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….
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.
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.
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.