I’ve noticed the same trend in law firms starting to see the value in and employ professional project managers. Corporations are sold on role already and many firms are starting to follow by realizing that project management is not just a set of responsibilities, but a formal role in the organization. One of the largest challenges I’ve seen, however, is in the ability for law firm project managers to remain dedicated to a project. It isn’t uncommon for these individuals to be quickly pulled off a project and moved to a new project without time to formally close or transition the original project. For that reason, the value of the role must be understood throughout all levels of the organization.

I agree in the difference between case / matter management and project management. While there are certainly similar aspects, a different set of skills are useful. Lawyers are definitely not, by default, project managers. While there are inherently certain skill sets related to communication and organization that indicate potential, formal project management training should not be skipped over. An untrained project manager may reach the desired results in terms of scope, budget, and schedule, but some of the benefits of formal project management are lost when fundamentals surrounding project closing are skipped, for example. On the other hand, lawyers and other legal professionals who are also formally trained in project management will bring additional benefit to a project over a more traditional IT or business-function PM. Lawyers, for example, quickly see the tie between the project management fundamentals of quality and risk and the defensibility of legal tasks and processes. Documentation may have a different set of requirements in a legal project and while many of the fundamentals can still be applied, litigation is a different kind of beast. Finally, multiple projects may feed into case management. While I may look at the e-discovery portion of litigation as a complete project, it is simply a piece of the larger picture and from a resource perspective, you need to be certain that the correct resources are focused on the the tasks where they will be most effective throughout that larger picture.