Legal project management

Legal-project management is the application of the concepts of project management to the control and management of legal cases or matters. Practitioners of legal-project management apply it to the mechanics and business of providing legal services rather than to the substantive legal work itself. Legal-project management is becoming increasingly common, especially in law firms working under alternative fee arrangements such as fixed or flat fees, cost limits, and success bonuses. Such cases require management of schedule, risk, and cost in a more rigorous and measured manner than firms have practiced in the past. Also, legal-project management is becoming an accepted discipline for law departments and firms using hourly billing faced with the need to be more efficient in the delivery of legal services.

Legal-project management meets traditional project management particularly in the area of electronic discovery. E-discovery in particular has a set of regularized, repeatable, and measurable practices and has been subject to great cost-control pressure for the past few years, making it a specialty within law amenable to traditional project management. The practice of legal-project management varies from the schema in Steven Levy's book to law-firm-specific regimens such as Seyfarth Lean to corporate initiatives such as Cisco’s core-and-context approach to legal work.