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Project Management Software Empowers the Litigation Support Department
Duane Morris LLP's Practice Support Department is constantly challenged by tight deadlines, tight budgets, numerous processes that require extensive planning and project management, and let's not forget the element of stress that comes with anything tied to the word “litigation.” The firm has advanced technologically over the years and operations have grown along with it. The Practice Support Department has long recognized the importance of project management to promote cost-containment strategies and to ensure compliance with discovery requirements during the discovery phase of a litigation case. While the firm developed its own sophisticated project management database, the newly implemented iFramework software takes project management to a higher level. It provides a wide variety of options for implementing individualized best practices for specific law firm or legal department needs. The level of project management afforded by iFramework promotes consistent, standardized, repeatable results, and at the same time, provides the ability to monitor costs to contain them at every phase of the project.
Project Management Challenges
One of the more recent project management changes for the firm is from more traditional processes to electronic ones. Our Litigation Support Department made a necessary move away from using multiple systems, such as paper, e-mail inboxes and folders and/or Excel files, and began implementing centralized, online, real-time technologies that include integration with processing tools and online review platforms that can be accessed from one centralized project management system. iFramework's project-based workflow solution is used to help improve visibility and track data acquisitions, data processing and document review from within projects. The Litigation Support Department benefits by optimizing resources, building efficient processes and solving many complex project management problems.
Although the IT department had developed a very sophisticated Access database to manage the firm's products, which had worked well for a number of years, we appreciated the value of moving to the iFramework project management tool because of the more comprehensive utilities it provides.
It is extremely important to consider many factors when implementing a project management tool because it is going to affect everyone who is involved in many projects: partners, associates, paralegals, clients and vendors. We began looking at iFramework for numerous reasons. Mainly because the project-management solution was focused specifically to litigation support, it enabled us to share all of the details in one centralized tool, identify which projects are most critical and to help execute projects as efficiently as possible. We also found the software-as-a-service (“SaaS”)-based offering more affordable, faster and easier to deploy than locally installed ones.
The evaluation and implementation of a new software tool can be a time-consuming exercise, so it's a requirement that the results we expect to achieve are considered and documented. To achieve our project-management software implementation goals, all of the users in our department were part of the evaluation. We followed a four-step process:
1. Defining Objectives: A written statement of objectives helped to define the scope of the project and was used to evaluate its success on completion.
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