Guest Post by Vincent J. Cordo, Jr., Global Director of Client Value and Melissa C. Prince, Esq., Manager of Legal Project Management and Analysis, Reed Smith
Reed Smith is deeply committed from the top down to finding innovative ways to provide value and contain legal costs for our clients. Reed Smith’s Client Value team grew out of the firm’s commitment to these principals, serves as a resource to the firm’s legal teams and clients throughout the duration of each matter and offers a number of value add services and technological innovations aimed at increasing cost-effectiveness and efficiency. The Client Value team is comprised of 11 dedicated and talented professionals with diverse legal project management (LPM) and strategic pricing backgrounds and strong credentials, including MBAs, JDs, CFO experience, PMP and Six Sigma certifications. And as a result of the growing demand for the Team’s resources, the Team will be adding several additional professionals in 2014.
At Reed Smith, we believe that Agile project management, which is an iterative and incremental method of managing projects in a highly flexible and interactive manner, is the best fit to address the uncertainty that often exists with legal matters -- and litigation matters in particular. Agile arose out of a reaction to the rigid Waterfall method of traditional project management, where all of the requirements of a project were known in advance. Agile works better in the legal environment where, as we all know, even the best planned matters often involve numerous changes in the scope of work that must be addressed quickly. The Agile methodology focuses on the following questions that are crucial to address in any legal matter:
- How to we deliver value quickly to our clients?
- How do we accurately identify the scope of work immediately at the outset of each matter?
- How can we provide transparency and predictability?
- How do we monitor each matter’s progress in terms of efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and scope of work in an accurate and timely manner?
- How do we proactively communicate with the Reed Smith legal team so that we meet the client’s goals and business objectives?
- How do we collect historic data and measure client satisfaction at the conclusion of each matter so that we can make continuous improvements over time?
While the Agile methodology already plays a huge role in the projects our LPM team handles on a daily basis, we believe that the entire LPM team should receive formal Agile training and certification. As such, we will be providing a mandatory Agile certification course during the first quarter of 2014 for all of our LPMs given by the Rutgers School of Business that will be specifically tailored to legal project management.