick reference card (which can be used as a reminder of key concepts)  

  • Copies of all the slides used to teach the course which act as a resource guide when they have questions.

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