James Senior: How to Become a Legal Project Manager

James Senior works as a senior legal project manager, ensuring that legal matters and processes run smoothly and efficiently. This article will take a closer look at the role, providing an overview of the key responsibilities involved and the requisite qualifications, skills and experience demanded by the role.

Legal project management combines the application of project management with the delivery of legal services. Applying project management techniques, tools and principles to client matters helps legal service providers to improve the management of cost, risk, client communications and resources. Legal project management also provides an opportunity for professional project managers to transition to the legal services industry.

Today, the International Institute of Legal Project Management (IILPM) operates a widely recognised certification scheme, providing professional qualifications for Legal Process Improvement Professionals, Legal Project Associates, and Legal Project Practitioners. Operating across more than 50 countries today, IILPM provides legal service providers and their clients with assurance that graduates have a thorough understanding of legal project management, enabling them to play integral roles in service delivery teams.

IILPM Legal Project Management Training courses last for either two days for Legal Project Associates or three days for Legal Project Practitioners. Courses are based on the organisation’s 4-Phase Legal Project Management Framework, covering traditional project techniques as well as adaptive techniques. IILPM presents various exercises and workshops to enable students to gain guided practice at applying project management to legal matters.

Lasting for up to two hours, IILPM’s shorter non-certification courses are geared towards senior management staff and partners in law firms. Half day courses are available for practicing solicitors, as well as courses for specific cohorts, such as aspiring partners. The IILPM also offers special courses for in-house legal teams.

Over the years, the careful management of lawyer-client relationships has become integral to the success of any law firm. Recognising this, increasing numbers of legal practitioners are actively seeking out ways to create consistent, efficient experiences for their clients. This in turn has led to a greater need for standardised systems and processes, enabling lawyers to manage matters and projects in a more efficient way. In response, the legal industry is experiencing rising demand for legal project management solutions.

Legal project management draws on the tenets, tools and skills of general project management, adapting them to the specific needs of law firms. Through astute planning, budgeting, resource allocation and risk management, legal project managers help law firms to better manage legal projects and matters. In addition, legal project managers create enhanced consistency in law firms in terms of processes and predictability for clients around expectations regarding experience and cost. In simple terms, legal project managers take the principles of effective project management and apply them to help law firms run in a more

Candidates need not have a background in law or possess a particular certification to become a legal project manager, although legal experience certainly helps. To be successful, legal project managers need a specific set of attributes and key skills, including:

• Adept project management skills
• Exceptional communication
• Organisational skills and an eye for detail
• Analytical skills
• Legal specific knowledge

Although a legal project manager need not necessarily be a qualified lawyer, a familiarity with legal practices and processes is desirable. Project managers who have served in the role of legal assistant, paralegal, or come from a similar legal-specific background are ideally placed to succeed in the role, having gained sufficient commercial expertise and legal knowledge. Formal qualifications in legal project management can also go a long way towards helping candidates to level up. In addition to IILPM, several other organisations offer certification and training options, including the LPM Institute and others.