By Gerry Riskin

Welcome to our second Edge International Review for 2010. We are so excited to begin with articles by the newest members of our team: Pam Woldow and Doug Richardson (both lawyers and extraordinary senior consultants joining us from Altman Weil) and John Plank (the finest presentation coach to lawyers and TV personalities in the world). Check out their stellar biographies at www.edge-international.com.

These key additions reinforce our growing reputation as the leading international consultancy for law firms. It is an amazing privilege for us at Edge to serve our firm clients globally. Just as you experience in the practice of law, we continually learn and gain insights through serving some of the finest lawyers and law firms in the legal marketplace.

In this issue, you’ll find articles relating to legal project management, collaboration within law firms, pricing tactics, fast-track strategies, engaging presentations, marketing and branding with an Indian flavor, and a unique and thought-provoking item on what lawyers can learn from, of all things, pencils. Your candid feedback is always welcome, as are your suggestions for future topics and themes of interest.

You will find an electronic copy of this and previous editions of the Edge International Review on our website. You are welcome to download and share full editions or individual articles among the members of your firm. Enjoy!

The rapid emergence of legal project management (LPM) as a powerful new source of energy in the legal profession resembles the discovery of fire. It’s hot, it’s new, and everyone is gathered around, trying to figure out how to put it to best use. Cautious types shrink from picking it up. But first-movers who dare to grab it and bend it to their will suddenly find themselves in positions of power at the head of the clan.

Stripped to its essence, legal project management is a logical sequence of activities in which a law firm and its client collaborate to agree on goals, de- fine the value of service, allocate re-sources, create a realistic and comprehensible budget and action plan, develop critical work paths and performance measures, try to anticipate and limit bad surprises, and employ transparent communication protocols.

We shouldn’t oversimplify LPM, because managing complex legal projects demands equally sophisticated planning and execution. But in working with clients to implement LPM training, we do try to demystify LPM as much as we can. LPM’s sheer novelty and its frequent association with quantitative, IT-driven industrial project management approaches tends to generate predictable resistance among lawyers. Effective LPM training programs must respect and address this resistance.

In her article on legal project management (LPM) on page 4, Pam Woldow describes the characteristics and benefits of legal project management — what it looks like, how it improves matter management, how it leads to improved metrics and fewer surprises, how it achieves significant efficiencies, and how it fosters more interactive client relationships.

At its heart, LPM is re- ally all about collaboration. Here at Edge International, we think LPM is set to transform the way law is practiced in the future. But successful LPM implementation requires more than great blueprints and rational processes. It also requires and eventually must engender, a collaborative commitment among stakeholders. As many frustrated legal project managers will attest, that can be a tall order when the cats you’re trying to herd are lawyers.

A few months ago, the managing partner of a prestigious law firm asked me this question: “How can I keep my listeners engaged while I’m presenting?” In fact, she’s already a superb presenter — but like all good speakers, she constantly strives to be better. I’d like to share with you the advice I gave to her.

The level of interest in your topic and the quality of your information will always vary from one presentation to the other. But the challenge inherent in every presentation remains the same: “How can I be sure that I will engage my listeners?”

There are many approaches and techniques available to you, but there are only a few that I would call “The Essentials.”

Urgent and Important: your firm’s future is not waiting for you! It’s marching on, and you need to choose a sensible strategy to guide it. But you can’t wait until it’s convenient or comfortable — or worse, until the conditions are perfect — or it will simply never happen. In this context, procrastination can be lethal.

Strategy is all about focus and direction; often, it’s about what your firm does not want to do as much as what it would love to do. Without a strategy, even good law firm leaders find themselves steering around the icebergs without a clear destination, while more strategic competitors are striking out into the deep. So if a strategy can create a competitive advantage, why do so many firms wander around directionless? I believe that as lawyers, it’s precisely our intelligence and practice experience that get squarely in our way. Here are six examples of the lawyer-specific propensities that work against us when selecting our strategy — I’ll wager that more than one of these will resonate with you.

Every day, general counsel rely on metrics and benchmarks to monitor how well their in-house department is doing and whether targets are being met. But how often do they get the chance to test themselves too? If you’re a GC wondering how he or she is doing in this turbulent economy and time of upheaval, Edge International would like to offer this quick and easy quiz.

For each question, check the appropriate response or responses, then add up the totals and see how you scored.

In a growth industry, the sellers of services are always in a position of power when setting price. The recession, however, has shifted that balance of power to the benefit of the buyers of legal services. Law firms need to deal with some major pricing issues now or risk never regaining a level playing field for selling legal services.

For years, law firms and their clients alike have under-stood the inherent problems with the way law firms charge for their services. But for lawyers, charging by the hour is simple, requires little judgment or management, and effectively shifts the risk of inefficiency to the client. For clients, even those who are themselves lawyers, the legal process in America is a black science and attempting to relate outcome, or even activity, to price requires an effort that few general counsel have been willing to make.

Further, the desire for confidentiality has limited clients’ willingness and ability to trade much information about fees. And for many in-house legal managers, becoming too involved in the manner in which legal work is performed or the direct management of the lawyers who provide the services could result in the need to accept some level of accountability for costs or outcomes. And so the process of billing by the hour has gone on for decades.

Lawyers in India must grapple with regulations that greatly restrict their ability to market their services. Accordingly, business development in India must rely on longstanding marketing and branding principles that also apply equally well to non-Indian lawyers.

To appreciate the challenges facing law firm marketers in India today, consider the following March 2010 directive from Ved Prakash Sharma, a member and former chair of the Delhi Bar Council, on the subject of law firm websites.

“If the intention is to attract more and more work and use it for commercial pur- poses or professional enhancement, it is not permitted. Law firms carrying public- ity material on their websites is not permitted. Regulation only allows them to mention if they are involved in civil, criminal or corporate or some other area.”

There’s an urban myth, thoroughly debunked but instructive nonetheless, involving the Ameri- can and Russian space programs in the 1960s. The legend goes that NASA needed a pen that would write in the vacuum of space, in extreme conditions, without breaking or freezing or otherwise malfunctioning at critical times. Scientists set to work and spent several months and millions of dollars to invent a “Space Pen” that would do the job.

The Soviets, faced with similar challenges but much less money, chose to go a different route. They used a pencil.

We always seem to forget about the pencil. It’s one of the first writing instruments we learned to use as children, and many of us still remember that satisfying rhythmic grinding of the pencil in a plastic hand-held sharpener (or better again, the thrill of using the heavy-duty crank-driven pencil sharpener bolted to the teacher’s desk). But then, somewhere along the road to adulthood, we started to use ballpoint pens and markers, and few of us ever looked back.