LegalBizDev announces the first Certified Legal Project ManagersTM

BOSTON--(EON: Enhanced Online News)--Three lawyers have completed a rigorous educational program including readings, case studies, and practical applications, and are the first attorneys to become Certified Legal Project Managers™.

“The accomplishments of this first group prove that busy senior partners can complete an intensive distance learning tutorial within a few months, build a solid foundation of project management knowledge, and apply this knowledge to develop and implement new procedures that improve client service and increase profitability.”

“Legal project management is now widely acknowledged as a set of skills that many lawyers need to master in a rapidly changing profession,” said Jim Hassett, the founder of LegalBizDev, which developed the program. “The accomplishments of this first group prove that busy senior partners can complete an intensive distance learning tutorial within a few months, build a solid foundation of project management knowledge, and apply this knowledge to develop and implement new procedures that improve client service and increase profitability.”

Over the course of the program, each participant studied more than 300 pages of readings from six leading textbooks in the field and answered 17 essay questions about how project management concepts applied to their practice. Then they worked with a legal project management expert to identify the most efficient way to achieve immediate and practical results.

LegalBizDev has also begun certifying additional lawyers in the United States, Canada, Brazil, China, and Germany. The smallest firm to sign up has eight lawyers; the largest has over 3,000.

The first three attorneys to complete the program were Fraser MacFadyen, a partner at Stewart McKelvey, a 220-lawyer firm in Atlantic Canada; Liz Harris, the founder of Harris Cost Lawyers, an eight-lawyer firm in Melbourne, Australia; and Stacy Ballin, a partner at the international firm Squire Sanders, which has more than 1,200 lawyers.

Each chose a different method of applying project management techniques to the practice of law. MacFadyen focused on improving practice-wide procedures for handling certain types of secured financings, including working agendas, forms for communicating with clients, and budget estimate spreadsheets. Harris created more than 25 pages of checklists and templates to enable her firm to better define scope for four types of fixed-price matters and to complete them within budget.

Ballin, who is Litigation Group Business Partner at Squire Sanders, focused on improving the firm’s “billing realization rates,” reducing the amount of time that lawyers devote to cases but choose not to bill to clients. She designed a research study of six young Squire Sanders partners to explore ways to increase efficiency and reduce write-downs, leading to a significant improvement in the firm’s bottom line.