The evolution of an industry and the change we face in the legal business has always interested me. So it goes for records managers. Just when you think you’ve got some aspect of the legal technology space figured out, someone comes along and raises the stakes by introducing technology or a new operational model. One thing I always say –and...
In more than 20 years of working in the legal business—the first third just working hard, the second third as an aspiring leader, and the last third at the director level—I’ve learned a thing or two about leadership, about operations, and about people and how to lead them. So, it frustrates me when I hear about a leadership vacuum literally...
If you work in legal operations, sooner or later you’re going to need to deal with vendor selection and interact with a vendor. In many instances, preparing for e-discovery also means selecting vendors. Whether you are in-house or at a law firm, it will become necessary to engage a service provider or consultant to provide or supplement resources for some...
I’ve been working with people in legal operations for about 20 years. Of course, most of my career has been on the law firm side, so I don’t claim to have an insider’s view of all the trappings of Fortune 500 legal departments. But I have experience as part of the legal team at outside counsel working with GCs, AGCs...
There are two things in life that I am passionate about –project management and music. I’m a project manager at heart so you can infer that the work I do is project oriented. And when I was younger I studied and then played music for a number of years (at least until I realized I needed a job with health...
Few people in legal operations discuss project management in the same sentence with electronic discovery. When the subject does arise you hear people toss around phrases like “legal project management,” or you hear talk of organization-wide process improvement efforts. Mostly, it’s about finding ways to be more efficient. But organization-wide project management initiatives require high-level buy-in and lots of resources...
Those who are unwilling or unable to adapt, like dinosaurs, will find it difficult to survive.
If there is one cause of consternation among law firms, consultants and service providers –those who mostly collect and process ESI—it is a project in which the client organization has poor information governance practices. I am reminded of this because a few weeks ago at The Master’s Conference in Washington, D.C., I told the audience that information governance practices are...
I like oatmeal. It has been around forever and I eat it a lot. Project managers have also been around forever. When they built the pyramids in Egypt or the Great Wall in China there was likely someone there who planned, directed, monitored and controlled the work. Although clearly the workers back then were not anything like the organized labor...
Throughout all of recorded human history –indeed, even before we began to record it—communication has been an issue. Early humans carved cave walls to allow others to know things. I’m sure that some among them thought that such carvings were quite radical at the time. And today, many people find the current scriveners—those who incessantly post their thoughts, meals, pets,...