ILTACON 2025: Proactive project management emerges as law firms’ new secret tech weapon

Key takeaways:

• • • Proactive management — Law firms must adopt proactive project management strategies to effectively prioritize and align projects with evolving firm-wide strategic initiatives, especially in the face of rapid AI adoption.

    • Plan for the future — Consistent prioritization models and robust intake processes enable firms to better manage both planned and ad hoc projects, supporting long-term, multi-year goals.

    • Trust at the fore — Building trust across practice areas and creating a culture of collaboration are essential for successfully implementing successful project management strategies within law firms.

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NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland — One side effect of the explosion of AI within law firms is that, due to the portability of the technology, everyone wants a piece of the action. Whether on financial teams, business development and marketing teams, or lawyers themselves, technology remains top of mind for just about every function’s strategic planning into 2026 and beyond.

Naturally, this will cause some capacity constraints on various teams. IT will be affected, of course; and so too will security and risk management teams. However, there is one area that law firms may have already been struggling to build out that suddenly faces a crunch: project management offices. Suddenly, there are more projects to be done than ever before, and an office within the firm that may have been somewhat neglected before has been given increased importance.

So how can law firms bolster their project management capabilities and workflows on the fly? A session, Project Management: The Secret Edge to Strategic Planning at the International Legal Technology Association Conference (ILTACON) 2025 aimed to advance the critical conversation around project management. Too often, the panelists said, law firm project management functions are stuck being reactive to pre-existing projects, rather than being proactive in determining how projects can be prioritized to align with larger firm strategic initiatives.

“These projects are already happening. These lists aren’t driving strategic decision-making, they’ve already been approved,” said panelist Maura Whelan, Director of Project Management at McDermott, Will & Schulte. “But this is a mature practice in our industry, and we want to acknowledge that.”

Picking priorities

For law firms to become more proactive about project management has to start with leadership asking a question that sounds simple in theory but is more difficult in execution: How do you prioritize certain projects over others?

There are a bunch of different potential methods to doing this, Whelen explained, adding that one way her firm has done this is through aligning projects with different firm strategic initiatives, then prioritizing those initiatives and ranking them from top to bottom. Project managers could also assign a 1 to 5 on value, or have a matrix of feasibility vs. impact, or any number of potential ways of categorization.

However, what’s important, Whelan said, is to have something that is consistent and universally agreed upon by firm stakeholders. “Look for the model that works for you, evolve the model that’s best for your firm — but you need to have an agreed upon model,” she said.

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For law firms to become more proactive about project management has to start with leadership asking a question that sounds simple in theory but is more difficult in execution: How do you prioritize certain projects over others?

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Once the firm has shaped the initial prioritization, however, that does not mean that the projects are set for the year. The panel noted that not only will firm priorities shift throughout the year, but pressing projects themselves too will rise. Cindy Etoh, Director of Project Services at Ropes & Gray, estimated that about 20% of the projects her team works on during the year are ad hoc projects that emerge after the initial yearly planning. As a result, she has quarterly planning meetings to go over new project requests with firm leadership, during which she’ll discuss each project’s business case and assign a ranking score at that time.

Mary Nguyen, Director of Planning & Strategy at Paul Weiss, said her firm sees a similar percentage of ad hoc projects arise. Because the firm has instituted a strong intake process with past projects, her team doesn’t feel caught off-guard, Nguyen said, adding that the intake process “also helps us predict the work with some scientific backing to it.”

With years of data now piling up, Paul Weiss is beginning to look at the project portfolio not even in yearly chunks, but in multi-year key goals and themes, she explained, noting that it’s a relatively new initiative, but it came to the fore particularly with large projects such as cloud migrations or AI implementations that could be hard to handle without long-range thinking. “That really prompted us to start thinking and planning in a different way.”

Agents of change

It’s one thing to plan more strategically for a firm’s projects, and it’s wholly another matter to make sure that firm personnel are actually on board with those projects as they’re rolled out.

Panelists put forth the idea of portfolio change management as a potential balm — the idea that change management does not need to only happen at the project level, but as a portfolio-wide plan that can be portable across all projects now and in the future.

Nguyen pointed to recent developments in the cloud and AI, for example, that demonstrate two key reasons why traditional change management methods are not cutting it. First, the use cases are so vast and possibilities endless that project managers can show people how to perform the initial few steps but not necessarily know the outcome. Second, technologies are rapidly changing, so that for a full, firm-wide tech implementation such as launching Copilot, project managers need to update processes monthly instead of two or three times a year.

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Panelists put forth the idea of portfolio change management as a potential balm — the idea that change management does not need to only happen at the project level, but as a portfolio-wide plan that can be portable across all projects now and in the future.

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With rapid, unknowable change at the fore, Reesa David, Project Manager at legal service provider InOutsource, said one currency is more valuable than the rest — trust. She suggested having a project manager not only assigned to different practice areas, but a liaison that actually sits within those practice areas. “Whether it’s technical or non-technical, you’re able to translate those resource needs,” David said, adding that will allow team leaders to break down silos when different groups have different strategies and different practices.

Cindy Fragliossi, Head of the Project Management Office at Fried Frank, agreed on the importance of trust and also noted that it can also be a reflection of firm culture. As the saying goes, she noted, “culture eats strategy for breakfast” — meaning that all the planning in the world won’t mean much if the firm culture isn’t one of collaboration on new and existing projects. “Your [project management office] and its growth will be defined by firm culture and what its demands are,” she added.

Indeed, there is a lot of change in today’s law firms, maybe too much for some; however, with proper proactive project planning and a strategy for getting stakeholders on board, project management does not need to be overwhelming. “Good change management principles can help us all be more successful,” added McDermott, Will & Schulte’s Whelan.

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