From skepticism to success: convincing your team to try Legal Project Management

In other words: how to turn Legal Project Management from ‘extra work’ to ‘how we work’

Photo by Ross Findon on Unsplash

If you are a lawyer with an innovative mindset, quite often you’ll be frustrated by your teammates’ reactions to your ideas about changing the way you work. It’s no different if you wish to start applying legal project management in your in-house legal team.

Lawyers accustomed to autonomy see legal project management as an unnecessary administrative burden, extra bureaucracy, and paperwork – choose your term. They see it as a set of additional tasks that are not “real legal work” and something that will only slow down projects even more. Other voices you may hear sound like: where’s the ROI? Who’s on the hook for all the new reports, and how much time will they take? Isn’t this a business-side problem, not ours?

Despite these objections, the right change management approach can overthrow this resistance. After all, even LPM sceptics agree that lawyers need better ways to manage matters. However, if you roll out your legal project management initiative badly — by forcing project management frameworks that are not fit for purpose or by chasing imaginary efficiencies — it will fail. But when you handle change correctly, by aligning with real pain points and starting small, even your change-averse colleagues will notice value over time.

So if you want to roll out a legal project management program in your in-house legal team, you should understand the typical objections you may face:

· “Where’s the ROI?”
Despite the fact that applying legal project management does not require any specific budget, it’s still an investment of a very scarce resource: time. Lawyers often demand quick, visible payoffs. If team members must spend additional hours on scoping and status updates, they naturally ask, “What’s in it for me?” Without solid answers, LPM can seem like busywork. While it’s not always easy to show tangible benefits with numbers and KPIs, the benefits of LPM are still there. Quite often, the real ROI of legal project management materializes in less obvious but highly valuable areas: fewer escalations, a more predictable workload, or simply an improved perception of your legal team among business stakeholders.

· “More reports? No thanks.”
I don’t know anyone who likes reporting. I hate reporting just for the sake of reporting. But project management is not about purposeless reporting. It’s about communication and alignment, and status meetings or progress updates are just one of many ways LPM can improve communication within project teams.

· “We don’t have time for building Gantt charts.”
Gantt charts are of course just an example – the real fear is that legal project management will steal even more of lawyers’ precious time that could be spent on “real work.” But if you look at how legal projects in your organization have been handled in the past, you’ll clearly see that neglecting things like defining project scope, managing business expectations, conducting risk analysis, and clearly defining responsibilities – which are the core of legal project management – was the reason why many of those projects were frustrating or failed to deliver properly.

· “It’s not a legal issue!”
Sometimes lawyers see LPM as a business-imposed initiative. This perception is actually correct. If other business units adopted project management long ago, why wouldn’t legal do the same? But behind this objection is often a hidden fear that being involved in project management will make legal responsible for tasks outside its intended role. This is a false perception. Whether they admit it or not, lawyers are already involved in project management. The question is whether they manage their projects intentionally or by accident. Legal project management is not about shifting responsibilities between business and legal; it’s about giving legal teams the tools that the business already uses successfully.

In short, lawyers’ resistance usually masks two things: fear of additional administrative burden and unclear ROI. Addressing both directly is the first step.

Embracing Change Management: a smarter path

If resistance to new ways of working is the problem, change management principles offer the solution. At its core, change management means humanizing the process: align LPM with real needs, engage people, and move in manageable steps.

· Solve real pain points first.
Don’t introduce LPM as a vague corporate initiative. Anchor it in a concrete problem: a repetitive bottleneck, a recurring complaint, or the fact that your team keeps missing business deadlines. Start by asking your colleagues where they feel the most pain or waste. It might be a painfully manual intake process, unrealistic deadlines, or unclear expectations from other business units. Then show how legal project management can actually relieve that pain. Focusing on real outcomes – like cutting contract cycle times – grabs attention much faster than abstract talks about efficiency.

· Build urgency.
To paraphrase Kotter’s famous first step in change management: you need a compelling reason to change. Show LPM not as something optional – not just a cool new approach – but as the solution to a pressing problem (e.g., an upcoming acquisition, a critical regulatory shift, or a complex deal with a demanding client). When lawyers see LPM as a way to do their jobs better – and maybe earn more recognition – their resistance starts to fade.

· Start with a pilot.
Don’t launch a department-wide revolution. Pick one type of matter to pilot the new LPM approach. Define one clear scope, one timeline, and one success metric. When that pilot finishes more smoothly – for example, when it wraps up ahead of schedule – showcase it to the rest of the team.

· Tailor LPM to your needs.
If you ask most LPM professionals, they’ll tell you: there’s no single best legal project management method. I fully agree. LPM should always be adjusted to the specific needs and challenges of each legal team. If your biggest issue is unclear business expectations – focus on project scoping. If roles and responsibilities between legal and business are blurry – put more emphasis on communication plans and stakeholder management.
Not long ago, Agile became a corporate buzzword – widely discussed, rarely understood, and even less often practiced outside the IT world. Legal should avoid chasing buzzwords. It should build something practical, adapted to its own context.

· Measure and get feedback.

As I said before, it’s not always easy to quantify the impact of LPM on legal team performance. Legal work often feels too complex or too human to be measured in simple numbers. Still, there are valuable, actionable metrics you can – and should – track to make progress visible, such as: turnaround time for contracts, stakeholder satisfaction or on-time delivery rate.

Remember, the goal is not to track numbers just for reporting’s sake. The goal is to get feedback that helps the team improve how they use project management tools

Changing established ways of working is never easy – especially among lawyers. That’s exactly why change management is essential. People cannot feel that they are being forced into new habits. They need to see, that the change will make their life better.