Legal Project Management is EXACTLY like Legal Electronic Invoicing
Eric Elfman
Not really. But the process that the legal industry is going through to define legal project management is exactly like the process the industry went through to come up with standards for electronic invoicing in 1997 and 1998, which yielded the Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standards, or LEDES for short.
In the mid-1990’s, companies like AIG, GM, DuPont and countless others were creating their own formats for law firms to submit their invoices electronically. It made sense because there were no standards. Then electronic invoicing vendors like Examen and TyMetrix started writing their own formats and proposing that companies adopt them so that there would be less formats in the market. The short term result was more formats.
The solution was to have the industry get together and agree on a unified standard that may not necessarily cover everyone’s complete wish list, but was enough for law firms, corporations and vendors to start communicating in a common language. Until that happened in 1998, electronic invoicing was only a trickle. After that, the flow of data became a flood.
Today, there is a lot of chatter about legal project management. There are lot of ideas about what it means and why the legal industry needs it. There are also a growing number of definitions of legal project management. I find that they are predominantly from the law firm perspective, though. Not wrong, but our perspective is very much from the buyer of legal services perspective, not the seller. In my view, until the industry finds a way to come together and agree on a definition, legal project management will make little headway.
How the industry gets together to do this is a bit more challenging. In the earlier example of electronic invoicing, PriceWaterhouseCoopers funded the initiative and really facilitated the outcome. They did this, presumably, because they wanted to be seen as thought leaders and to generate fees eventually based on the implementation of electronic invoicing and spend management. And I think they were successful. Who will step forth for legal project management is less obvious. It can’t really be a vendor like Onit. And it can’t really be a law firm. And it can’t really be a corporation. I think it will take a forward-thinking, thought-leading consultancy that understands that investment is necessary here and that it will yield benefits in the future. Any takers?
Finally, in the interest of moving the ball forward, here is my top-level take on what legal project management means for corporate legal departments. Feel free to comment….
- Initiation
- Create project
- Define issue
- Define project goals and scope of work to be performed
- Define desired outcome
- Have initial conversation with outside counsel (if necessary) about the project
- Planning
- Agree on a project plan, which breaks all deliverables into discrete items
- Agree on a budget according to the project plan
- Agree on a staffing plan and detail who will work on the project and at what rate
- Execution & Monitoring
- Begin execution of the project plan
- Get weekly status updates (or more frequent for shorter projects)
- Completion & Evaluation
- When a project is complete, go through an evaluation process that includes the following:
-
- Project evaluation
- Firm evaluation
- Lessons learned
- Use closing process to help you create better templates for future projects
Your Opinion Counts: Give us an Hour and We’ll Contribute to a Charity of Your Choice
Jill Black
In a post last month, I talked about the formation of the Onit Advisory Group (OAG) to help with the strategic development of our premium legal spend management module. Since then, we have received a great deal of feedback that many of you would like to participate but do not have enough time to commit to the group.
If you fall into this category, we have a solution that we think is mutually beneficial. Give us one hour of your time to discuss your opinions about billing policies and guidelines, electronic bill submission, invoice workflow, alternative free arrangements, etc. and we’ll donate $250 to the charity of your choice.
There is a small disclaimer though. We are seeking corporate legal attorneys or professionals from companies with revenue of at least $1.5 billion dollars. We are targeting this segment of the market because we feel there is great opportunity for a comprehensive legal spend management and project management tool. Your feedback will help us shape the product development, which is scheduled for launch in early fall.
Please email me at jill.black@onit.com if you can donate an hour of your time to help a charity of your choice. Your opinion matters. Thank you in advance for your participation.
Depth Verse Breadth
Eric Elfman
As we prepare for our new website launch and begin work on our premium product tailored at the legal vertical, we continue to struggle with how we talk about what we do. Although we designed Onit specifically for lawyers, we quickly realized that Onit is a universal project management tool that any professional, or non-professional for that matter, could use.
At the highest level, a lawyer’s project management needs are not that dissimilar than most people’s needs. On the one hand, we have a great, general project management tool that we will continue to grow for all professionals. On the other hand, our business plan predicts that 100% of our revenue will come from the legal vertical in the next five years.
It is the classic “depth verse breadth” battle that most software companies encounter. So far, we have tried to straddle both: Onit is for everybody; Onit Premium will be for lawyers and people that work with lawyers. Now, we have to find a middle ground that clearly articulates Onit’s value proposition to both audiences.
New Project Features – Snapshot Project View, Tags & Filters
Jill Black
We wanted to share some exciting news about new features in Projects. As you may have noticed, we significantly changed the way you view your legal and business projects in Onit. Now, you can quickly see a central view of all of your projects with user status, reminders and recent activity.
You can also filter projects by activity, project name, and stale activity (no activity in the last two weeks). Creating and applying tags to your projects is another new feature that helps you stay organized and allows you to quickly search for projects with similar tags.
This new functionality not only makes project management faster and more efficient but it allows you to quickly see what projects need your immediate attention.
The screen shot below shows some of this new functionality. Log-on now to see the new features.
Onit Advisory Group: We Need Your Expertise
Jill Black
We are hard at work trying to spec out our electronic billing and legal spend management module but we need a few brave individuals to assist us. Although we have a decent amount of legal domain experience to guide us, we lack more voices from our target market. Who exactly makes up our target market? Simply put, it’s the companies between $1 billion and $4.5 billion in revenue. Generally, these are companies just below the Fortune 500.
That’s why today I am announcing the formation of the Onit Advisory Group (OAG). This team of legal professionals will participate in the strategic development of our legal spend management module. Membership in the advisory group is by invitation-only but I strongly encourage you to email me at jill.black@onit.com if you or a colleague is interested in participating. Just think, how often do you get to influence the strategic development of a new product in the legal industry? Don’t miss out on this opportunity.
1,000 Users and Going Strong: Results from the Onit Beta Program
Eric Elfman
As we near the end of the Onit beta, I have been thinking about the success of the last three months. Since launching at LegalTech New York on February 1, 2010, we have had almost 1,000 business and legal professionals register for our beta. In addition to wildly exceeding our expectations, we are encouraged to learn that there is a need for a legal project management tool like Onit.
We also got a fair amount of action on our community site and encourage users to continue to submit questions, share ideas and report bugs. Our main goal with the beta program was to gain an active group of users and we were pleased to find just that. Thank you to everyone who made this beta a success. We will continue to engage with our active users and solicit feedback for new legal project management features.
Our users broke down in ways that we didn’t completely anticipate: 35% were law firms, 20% corporate/government/education, 10% competitors/vendors, and 35% were other types of users that had nothing to do with legal. While we were hopeful that law firms and people not associated with the legal industry would adopt our platform, we didn’t realize either group would be so large.
Looking forward, we have some major functionality that we plan to roll out in the next week or so, but the big news is that we are working on our electronic billing and legal spend management module. This will be targeted at the legal industry and will add the ability to budget and track the financial side of projects. We will be in beta with this module over the summer.
We’re Onit: New Enhancements to Project Plan
Jill Black
We appreciate the feedback we have received from our beta users and wanted to share some news about new enhancements to the Project Plan. We recently updated a section in Project Plan that lets you add detailed information to tasks. Now, it is faster than ever to add new items and you can track the status of items like you can with project status.
In the Project Plan, you can assign tasks to team members, add a description, set deadlines, estimate costs associated with a task and update your personal status. You can also quickly upload and attach multiple documents to projects. We also fixed how the Project Plan is displayed in Internet Explorer. The screen shot below shows this new functionality. Log on now to see these new enhancements.
Why I Joined Onit?
Jill Black
Hello. I first wanted to introduce myself as a new Onit team member. My name is Jill Black and I have been doing marketing and communication in the legal market for a little more than 10 years. In fact, I was the director of marketing for DataCert, an e-billing and legal spend management company, and was responsible for the company’s global marketing initiatives including tradeshow and seminar management, internal and external communication, media relations, advertising and collateral and website development.
Enough about me. I am hear to tell you about Onit. I decided to join the Onit team for two reasons. First, I just couldn’t stand to be away from the legal technology market. I left for a short hiatus and took a position with a software company in Austin. I know it sounds crazy but I actually missed my colleagues and the long booth hours at the legal tradeshows. What was I thinking!! I also have the pleasure of working with Eric Elfman and Eric Smith again and I just couldn’t say no, especially after spending so much time with them at DataCert.
The second reason I joined Onit was simple. There are no other products in the legal market that does what Onit offers. Okay, I am going to “borrow” a quote from Eric Elfman now. “Lawyers manage projects for a living but aren’t trained in the discipline of project management.” Enough said. There is a huge market opportunity for a lightweight tool that lawyers and people that work with lawyers could use. Onit is the answer …And it’s a catchy name!!
Okay, so now you know who I am and why I joined Onit. Now, I want to tell you that I’m here to help make your Onit user experience the best that it can possibly be. I will be lurking in the community site and posting community updates so I would love to hear your thoughts, comments and ideas for new features. I will also periodically post new blogs about new features or enhancements in Onit.
Please don’t hesitate to contact me by email at jill.black@onit.com or at 713-560-9225 if you have any questions about Onit.
How E-billing Has Evolved Since the 90′s
Eric Smith
I have been thinking about legal e-billing and spend management for a long time now. My partner and I implemented the first really successful e-billing systems in corporate legal back in the late 1990’s. At that time, corporations were dealing with invoices the size of phone books from their outside lawyers. They were simply too big for busy inside lawyers to review.
The goal with our product was to identify waste. Everyone knew the waste was there. They knew that their invoices were too high. They also knew this was not because the firms were cheating them but because no one was reviewing the invoices for mistakes made by their firms.
Many of the Fortune 500 were the earliest adopters of the technology and the earliest success stories. We designed our product with their requirements in mind. We developed big hairy systems to get invoices electronically from law firms to their corporation customers. We wanted to help them save time and money and eliminate waste.
We at Onit are in the process of developing a new e-billing system that will work for BOTH small and large corporations. One of the first things we learned was that scale matters. Smaller firms and workgroups have very different problems and barriers to adoptions than the largest corporations in the world. Trying to implement software designed to squeeze pennies out of every line item will not work for you unless you have lots of line items.
We have a philosophy about how, why and when you should adopt e-billing and spend management systems and this collection of blog posts, I hope, will articulate some of that philosophy.
The Importance of E-billing
Eric Smith
Before I start discussing e-billing, let me tell you a story to illustrate how important it is.
I remember walking through a large bank’s offices in the late 1990′s. As we walked back to the conference room to give our sales pitch on why they needed a e-billing system we had to squeeze past boxes four feet high.
I asked “What’s in the boxes?” They said legal bills.
During the sales pitch I asked several questions:
How much do you spend in legal bills? Answer: we don’t know.
How many law firm vendors do you have? Answer: we don’t know.
Home many legal bills do you get a year? Answer: we don’t know.
I knew then that the software we had designed was going to sell itself. In the next series of posts I will be explaining why e-billing is so important and why we at Onit have spent so much time designing a system that works for you, no matter how big or how small your company may be.
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- Legal Project Management is EXACTLY like Legal Electronic Invoicing
- Your Opinion Counts: Give us an Hour and We’ll Contribute to a Charity of Your Choice
- Depth Verse Breadth
- New Project Features – Snapshot Project View, Tags & Filters
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