eDiscovery Daily Blog
eDiscovery Project Management: Effectively Manage your Clients
If you work in a law firm, your clients are in-house: they are the litigation teams in your own firm. It’s important that you maintain good lines of communication with them throughout a project and that you have a mutual understanding, from the start, of what’s expected. That, of course, starts with setting expectations:
- As a first step, gather the information you need. You’ll probably need to know the schedule for the case, the expected size of the document collection, locations of the documents, contact information for litigation team members, and case management order requirements. If you can, schedule a meeting to collect this information. If that won’t work, make it easy for your clients to give you this information (you might use an easy-to-answer email questionnaire).
- Next, prepare and distribute a memo summarizing your understanding of the requirements. Include a description of the deliverables, schedule and budget information, and a description of your approach.
- Don’t agree to the impossible or the unreasonable. Try to talk them out of bad decisions. If you can’t prepare a memo that describes what potential problems may occur.
Throughout the life of the project make sure to submit regular status reports that tell your client where you are with regard to budget and schedule and that highlight project points of interest. Don’t wait to pass along important project information in a regular status report. If there’s a problem that needs their attention, give them a call and put it in a memo. Keep your clients current on what you are doing and on where things stand.
What do you think? How do you manage your clients’ expectations? Please share any comments you might have or tell us if you’d like to know more about a topic.