Last week we hosted our first Hydrogen LPM Supper Club! This quarterly networking group is aimed at Legal Project Managers in and around London and brings together like-minded people to share ideas and innovations in the legal project management space.
We were delighted to see a great turn-out for the first event, and a good mix of LPMs from 10 different law firms, 1 consultancy and 2 in-house teams.
We were also very excited to welcome Mark H Clark as our guest speaker. Mark is a Transformation Consultant with over 30 years’ experience in B2B/B2C consulting across several industries including legal, financial, retail and pharma sectors. During the last 6 years he’s spent in the legal sector, he’s led complex end-to-end transformations that have involved operating model changes, deployment of LPM, technology programmes and other innovation initiatives. Mark has advised and led Business Services improvement programmes in several law firms.
It’s this breadth of experience that made him the perfect person to present to us on ‘Integrating LPM into Law Firms’, reflecting on what he’s found so far and what the future could look like.
There were a few key messages within his presentation which really stood out to me:
The story so far: LPM provides a consistent approach, but if deployed in an isolated, case-by-case manner, the achievements and benefits are fleeting, with the learnings, shared knowledge and experience benefiting only a few.
Where we are today: LPM is a ‘Way of Working’ and not a silver bullet. Law firms need to continually remind themselves why they deployed LPM and what they need it to deliver!
Many firms are only at ‘stage 1’ of deploying LPM, that’s to say a member of the LPM function supports the Partners and Associates in a very focused isolated way.
The next phase that firms need to focus on is on building an integrated & sustained approach, where LPM is better connected to other functions – evolving and increasing the value of LPM.
LPM, as with other innovations, can help manage the opportunities and threats that face law firms today – client demands, competition, the need to grow and an uncertain future – but only if its benefits are firm wide, not case by case.
Don’t forget, real change is achieved and sustained by people!
Here are the key slides from his presentation:
Hydrogen's LPM Supper Club - Aug 2019 from Hydrogen Group
I’d like to extend a huge thanks, once again, to everyone who joined us and made it such a fun evening. We had some brilliant feedback and are looking forward to planning our next Supper Club!
Join our next event
If you, or someone you know, would be interested in attending our next LPM Supper Club, please do get in touch. I’m also keen to hear from anyone who has any strong ideas around what topics you’d want us to cover at future events, as we want to keep these topical and relevant.
In the meantime, watch this space for details of the next event in a couple of months!
Posted almost 4 years ago