A silent (r)evolution - introducing Legal Project Management through the COVID-19 backdoor

Unprecedented, unstructured, unpredictable

COVID-19 has clearly changed our lives overnight. While we are home-office bound for the third or fourth week in a row together with our immediate family members, governed by curfews and other restrictions, we are experiencing vastly different professional environments.

The immediate challenges - content wise and process-related - faced by legal departments and their external counsel (law firms and other legal service providers) differ only in nuances for each legal practitioner:

• Your team is fielding a flood of inquiries by phone, via email and in person that are most likely unstructured and disparate.
• Top management, staff, customers and suppliers are asking for your advice and anticipating actionable proposals as quickly as possible.
• The incoming queries often deal with issues that are new to everyone, a huge challenge for the team in general and specific staff members in particular. Moreover and for the first time ever, your team may be operating decentrally and remotely.

Your IT colleagues heard you and installed a couple of new collaboration tools on your laptop. So far, so good.

Are you already applying Agile Project Management elements without knowing it?

Overnight, many corporate departments like yours and mine had to migrate their teams to online collaboration platforms. Those IT tools had been in existence for a while but never received the today’s degree of interest and attention. Interestingly, the likes of Microsoft Teams, Jira, Slack, Trello, HighQ, and many more provide functionalities which utilise or are aligned with (mostly Agile) project management concepts, such as Kanban cards, RACI Diagrams, etc.

Within days, we have collectively learned to use those tools without fully embracing their conceptual background. Who cares in times of daily regulatory updates, ubiquitous digging in the mist and fear of the unknown? What we needed at this stage were pragmatic and immediately available solutions to cope with the unprecedented nature of a 'social distancing' economy.

In the old and early days of ERP implementations, we called this approach ‘Change Management by bomb dropping’. Now that you may have immersed yourself by coincidence and without prior warning (so to speak taking the ‘COVID-19 backdoor’) in some of the principles and practices of Legal Project Management (LPM), what are the next steps? What can you do to further leverage these first achievements and consciously apply more LPM elements in a sustainable manner today and tomorrow to master this volatile environment?

52.3% of German in-house counsel confirm "optimising workflows/project management" as a high priority

(JUVE In-house Survey 2019, Rechtsmarkt 2/2020)

Cherry picking the LPM building blocks which help immediately

LPM is an approach and a toolbox helping you to structure, prioritise and allocate resources. It offers legal teams a range of elements to help you take fast, pragmatic and effective action in times of volatility and crisis:

• Effective detection of potentially parallel or interdependent activities – Already mentioned above, most tools allow organising your activities based on Matter Management Boards, which may be of great help as they can be easily set up and are intuitive by nature. Karen and David Skinner, colleagues from the IILPM network have summarised all the things one needs to know to get started today (link to the LinkedIn post)
• Prioritisation and scheduling of activities that change on a daily basis - e.g., the MoSCoW method is an Agile prioritization framework. It is commonly used to help key stakeholders understand the significance of initiatives in a specific phase or delivery stage of a matter. The categories hiding behind MoSCoW are Must Have, Should Have, Could Have and Won't Have. The plain English meaning of the prioritisation categories alleviates an understanding of impact compared to alternatives like High, Medium and Low, in particular if the timescale is under pressure. A rule of thumb is that the safe percentage of Must Have requirements, in order to be confident of project success, is not to exceed 60% of the overall effort. NB: Some of the collaboration platforms mentioned before allow virtual group scoring on shared activity cards, a useful feature to determine the prioritisation categories concurrently.
• Team structure and communication strategy that responds appropriately to the situation at hand - e.g. the RACI Diagram, which helps identifying responsibilities and accountabilities labelling contributing stakeholders as 'responsible', 'accountable', 'to be consulted' and 'informed'. A YouTube video explaining the context in more detail can be found here (a light-hearted reference to our current 'household affairs').
• Targeted and non-bureaucratic meetings - e.g., Stand-ups, a specific meeting format rooted in Agile LPM. Usually limited to 15 minutes (time boxed) and focused on three questions only (What did you accomplish since the last meeting? What are you working on until the next meeting? What are the impediments to achieve your goals today?), it fosters a peer-based collaboration and avoid 'waffling'. If you are keen to learn more about it, here is a useful article.
• Guidance through effective stakeholder analysis and identification - e.g., leveraging the ‘6-Tests Method’ and stakeholder mapping in general, provides orientation in complex stakeholder landscapes characterised by legal, regulatory, economic, technical/medical and political aspects.
• Communication planning and execution oriented towards risks and stakeholders – not necessarily the core domain of your previous service portfolio as a legal team. However, in times of high uncertainty messaging requires differentiation by target audiences, content, content delivery formats and frequencies, and response times. Our standard memo to all employees will not be adequate anymore (if that was ever the case).
• Alignment of different work streams (e.g., program management) – e.g. by setting up a respective structure, for instance, in Microsoft Teams (different channels) or appointing a central point of coordination leveraging the full portfolio of program management tools.

Are you considering other LPM elements? I look forward to hearing from you.

Conclusion

All of these changes may be borne out of an emergency environment – unprecedented in nature and scope. However, the rapid deployment and implementation of new digital collaboration platforms has introduced legal departments and law firms to numerous new ways of creating transparency and value. No one will ever put the genie back in the bottle. Which LPM elements will you implement next?

Ignaz Füsgen is a Counsel at Deloitte Legal and member of the firm’s German Legal Management Consulting team. He is writing in his personal capacity. Deloitte and its affiliates do not necessarily support views expressed here.