The Oklahoma Bar Journal January 2024

L itigation & T rial P ractice

Legal Project Management for In-House Litigation Counsel By Jennifer Castillo L ITIGATION AND DISPUTES OF ALL TYPES HAVE BEEN RISING SINCE 2020. According to Norton Rose and Fulbright’s 2023 Annual Litigation Trends Survey, 1 a majority of corporate counsel surveyed in late 2022 expected all legal disputes to stay the same or increase, and nearly half of all respondents expected lawsuits to increase in 2023. 2 At the same time, companies are implementing measures to reduce expenses, including overall legal spend, in response to economic, regulatory and operational pressures stem ming from COVID-19 and other historic weather and political events. Of particular concern to in-house lawyers is the increasing attention on the amount spent on outside counsel, most especially outside counsel engaged to handle litigation. As a result, in-house lawyers are under more pressure to handle more matters internally. For in-house litigators, this creates a need to quickly and appropriately assess claims to determine whether to spend precious resources taking a case to trial or to settle the case so resources can be reserved for those cases the corporate client deems more appropriate. This can feel like a herculean task.

assuredly do not. The hope of most GCs is that they can orga nize themselves to become more selective; that they can move from being excessively reactive to being proactive. In other words, their job should be to anticipate problems before they arise. The focus should be on avoiding disputes rather than resolving them.” 4 This shifting focus from reactive to proactive demands in-house lawyers to “become increasingly systematic and rigor ous in their management of risk” and utilize “sophisticated tools and techniques to help them.” 5

Richard Susskind, a British author, speaker and independent advisor to international law firms and national governments, rec ognized in his book, Tomorrow’s Lawyers – An Introduction to Your Future , that most general counsel and in-house lawyers believe their primary responsibility is legal risk management. 3 As Mr. Susskind continues in Chapter 7 of the book, “[i]n-house lawyers are faced, on a daily basis, with a barrage of requests, problems, and questions from across their organizations … while some of these inquiries merit serious legal attention, others

For example, in-house legal departments and law firms across the country are applying project management tools and concepts developed in other fields to the provision of legal services, includ ing litigation. This article will outline key areas of project man agement, discuss implementation of project management principles in the in-house legal department and highlight risks and impedi ments to the utilization of project management in legal settings.

Statements or opinions expressed in the Oklahoma Bar Journal are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Oklahoma Bar Association, its officers, Board of Governors, Board of Editors or staff.

30 | JANUARY 2024

THE OKLAHOMA BAR JOURNAL