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The Certified Legal Project Manager™ program
“I strongly recommend the Certified Legal Project Manager program to any lawyer who is interested in developing or improving their project management skills. The curriculum of readings is very interesting and the program is well thought out. These days, clients want to make sure their firms deliver quality management of cases that drives a better value for them, and firms want to improve the bottom line. This program will help lawyers accomplish both.” – Stacy D. Ballin, Partner, Squire Sanders
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“The Certified Legal Project Manager program produced immediate and genuine benefits for our firm. The readings helped me to clarify which concepts from the project management literature would be most helpful to us. And the detailed discussions of exactly how to apply those concepts helped me to develop checklists and templates to plan and manage fixed price arrangements. These tools are now helping us to better define scope, to manage the work to deliver high quality while staying within budget, and to get new business.” – Elizabeth Harris, Founder, Harris Cost Lawyers
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“In the Certified Legal Project Manager program, I studied selections from several textbooks on project management, then analyzed how these concepts could help our firm provide more value to clients and protect profitability. In the case study portion, I worked with a legal project management expert to develop templates to increase efficiency for certain types of secured financings, including working agendas, forms for communicating with clients, and budget estimate spreadsheets. These tools will help us give clients better price guidance, and increase the consistency of the services we provide.” – D. Fraser MacFadyen, Partner, Stewart McKelvey
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LegalBizDev is offering the first programs to help lawyers and non-lawyers to play a leadership role in implementing project management within their firms and to formally certify them in this new discipline.
The Certified Legal Project Manager™ program is designed for practicing lawyers who have at least three years of experience managing large legal matters. It enables them to go a step further than any other program, and guarantees a solid foundation in both knowledge and skills.
The Certified Legal Project Planner™ program is designed for financial staff, paralegals, law clerks, and other non-lawyers who are involved in planning and managing large legal projects, but who have limited authority. This program is also suitable for associates and junior partners who help senior partners manage projects. Special attention is paid to the issue of how to manage a project when the team doesn't necessarily want to be managed, especially by a junior lawyer or a non-lawyer.
About 80% of the content is identical in the two programs. In both programs, individuals work closely with a legal project management expert on key competencies, review assigned readings from leading textbooks in the field, and answer a series of probing essay questions. Throughout the program, each individual focuses on how skills and knowledge can be applied to real-world applications. This program is structured like a graduate school distance learning tutorial. It requires a minimum commitment of 40 hours, which lawyers can complete, at their own pace, over one to six months.
Both programs include:
- Four telecons with a legal project management expert. The first, at the beginning of the program, is to discuss each lawyer’s background and needs, and how the program works. The other three are to discuss how project management concepts apply to an actual matter from the lawyer’s practice.
- A reference library of seven books with over 2,800 pages, to be used as a resource during the certification program and after, including the Legal Project Management Quick Reference Guide: Tools and Templates to Increase Efficiency, written by Jim Hassett, the developer of the certification program.
- A guide to recommended readings from the reference library
- A 17-item open-book essay exam to certify mastery of basic concepts
- A project management analysis of the most efficient ways to apply project management concepts to each lawyer’s individual practice
- A final project in which each lawyer actually applies key concepts to their practice, such as developing and implementing new templates to increase efficiency
- Six months of unlimited email support to help each lawyer complete the program on time
- A certificate awarded upon successful completion of the program
For background, see:
Reuters item about the first lawyers to complete certification
More details about the first lawyers to complete certification
National Law Review article by two Squire Sanders lawyers in our certification program
Law360 article on certification
Press release: LegalBizDev announces the first certification program for legal project managers
Press release: Lawyers begin new program to become certified as project managers
Questions and answers about Certified Legal Project Managers™ – Part 1
Questions and answers about Certified Legal Project Managers™ – Part 2
Questions and answers about Certified Legal Project Managers™ – Part 3
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