Katten Munchin Roseman office

Newton's First Law of Motion states that a body at rest will remain at rest unless an outside force acts on it. And while physics might not be completely analogous with the legal profession, anybody who has spent time in a law firm knows that Newton might as well have been talking about change in how work gets done.

For a law firm to change something as fundamental as project management, it will take an outside force, or an exciting action, to spur the firm to act. At Chicago-based Katten Muchin Rosenman, which formed as the result of a 2002 merger between Katten Muchin & Zavis and Rosenman & Colin, project management was done through largely localized methods. For a firm with 13 offices and more than 600 attorneys, though, that approach can quickly become unwieldy in today's legal market that demands fast responses and even quicker data analysis.

The imperative to centralize and institutionalize the firm's project management structure fell to Adam Poeppelmeier, a senior litigation paralegal at Katten, who has been with the firm since 2003. LTN recently caught up with Adam to explore how he was able to get the project in motion, and how his team overcame any obstacles that stood in their way.

Legaltech News: How did the idea to focus on the firm's project management structure come about?

Adam Poeppelmeier: We have always had strong project management and workflows in place, however, they tended to be less centralized. The existing method worked, but we thought we could improve upon it by making it more formalized to ensure repeatability across matters. We thought that using a legal project management tool would allow us to ensure these processes were being followed and we were tracking the various components of the project.

This was not a top level imperative or even something explicitly requested by the attorneys, but we were able to show them the value of implementing the new approach and they supported our efforts.

Since getting started is always one of the toughest parts, what were the first steps in your improvement process?

We “went back to the drawing board,” or more appropriately, we went to the white board. A few of us got together and broke down our entire practice workflow to its most basic components. Once we had all the pieces in one place, we isolated those that made the most sense to build into our legal project management application. We focused on select processes that needed the most repeatability and had the biggest impact.

What was your strategy for demonstrating the value of the project to firm management?

I believe that it is hard to show total value for a project or initiative in the short-term. I focused on short term goals and the value associated with those goals. This way, we showed an iterative value as we reached each goal or benchmark.

This is a living process for us, and we are continuing to show value as we build out more modules. To date we have created something that saves time and centralizes certain information.

Were the firm's attorneys eager for a new technology? And how did you go about convincing ones that weren't?

Our attorneys are always supportive of leveraging technology to be more efficient and provide better services to our clients. Most of the time this is seen as using the best for e-discovery services. However, using better technology behind the scenes provides tremendous value to our clients by being able to have information easily accessible, centralized, and with repeatable workflows. Fortunately, we did not have anyone that opposed implementing a legal project management tool.

What were some of the key features that you had to have in evaluating new technologies?

We reviewed a number of different tools that are on the market. Because of the various practice areas and potential needs for those groups, one of the key components that we required was a tool that allows us the flexibility to build custom projects and/or workflows based on our processes. Another requirement was the ability to build custom reports within a matter as well as across matters.

Where are you in the roll-out now, and what has been the reaction from the firm?

I approached our rollout in phases in order to get the most buy-in by both the attorneys as well as my project teams. We have finished the first two phases to date. Phase 1 consisted of matter integration and centralizing key matter specific information that was maintained across multiple places. Phase 2 included the integration of one of our key vendors to track processing deliverables and project timing. Phase 3 is underway, and we are focusing on reporting, dashboards, team collaboration, and some platform improvements.