But, I’m a Lawyer, Not a Project Manager! How the Right Tool Busts Bad Habits and Lets Legal Level Up.
Virtually all lawyers and legal operations professionals are project managers.
Some want to dodge the role. Others are eager to improve. And a few aren’t even aware of the responsibility.
Whether the duty is accidental or assigned, every legal team manages both temporary tasks and long-term work to achieve business goals. And that is both the definition of project management – and the nature of most legal work.
In this guide, we highlight the pressing need for better legal project management. We’ll explore ways for legal teams to handle an onslaught of tasks, improve collaboration, and restore sanity in the 8-to-5.
We also show how the right tool (more than any tip, trick, or hack) is the foundation of your productivity.
“No duh” reasons to embrace better project management.
Few corporate functions are as in demand as legal.
Whether drafting contacts, reviewing content, navigating HR concerns, managing compliance, or handling litigation – the needs stretch teams thin.
For many lawyers, existing project management practices (if any exist) flounder. Even high performers tend to get in their own way, often coping through sheer force of will and longer hours.
Lawyers in high-growth organizations, in particular, need more systematic ways of managing work. They need routines that don’t just help them do more, but do more of the right things, too.
Legal teams can no longer depend on “more bodies” to handle the workload. Most operate leanly in terms of personnel, with one survey suggesting that companies with $1 billion in revenue typically employ just three legal team members.
According to the National Law Review, better project management elevates the professional experience of lawyers and delivers real business benefits including:
- More predictability in how projects are approached, how long they will take, and how obstacles will be addressed
- Efficient planning that delivers lower costs and better budgets
Enhanced “client” (e.g. - stakeholder) satisfaction due to consistent, transparent experiences
Proactivity: the price of poor project management
Without a project management framework, legal teams become too reactive. This compounds stress and can lead to expensive mistakes. Reactive responses become the norm, where the “squeaky wheel gets the grease.”
“Few teams operate in a world as nebulous as a legal department,” shares Jonathan Greenblatt, vice president of legal at LinkSquares. “Pressure to prioritize is constant, and it’s easy to default to the latest, easy task that someone asks you to do.”
Problematically, much of legal’s work, like global entity setup or trademark registration, may not have a pressing deadline or be immediately executable.
Legal needs a mechanism for taking on this essential but non-urgent work. According to Greenblatt, “Without project management discipline, long-term work gets back-burnered in favor of quick wins that make people feel momentarily productive.”
But tackling what’s top of mind is not conducive to success.
When applied over time, this thinking leads to issues like overspending, underestimating schedule impacts, agreeing to unnecessary work, and forgoing opportunities due to short-term thinking.
You’re only as good as your project management tool.
While some teams try intake or project management tools like Zendesk, Jira, or Asana to help manage tasks and projects, the jumbled nature of legal requests make these barely useful.
Asks arrive around the clock via email, Slack, Teams, phone, or drive-by chats in the office, and teams end up defaulting to ad hoc and manual processes.
Tasks and issues land on a paper to-do list, in a shared inbox, or in a spreadsheet tracker. In the chaos, responsibilities fall through the cracks. Messages get deleted, emails lost.
Legal wastes time going back and forth between different systems to chase down additional information from requesters, check in on requests, and share status updates with stakeholders. It’s no surprise that, according to Gartner, 68% of legal departments struggle to manage their workload.
Collaboration and visibility are also impeded as teams ping-pong between on- and offline tools.
The right tool eliminates reliance on disparate email threads and communications – and helps teams centralize requests, related documents, feedback, approvals, and output.
“Many lawyers have never even considered a legal project management tool. They incorrectly assume that no solution meets their unique security, sensitivity, and workflow needs.”
Jonathan Greenblatt, VP of Legal, Linksquares
For legal, not all project management tools are created equal.
When evaluating tools, legal teams should not resign themselves to whatever solution IT has extra licenses for.
They must inventory their unique usage and security needs and assess solutions accordingly.
While big-brand task management platforms are feature-rich, most are designed for general use. Instead, target a solution that is purpose built for legal work. This helps unlock immediate ROI and avoids wasted time from customizing privacy, organization, and collaboration features.
One example: LinkSquares Prioritize helps automate the legal intake process by allowing business stakeholders to directly submit requests. This means a real-time record of requests for simpler, faster review.
Once requests land, tasks may be categorized into use cases like compliance, contracts, and IP. From an integration standpoint, it’s best when your tool natively integrates with a CLM to reduce interoperability issues.
“Legal teams assume that a chaotic rhythm of task management via email, Google Docs, spreadsheets, and messaging apps is normal,” notes Aidan Sullivan, technical solutions attorney at LinkSquares.
“There is no need to field a request from finance in one place, access a contract in another, and communicate updates somewhere else. The right tool eliminates silos and acts as a homebase for legal projects.”
Taming tasks is just one business benefit.
Productivity gets most of the attention as a result of better project management. And, rightly so! Beyond simplifying task work, the right tools and disciplines support large, strategic projects too.
But, don’t underestimate other outcomes.
Legal PM tools generate data and insights in consumable forms, like dashboards and reports. These can feed other performance initiatives.
“Establish KPIs and review performance metrics based on available reports,” suggests Sullivan. “On every project, we glean insights into how long our work takes and the volume of tasks we’re responsible for.”
By analyzing these data points, legal can drive improvements across stakeholder relationships.
“We might find that the review process with sales is unusually slow. If so, we’ll reassess how we work with their team or the existing intake process we have in place,” shares Sullivan.
The data can also shape legal’s case for more resources.
Few legal leaders have a specific understanding of what their team is working on – including how often and with whom. This adds up to uneven workloads and difficulty asking for more headcount or investment.
“From contracts, to marketing collateral review, we should be able to report exactly what we’re working on and for how long,” notes Greenblatt.
Project management as a practice, supported by a tool, delivers this.
About LinkSquares and Prioritize
LinkSquares Prioritize is an intake and project management solution built to centralize an in-house legal team’s workload — empowering them to manage, track, and report on all their work in one place.
At LinkSquares, we help legal department leaders drive innovation, reduce backlog, lower costs, increase revenue, and minimize loss. If you're ready to adopt the most effective solutions for the legal function — and harness cutting-edge AI to improve every aspect of your department – then contact LinkSquares today.