Case Study: Legal Project Management

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Legal Project Management—The BakerManage Way

(Licensed from Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz P.C.)

More than ever before, clients need predictability and accountability in their legal budgets. To help achieve this goal, and to better manage the delivery of legal services, Baker Donelson has created BakerManage, a proactive project management process that ensures that complicated legal matters are managed efficiently and completed on time and within budget.
BakerManage represents Baker Donelson’s commitment to our clients to be good stewards of their resources, as well as our ongoing review of processes and systems with an eye toward continual improvement. By more efficiently incorporating technology and training, this tool allows us to improve client communication while delivering more cost-effective legal solutions.

BakerManage divides the management of a legal matter into three phases:

  • Development – LegalShift and Baker Donelson legal consultants and attorneys start by developing a plan for the engagement that includes a clearly defined scope and set of tasks to promote efficiency, a schedule for timely execution and a budget to control costs.
  • Execution – Communication is key to the successful execution of any engagement. A key component of the LegalShift/BakerManage solution set is the client extranet, which provides client team members easy access to customized project information including forms, tasks, budget and project status and other matter-related documents.
  • Closure – In BakerManage, closure not only officially concludes the matter in our systems but also incorporates an attorney-client debrief to review lessons learned and confirm any recommended changes for future engagements. LegalShift and Baker Donelson understand that post-evaluation of a matter can lead to improvements and efficiencies in future engagements.

BakerManage ensures more efficient management of your legal matters through more systematic planning, monitoring and communication.

For more information, contact Scott Rosenberg at srosenberg@legalshift.com or David Rueff at drueff@legashift.com.

Case Study: Improving Business Productivity

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Improving Business Productivity

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Case Study: Redefining Legal Processes

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Redefining Legal Processes in Creation of Best Practice Process Workflows

Our team reviews the full scale of law firm administrative operations, including but not limited to finance, human resources, information technology (IT), practice support, new business intake/conflicts, records, docket, Litigation/eDiscovery Support, risk management, knowledge management, secretarial support, file/print room and other back office where we assess, recommend and deliver improvement recommendations and next generation roadmaps, including tasks, timelines and costs to plan your move from where you are today to your desired future state. Our recommendations span law firm operations/administrative strategy, process, organization and technology changes to support the new “law firm” model.

  • Client:  150 lawyer firm
  • Problem: Cost cutting enabled our 150 lawyer law firm client to remove cost from its model but caused an unanticipated consequence, a dramatic drop in client service to its lawyers and only a marginal improvement in annual partner distributions.
  • Solution: The LegalShift team conducted a broad legal operations assessment and reviewed strategy/governance, process, organization and technology needs. We developed a comprehensive recommendations set and delivered a detailed implementation roadmap.  The firm has been implementing LegalShift’s recommendations.  The results included: a re-engineered new business intake/conflicts process and tools that now ties the intake of clients to the firm’s strategy, resulting in more profitable, strategically aligned clients; a re-tooled administrative finance organization, processes and tools that allow lawyers to see client and matter focused financial information, on a real time basis, including AFA budgets and current state, receivables, and allows status updates for client viewing; a new knowledge management function that exploits internal knowledge sharing and easier access to Firm intellectual property enabling higher value and more efficient results for clients; a refined technology delivery function that now caters to the Firm’s lawyers, and enables unfettered access “always on” to firm systems from a variety of mobile platforms.