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How do you, and who, sets up, manages, and maintains the matter management board? Plus three board legal-matter templates
Who sets up
Who should be setting up, managing, and maintaining matter management boards?
The simple answer is that it depends - on your resources, your culture, and how you want to structure your approach to matter management. It could be a paralegal, the Associate responsible for the deal, or the Partner
How / where to set up a board
Physical boards can be set up pretty much by anyone any where, there’s no mystery to them, and the learning curve is pretty shallow. You will need some empty wall space (with or without whiteboards), some tape to make the columns, stickie notes, and markers.
Some firms have dedicated project management spaces like an office set aside that are already equipped with whiteboards pre-set with blank columns, stacks of colored stickies, and markers. These offices can be booked as and when a team wants to manage their project using a matter-management board.
You could create a larger space that has multiple boards ready for use by one team looking to manage different aspects of just one matter, or a larger space could be used by multiple teams working on different matters, provided always there aren’t issues of confidentiality.
In the case of a digital board, you need not worry about having any physical space. Instead, what you need is your computer and access to appropriate software.
As a member firm of Lex Mundi, your firm also has access to a digital collaborative space when you are working with a client across multiple jurisdictions. That space will have a Task Module, which includes a function that allows you to see and move tasks around as cards on a matter management board.
Slide 6:
DAVID: Having established what’s involved, let’s look at who might be involved in setting up, managing, and maintaining your boards.
First, depending on how complex the boards are, and how many you have going at any one time, pretty much anyone can set one up. That’s certainly the case for physical boards.
KAREN: Clearly, there's more is involved when you’re using a software system to generate your matter- management boards.
Slide 7:
KAREN: While digital boards are, generally speaking, quite easy to use, and they offer some clear advantages over physical boards, you’ll likely want to have people on your team who are well-trained on the software you’re using, so they can manage the technical aspects of setting up boards in the system.
DAVID: The work of structuring them,
- Creating the right permissions and rules;
- Setting up the task cards in the “To Do” list; and
- Inputing the initial data on each card,
Is something you might want to assign to a member of your Legal Project Management team, if you have one. Otherwise, consider using a paralegal, a clerk, or even a specially-trained legal assistant.
For the purposes of this Knowledge Pack, we refer to these people as “Project Managers.”
Slide 8:
KAREN: Once your board is set up provisionally, you might want the Project Manager to submit the draft board for review and approval by the supervising partner or a senior associate working on the matter.
Slide 9:
DAVID: They would confirm that the organization of the board (in terms of the phases through which tasks should be tracked), and the initial allocation of tasks across members of the project team are appropriate and meet your expectations for how the matter will be managed.
KAREN: The Knowledge Pack includes a document on resources and staffing your matter-management boards. It might serve as a helpful reminder the first few times you work with a board.
Slide 10:
DAVID: The initial planning and structuring of the each type of board won’t have to be thought through more than a few times before you’ve got a very good template that can be used for similar matters.
Very quickly, you’ll have a database of templates that will provide the starting point for boards for a variety of different matter-types. From there, templates can then be modified on a case-by-case basis to accommodate the particularities and peculiarities of different matters.
Elsewhere in this Knowledge Pack we introduce you to three templates - one for a buy-side M&A transaction, one for a typical litigation defense file, and one for a commercial real estate deal.
Slide 11:
KAREN: OK. So you’ve had your kick off meeting for your transaction or your litigation matter, the board’s been set up, and cards for all the tasks you can think of initially have been added to the “To Do” column.
Now what? Work’s getting underway, but who’s updating the board?
Well, once the initial data is in and the cards are all set up, it's very important that you train and develop within each of your lawyers and other members of the deal team the reflex to manage their own task cards.
DAVID: Since two of the goals of using matter management boards are:
- One, to improve your access to information in real time about work-in-progress, work allocation, and the status of different aspects of a deal; and
- Two, to reduce the amount of time in meetings that has to be spent on project updates,
it’s very important that the board be updated regularly.
KAREN: Ideally you want it updated daily, otherwise there’ll be a lag in the currency of the information on the matter-management board. This lag will impact your ability to report in real time.
Slide 12:
DAVID: If you want your boards to speak to you in real time, think about how updating might fit with how you currently track time. If your lawyers and other fee earners are already entering time at the end of each day, then it would be ideal if you could twin that timekeeping exercise with updating the task cards on each of the matter-management boards. It’s only a matter of minutes, and keeping the boards current is essential.
In my view, the best practice would be to create the reflex that “time entry” equals “updating the matter- management board.”
If you can achieve this in an environment where time entry is done daily, your board will offer you the best visual representation in real time of the status of your matters.
KAREN: Of course, you might still decide that it’s better to assign responsibility for updating the matter- management board to a project manager or a paralegal. However, if you do, then everyone working on the matter will have to update that intermediary daily or weekly (as the case may be), so why not just make each team member directly responsible?
The more you push responsibility for maintaining the board away from the people doing the work, the less reliable and up-to-date your data will be—simply because things get lost in translation and it takes more time to record them when they are passed on to someone else.
Slide 13:
KAREN: So that brings us to the end of this segment.
You can download a copy of the slide deck and the transcript of this presentation from the Knowledge Pack.
DAVID: The next videos take us into the “How To” part of this Knowledge Pack. We’re going to:
- Introduce you to using Card View under HighQ Collaborate’s Tasks Module, including how to set up and navigate around a basic board; and
- We’ll show you how matter-management boards can be used to manage matters at different levels of detail.
The Knowledge Pack includes a template for the M&A transaction, for a civil litigation defense file, and for a commercial real estate matter. You can use these as a starting point for your own matter-management boards.
Thank you for joining us... We’ll see you next time.
- To Do represents the backlog: it reflects all upcoming work.
- Doing represents your work-in-progress all the things you’re currently working on.
- Done is where you move a card once the task has been finished.
KAREN: You can download a copy of this slide deck and the transcript of this presentation from the Knowledge Pack. In the next video segment, we’ll show you examples of some more complex physical boards, introduce you to a digital board, and discuss some of the advantages of using matter- management boards.
Roles and Responsibilities
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Creating a Board - Roles & Responsibilities |
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Role |
Responsibilities |
Skills - Physical Board |
Skills - Digital Board |
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Project Manager |
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Supervising Lawyer |
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Other Team Members |
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Using Your Board - Roles & Responsibilities |
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Role |
Responsibilities |
Skills - Physical Board |
Skills - Digital Board |
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Supervising Lawyer |
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Project Manager May be a dedicated project manager, or a lawyer, assistant, paralegal or clerk with the requisite skills |
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Other Team Members Includes all fee earners and others with active tasks on the board, including any lawyers from specialist departments |
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