This past week Mark Medice, Senior Program Director of Peer Monitor, discussed two key trends that are reshaping traditional models of delivering legal services: new approaches to expense management and project management.

With the objective of redesigning legal work processes to achieve greater efficiency and cost-effectiveness, firms are looking at various strategies such as instituting project management training as well as evaluating the kinds of legal professionals needed for certain kinds of work. Intertwined with improving work processes are the technology and tools that legal professionals need to support them.

While Mark briefly touched on legal research in the context of legal process outsourcing, modern legal research technology that delivers high-quality results faster offers significant opportunities in project management. The ability to drive legal research efficiency enables a law firm to differentiate its service, both in terms of delivering value and controlling legal costs.

A modern legal research technology, such as WestlawNext, creates much greater flexibility for project management and service delivery. The tool’s power creates an opportunity to increase productivity by assigning research tasks to a wider variety of the legal staff and its efficiency creates capacity to better adjust and react to the unexpected occurrences one naturally comes across during the life of a case. On top of reactive benefit to efficiency, reducing research time can also benefit the project plan by either being a direct cost savings to the client, or freeing up time to create higher-value work product for the client in the same amount of time. The attorney is able to focus on core aspects of the matter, find the solution, and deliver better advice or work product much faster and more cost-effectively than before.

“We strive to be proactive and anticipate our clients’ needs regardless of the economic times,” says Tom Scrivo, Managing Partner of McElroy, Deutsch, Mulvaney & Carpenter, LLP’s Newark office. “With today’s economic realities, clients are more keenly aware of costs and place a much greater emphasis on savings and efficiency. We make sure our clients realize we’re managing legal costs wisely by being very efficient.”

McElroy has reported turning around research projects in one-tenth of the time than they did before they implemented modern legal research technology. McElroy is realizing improved efficiency by using research folders to store prior research and creating folders for individuals or specific disciplines. This means associates don’t need to “reinvent the wheel each time they return to research”. Scrivo adds, “Clients know that we are doing research in a cost-effective manner, in a way that doesn’t have to be duplicated, and that can be shared with them. Whether you realize that in the short term or the long term, cost-effectiveness is something that’s real and tangible.”

To learn more about new approaches to law firm management, read Mark’s article here.