Association of Corporate Counsel Annual Meeting

Outside Counsel Management – Project Management for In-house Counsel

Tuesday, October 2, 2012; 11:00 – 12:30pm

Program
Description / Trying to manage projects, internal resources, external resources, budgets and deadlines is a daunting task for everyone. When your company relies on you to manage it all under budget, what do you need in your toolbox to ensure success for all stakeholders? In this workshop, panelists will provide an overview of legal project management techniques, plus tools you can use and most importantly, engage you in discussion of best practices for scoping projects, managing teams and budgets, communicating across stakeholders, addressing scope creep, and conducting post project reviews—all in 90 minutes! Be prepared for breakout groups and hot debates.
Skill Level: Intermediate
Speakers / Moderator: Jenny Fletcher, Partner, Sutherland Asbill & Brennan LLP
Panelists:Russ Dempsey – VP and Chief Legal Officer, United Retirement Plan Consultants
Keith Isgett – Attorney, Outside Counsel Management
Joe Limone – General Counsel, Noble Americas, Inc.
Denise Skingle - VP and Associate General Counsel, Nationwide Insurance
Table Moderators: Catherine Moynihan, Director of Project Development, ACC
Felice Wagner, Chief Client Service Officer, Sutherland
Sheri Palomaki, Director of Practice Management, Sutherland
Monica Ulzheimer, Business Manager, Sutherland
Format / The format will consist of an outside counsel moderator, an in-house counsel panel and an interactive workshop at participant tables with table facilitators.
Audience / In-house counsel
Room Set- up / Panel/Moderator Head Table, Round tables for the audience participants, flip charts.
Room divided into three categories: Scope, Budget, Communication, Debrief
Takeaways / Checklist of Conversations – Scoping, Budgeting and Post Project Reviews
Time / Topic / Person
11:00 – 11:10 / Welcome
  • Legal Project Management continues to be a hot topic; evident by the sold-out programs here at ACC, including this one.
  • Every corporation is asking for more efficient legal services. Every law firm is trying to figure out how to provide more efficient legal services.
  • This is a workshop, not a lecture. We will be doing a break-out session so that you can debate the concepts of LPM and share stories and best practices.
Introductions
  • (Messages below)
/ Jenny
11:10 – 11:11 / Introduce LPM Concepts
  • Here are the four topics we’re going to cover today:
  • Scope
  • Budget
  • Communication
  • Debrief
  • These topics overlap. You can’t talk about scope, without talking about budget, and you can’t do either effectively without setting the ground rules for communication.
/ Jenny
11:11 – 11:12 / Scope
  • This is a broad topic, but essentially scoping is about talking through what is involved in the legal matter, including various phases, tasks and deliverables. About who is handling what, how long it is going to take, and of course, how much it’s going to cost.
  • Jenny to share a story about scoping projects with clients.
  • Denise Skingle at Nationwide has some war stories and best practices she is going to share with us in the specific area of scoping legal matters.
/ Jenny
11:12 – 11:20 / Scope
  • Main Message: We all make too many assumptions.
  • War Story: Surprise bill.
  • Best Practice: Milestone Planning
/ Denise
11:20 – 11:21 / Budget
  • It all comes down to money.
  • Essentially, budgeting for purposes of our conversation today is about establishing an agreement between inside counsel and outside counsel about how much a particular matter is going to cost.
  • The more specific you are in the scoping process, the closer you will be in the budgeting process.
  • Because this is such an important topic, two of our panelists will opine on this topic, with a slightly different perspective.
/ Jenny
11:22 – 11:30 / Budget
  • Main Message: The better the scoping process; the better the budget will be. “Value is subjective” (Use existing data to overcome some of the hurdles. Carve out risks to better determine probability.)
  • War Story:
  • Best Practice: Risk Chart
/ Russ
11:30 – 11:38 / Budget
  • Main Message: Nirvana: That this idea that we’ll get to paying for something based on the value it has to us. Should hours be the baseline for value? How much is it worth?
  • War Story:
  • Best Practice: Project Plan Template
  • GSK tool?
/ Keith
11:38 – 11:39 / Communication
  • It’s hard to speak the same language when you’re speaking the same language.
/ Jenny
11:39 – 11:47 / Communication
  • Main Message: It’s about relationships.
  • War Story: Class Action incident
  • Best Practice: Outside Counsel Guidelines
  • (I think we are going to propose that the Communication tables do a RACI chart… Thoughts?)
/ Joe
11:47 – 11:48 / Debrief
  • Debriefing a legal matter is an easy and effective way to capture what went well and what can be done better the next time. Yet we don’t execute this with any level of regularity. We’ll debrief this program after the break-out.
/ Jenny
11:48- 11:49 / Introduce the Breakout Session
  1. Tables are divided into three categories (scoping, budgeting and communicating).
  2. You get to make assumptions (ok to work on the budget without working on the scope).
/ Jenny
11:49 – 11:10 / Breakout Session / All
11:10 – 11:25 / Report Back from Breakout Sessions / All
11:25 – 11:30 / Debrief the Program / Jenny

Introductions

  1. Denise Skingle is Vice President and Associate General Counsel for Nationwide, and leads the Corporate Transactions Team. She has been with Nationwide for 7 years. She was an associate at Jones Day prior to joining Nationwide, so she will have added perspective of outside counsel for our discussions as well.
  2. Russ Dempsey is with United Retirement Plan Consultants, and has served as VP and Chief Legal Officer for more than 4 years. Prior to that, he was Assistant General Counsel for Natiowide. Russ has been employing legal project management techniques at his company, and has written and spoken on the topic of LPM frequently.
  3. Keith Isgett is in charge of Outside Counsel Management at GlaxoSmithKline and has been using legal project management, in one form or another, since 2002, when GSK began policing their law firms for better prices on legal services.
  4. Joe Limone is General Counsel for Noble Americas, where he oversees all legal matters for Noble, which includes litigation, transactions and regulatory issues. In his first year as General Counsel at Noble, Joe decreased their outside legal spend by 50%, by employing structure such as Outside Counsel Guidelines and legal project management techniques.

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