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 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.
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.
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.
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.
In our last post we briefly mention waterfall development and why in client work, it’s important to avoid that method when managing a project. To explain why, we want to go into a little more detail on what waterfall development really means.
It is typically defined by seven linear stages: conception, initiation, analysis, design, construction, testing and maintenance. Some of these stages can last months and are usually marked by big milestones. It is only upon the completion of these milestones that the customer or client is reengaged for review.
The advantage of this method is that the customer has to really think about what he wants before software engineers spend time coding. And it allows for predictable, top-down management of engineers from the project manager’s perspective. But the biggest disadvantage of this method is that if the product starts to veer, or if too many project interpretations are wrong, it is a long time before the customer knows it. There is the potential for vast amounts of rework and very unhappy customers.
In the software engineering world, they use a disciplined project management process called “agile” The agile method is based on teamwork, frequent inspection and adaption, self-organization and accountability, and a business approach that aligns work with customer needs and company goals.
We think those tenets should be applied to all project management systems, not just the development world, so the agile method was central to our thinking when we designed Onit.
Agile project management, unlike more traditional systems, is neither linear nor marked by complete specifications being written up front. Agile project managers work in much smaller chunks of time, 2 weeks for example, and fast iteration is key. Yes, specifications still need to be well understood but that doesn’t have to happen up front. Since you are moving fast, you can change those quickly and incorporate new ones as needed. These constant updates also keep everyone in the loop and save time.
We think agile lawyering makes sense. My lawyers and I should iterate more frequently on my projects. Onit allows you to define your goals clearly and up front and then through “discussions” in the service, you can iterate to make sure the project gets completed with the least rework. And you have a running transcript of decisions and conversations. Imagine having one place where you can see everyone’s updates, rather than having to call a meeting to discuss them!
The answer to both of your questions is “no.”
At Onit, we recognize that the discipline of project management could play a valuable role in the average lawyer’s practice. None of the tools currently out there are a good fit so we spent the last year studying lawyers and trying to determine what was missing in the market for them. What we created is not the “building a freeway,” heavy, top-down project management that most people think of when they think of project management. Rather, we think what they need is more akin to lean project management, which is collaborative and is focused on eliminating waste as it’s primary function.
We have applied what we learned into a flexible, online project management tool based on lawyer’s specific needs. But a funny thing happened on the way to the legal industry: we discovered that lawyer’s project management needs are no different than most people. Perhaps the scale is a little different, but when we stepped back from what we had built, we realized that we created a tool that anybody could get value from. The reality is we are all project managers, whether we have that in our title or not.
We will continue to post on topics that are important to us and that are the foundation of how we think about project management. Next will be a post about our borrowing of concepts from software developers about iterating and frequent status updates.
On Monday, February 1st, we’ll be debuting Onit at the LegalTech 2010 conference in New York City so stop by and visit us! Onit will also be available for beta testing and we encourage you to sign up and try it now. Your feedback is important to us, so please leave comments and interact with our community forum!