Many law firms and corporate legal departments are using teams of legal professionals — lawyers, paralegals and others with specialized expertise — to handle complex projects, including e-discovery and litigation consulting, investigations and due diligence matters.
When structured using project-management best practices, outside teams working in conjunction with an in-house team can provide a cost-effective option to managing large-scale initiatives on tight budgets. This approach provides much-needed flexibility, while also ensuring the project team has the necessary expertise. The flexibility offered is increasingly critical for e-discovery, given that managing its scope and cost is becoming more challenging for legal departments and law firms.
But how do you make these arrangements work? Consider these five strategies for success when using e-discovery or litigation consulting teams:
- Appoint a strong project manager.Tap a project manager at the start of an engagement. This individual can be someone from within the organization or from a third-party project team. The main requirements are that he or she understands the legal intricacies of a case and has the project management skills needed to ensure results are delivered in a timely and cost-effective manner. This individual also needs the ability to keep the team focused on the big picture as well as the daily details.
- Define key roles and responsibilities.To avoid confusion and miscommunication, team leaders in law firms, corporations and members of third-party teams need to establish defined roles and come to an early assessment of what those roles and responsibilities include. In addition to the team leader or leaders, a project team might also include technology specialists, consultants, document reviewers and additional project managers in various locations, depending on the demands of the engagement. In addition, it’s essential to designate someone to review and quality check the team’s work. This critical role can fall to the law firm, general counsel or the project manager with the review organization.
3. Establish processes and protocols. Once you delineate who will be handling which responsibilities, establish processes and protocols for the team to follow. Hold a kickoff meeting to ensure all team members understand why the team was formed, what its goals are and what needs to be done to achieve those goals. This meeting should include a discussion of the action plan, logistics, workflow, and guidelines for exchanging information, making decisions, resolving conflicts and so on.
- Communicate early and often.Keep communication active throughout the engagement. Even if procedures are clearly discussed at the outset, project teams need ongoing guidance to function effectively. Deadlines often change and the scope of the project can also morph and change, so it’s important for team leaders to continually communicate updates and inform colleagues about how their work may be affected.
- Stay positive.It’s essential for people leading the team to keep project groups focused, motivated and ready to handle high-pressure work. Being able to anticipate and help the team overcome obstacles and identify next steps is crucial. Leaders also need to be the voice of reason, especially as engagements grow larger.
Finally, it’s important to develop reward mechanisms that recognize both individual and team accomplishments over the course of an engagement. Although many initiatives are brief in nature, others can continue over a long period. With this in mind, organizations that engage e-discovery and litigation consulting teams may want to consider their own ways to reward great work and keep project teams engaged and motivated.
Charles A. Volkert is executive director of Robert Half Legal, a leading staffing service specializing in the placement of attorneys, paralegals, legal administrators and other legal professionals with law firms and corporate legal departments. Based in Menlo Park, Calif., Robert Half Legal has offices in major cities throughout the United States and Canada.