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LAW OFFICE MANAGEMENT project management B 2010: BY KEV IN MARRON arbara Boake well understands how difficult it is to predict what will happen in the complex nego- tiations or adversarial processes in which lawyers are routinely engaged. But the Toronto-based partner at McCarthy Tétrault LLP also knows that more predictability — a better under- standing of potential outcomes and fees — is exactly what clients are look- ing for, especially in an economy where budgets are constrained and all costs are scrutinized. That's why she and her firm are hoping that project management — a discipline that has been applied for dec- ades in engineering and information technology to manage resources and budgets more efficiently — can provide lawyers with a set of tools "to make what is inherently pretty unpredictable a little more predictable." McCarthy Tétrault is by no means alone in this. As law firms around the world feel increasing pressure from clients to manage costs, legal project management is widely seen as a poten- tial panacea. "The time has come when lawyers are recognizing that there must be a better way of organizing their matters," says John Gillies, director of practice support at Cassels Brock & Blackwell LLP. A law- yer who spent many years in-house as sen- ior counsel for CIBC, Gillies says he well under- stands clients' need for more certainty as well as "a greater voice in how their legal services are delivered." Project management is a way of improving the systems by which law- yers work and, as such, "it upgrades the quality of what lawyers do by upgrading the quality of how they do it," according to Ottawa-based law firm consultant Jordan Furlong, a partner with Edge International Inc. and publisher of the blog Law21.ca. And, he adds, law firms need to invest in project management because their competitors will. "It's on its way to becoming standard operating procedure in law firms," he says. But project management is so new to the legal profession that everyone is still trying to figure out what it can do and how to make it work. Steven Levy, a Seattle-based consult- ant and author of the recently pub- lished book Legal Project Management, says project management involves set- ting up a framework for lawyers and their clients to communicate and work IT does it, engineers do it, now it's time for lawyers to get on the bandwagon. together on such goals as controlling costs, understanding what has to be done to meet clients' needs, figuring out what a successful outcome will look like, deploying appropriate resources to achieve this outcome, and controlling and predicting the time spent on the matter. Lawyers and law firms do many of these things already and have been doing them for years, he says, but pro- ject management requires a more sys- tematic approach. "It's a matter of put- ting it all together and not leaving out critical aspects," he says. Gillies cites the example of a corpor- ate acquisition matter in which it has been assumed that there would be no major regulatory issues. If it turns out, however, that the Competition Bureau does pose some questions, lawyers will have to spend more time answering these and the scope of the project may www. C ANAD i AN law ye rmag.com APRIL 2010 21 Buzzword JEREMY BRUNEEL