Project Management With SharePoint Task Lists

Like many law firms, project management is finding its way into the lexicon of attorneys and staff at Fenwick & West. Driven by clients' desire for more predictable legal costs, law firms are beginning to look beyond the billable hour to alternative fee arrangements. While AFAs can take many forms, they share one thing in common -- they transfer the risk of cost overruns from the client to the firm.

The need to better manage the risk of cost overruns is driving law firms to adopt process management techniques that have become common practice in other industries. One obvious candidate is formal project management. Since many traditional project management tools and techniques are foreign to attorneys, some firms hire dedicated project managers and create project management offices.

Regardless of the structure, successful project management requires tools that are easy to learn and use, which present a minimal distraction from the practice of law. This requirement presents a challenge to legal IT departments charged with selecting project management tools that can support better management of staff projects, as well as client matters. If you use Microsoft SharePoint, then you may already have such a tool: SharePoint task lists.

There is a continuum of tools that may be used to manage legal projects and matters, from paper, to tables and lists in Word or Excel, to centralized enterprise project repositories such as Microsoft Project Server. See Figure 1.






Figure 1: Legal project management tools

Within this universe of options, SharePoint task lists offer those unfamiliar with formal project management low complexity yet sufficient capabilities to improve project and matter management.

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Source: law.com
By: Mark Gerow