With full credit to the authors of the  Intelligent Change blog, I was inspired to provide my two cents on the topic of, “Lawyers — Just do something.”

Having recently returned from ILTA, I was struck this year by the inertia I felt from many of the attendees. This is not a criticism of the conference itself. ILTA continues to provide high quality programming and the event is always run seamlessly. This year, though, participants, seemed… tired.

My focus for the show was on Legal Project Management. I wanted to learn more about what firms are doing and what success they were having. I talked to at least a half dozen AmLaw 100 firms, as well as a handful of vendors playing in the space. I quickly learned that few firms are making significant headway in this space. The universal frustration: the Lawyers.

It seems that project management is much simpler than change management. Unfortunately, in the legal profession, you can’t achieve the former without the latter. Unless there is a partner driving the change, there is little energy around trying to formalize the management of legal matters to create true businesses processes that can be used for creating best practices and alternative fee arrangements.

This brings me back to the Intelligent Change post, which concisely defines the problem — Change is hard, especially for lawyers; There are other more pressing problems (e.g. cash flow); and,  it’s hard (what worth doing isn’t?)– but makes an even more valid point. Just do something. Some thing.

It is not necessary to develop a strategy — whether for legal project management or something else — that solves all of the world’s problems. Build version 1.0 and maximize that to the hilt. Then move on to version 2.0 or even 1.5. In the end making any forward progress is better than standing still.