Blogs

Best Practices & Overcoming Challenges When Going Through a Major Software Replacement Project Overview When it comes to replacing a major piece of your software, this is the perfect time to start analyzing all your data integrations between your systems, dashboards, reporting, and procedures to really understand the “why” and actual benefits. Additionally it is the perfect time to initiate procedural changes as innovation increases efficiency increases. This allows your organization to either eliminate or reduce the time and level of effort for many processes and utilize that for other business process executions. Data, Reporting & Processes ...

Please enjoy the summary highlights from the April 25th virtual roundtable discussion entitled Data Analytics Roundtable: Project Management and Workflows. Recommended Approach to get Started: Focus on process improvement/problem solving over technology to be used for the optimal solution. For Workflow/Scope/Execution/Practice Group involvement: It helps for IT/IS to partner with business and include legal knowledgeable resources (early in the process) to validate analytical approach in data initiatives while maintaining business analysts in departments. Whether developing custom applications for advanced analytics, or dashboards for operations – ...

Background Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP is an American international law firm, founded in 1945 with more than 900 attorneys. We have offices in Dallas, Washington, D.C., San Antonio, Houston, Irvine, Fort Worth, New York, Moscow, Philadelphia, London, Los Angeles, Longview, San Francisco, Beijing, Hong Kong, Singapore, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Frankfurt, Geneva and Hartford. Nineteen varying business services groups support fifteen legal practices at any given time. Our business services leaders are growing in lean legal sigma training and certifications. This enables a more proficient and sustainable approach to the business growth and process change ...

Content from Stephen Reale : Ropes and Gray : stephen.reale@ropesgray.com: Background: I am currently a Senior Project Manager at the Boston based law firm Ropes and Gray. Ropes and Gray is a leading global law firm with approximately 3,000 employees, and 11 offices, including offices in Europe and Asia. I work within the Project Services Department, which is similar to a Project Management Office (PMO). The group includes 6 Project Managers (PMs), as well as 3 Business Analysts (BA) and 3 Quality Assurance testers. As a PM, my primary role is to facilitate the implementation of business and technology solutions across various departments, within the ...

The Indiana Office of the Attorney General (OAG) is a complex, multi-faceted government agency that is both a law firm and a politically elected office serving many functions in an effort to protect and defend the constituents, laws, and government agencies and officials of the State of Indiana. The OAG has 28 separate and unique business units to accommodate all the legal, law enforcement, and operational functions handled within the office. There are approximately 400 OAG employees, just 10 of which make up the Information Technology Department where the business analyst and project manager roles reside. As a government agency funded by taxpayer dollars, ...

Business Analysts and Project Managers each play an important role in delivering change to an organization. To work well together, each need to understand their roles: Determining the "What." Executing the "How." Understanding and conveying the "Why." Business Analysts act as the bridge between the end user and the people who will affect a vision. However, getting to the What requires skills beyond just asking questions. Listening to users may lead to the skill of "asking the next question;" anticipating what the people who direct this vision of change, often a Project Manager, will want to know. Understanding what users want, the What must happen, represents ...

Three years ago, our firm entered into an eDiscovery managed services contract with Epiq. We believed that a managed services model was the most efficient way to deliver eDiscovery services to our clients at the most competitive prices. Our requirements were based on carefully articulated operational objectives (dedicated infrastructure and technical support) and financial objectives (predictable monthly fees). At the end of the contract term, we had to make a case for renewal. Had Epiq fulfilled our requirements? Did the model meet our original objectives? What was the measure of its success? By analyzing the details of our monthly subscription agreement and ...

Recently, our ILTA communities have seen an increase in traffic with searches for project management, legal project management, task management, tools, etc. Fortunately, my fellow ILTAns are never too shy to share their two cents, make recommendations, or link to prior content. To answer this increased call for knowledge, the Practice Management Content team is preparing a series on project management and a survey to gather more details on who’s doing what and why. While you anxiously await our content, feel free to binge on this recap of PM and LPM tools from the archives. Project Management and Legal Project Management Tools Matrix This matrix ...

Predictability can be one of the biggest benefits of a managed services model, when it’s in a matured state. In a less matured state, opportunities exist at every turn to strive for greater predictability: in standardized processes and templates of workflows, in issues management, in defining roles and responsibilities, and even in the content and methods of communication. When you can anticipate the time and cost of eDiscovery projects, expecting that the work you request will be done on time, on budget and according to specification, you are in the position to make well-grounded predictions about future projects. Forecasting eDiscovery work across the life ...

Every day we expect results: deliverables that are on time, on budget, and that meet specification. We deliver daily requests to service providers, following workflows that are designed to give us exactly what we need. But inevitably glitches occur in workflows. Maybe steps are skipped. Maybe there are holes in the design. Maybe time estimates are off. What happens then when the deliverable you receive is not what you asked for? What can you do when there’s an issue with getting the results you expect? The first obvious response is to ask the vendor to fix the problem as quickly as possible to minimize impact and to ease case team frustrations. The concern ...

The business of eDiscovery is based on workflow. Collected electronically stored information moves through its various conversions on a path to its final destination, whether it’s a database or production volume. This path is the backbone of eDiscovery, and contains the details of what we do every day. But what does an eDiscovery workflow look like? Where does it show up in the practice of litigation? What’s its relationship to managed services? One of the first pictures of an eDiscovery workflow in the legal industry showed up around 2005 with the launching of the now ubiquitous eDiscovery Reference Model (“EDRM”) ( http://www.edrm.net/frameworks-and-standards ...

We recently recorded the latest in the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) webinar series - "How Big Data Can Solve Problems." Today, companies are demanding bigger discounts, lower rates and more efficiency from their lawyers -- compelling law firms and in-house legal departments to produce summaries and statistical analyses of their work and results. This high-level statistics refresher will help you understand and apply basic statistics to your legal operations practice, whether in a firm or in-house. Click here to listen to the recorded webinar. Speaker: Rebecca Holdredge , a Manager in Bryan Cave's practice economics group, ...

Following on from John's post last week, something close to my heart - Legal Project Management, or more precisely, the struggle involved to implement Legal Project Management (LPM). Law firms and law departments sometimes struggle when seeking to make changes. Nowhere is this more evident than in law firm and law department efforts to implement legal project management techniques. The scale of the task can often feel daunting, but luckily there are a number of examples that can help steer us in the right direction. T hrough a combination of learning from others who have already started with LPM initiatives, and by also taking advantage of what you already ...

First, I wanted to thank the contributors for offering up such insightful and informative thoughts and ideas. I’m sure that as legal project management continues to surge into the mainstream legal service delivery process practitioners will continue to explore new solutions. We will look for new idea, tune existing ideas and look for opportunities to leverage the various LPM tools and methods to increase the value we are delivering to our clients. In closing A Week of Agile LPM I would like mention that Agile is not a single methodology, rather it’s a group of methods that share the commonality of offering alternative (to traditional/waterfall) tools ...