How Strategic Management Helps Tune a Legal Project

We are now getting into the operative parts of the Lean Law Program. We have examined the outer layer, which is four stages borrowed from Strategic Management or ‘SM.’ In this lesson we shall discover a helpful feature of this outer structure, how it can help regulate a legal project.

Our four-stage structure, Plan, Execute, Monitor, and Improve, is a regulating mechanism. This is how it works. We start with a project plan. Then throughout the execution stage the lawyer acts as ‘project manager’ and monitors progress against the plan. Are we where we should be? A good plan has milestones so this should be easy. The world of SM calls these Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, but milestones is a perfectly good word for us.