It's all about trade-offs

One aspect of my services is assisting clients in project managing litigation - perhaps it is better expressed as managing the lawyers who are conducting the litigation. This morning I read an article by Jim Hassett on project management and one of the succinct and crucial points he made is that lawyers need to embrace the concept of trade offs.  Jim's point is that very few clients live in a perfect world with unlimited resources to throw at a legal problem.  Lawyers need to embrace the concept of "good enough" rather than "perfect".

"Good enough" is a subjective measure which will change depending on the particular circumstances, including the nature of the client and their expectations.  Last year, I attended a conference on Legal Spend Management in London, and this concept of having lawyers embrace "good enough" was one of the themes.   In explaining how he has negotiated staged fixed fee arrangements for PPP projects, John Soderberg, senior vice president and general counsel for Alstom Transport, discussed that there needed to be control in the contractual negotiations and that his company's extensive experience in PPP project had enabled it to identify the likely risks which needed to be addressed in the documentation.  In other words, there comes a point where the documentation is "good enough" and there is no merit in spending more money to address risks which are assessed as extremely small.

In my experience, many lawyers, and some clients, have a long way to go in embracing the trade-off and good enough concepts.  But, given the pressures on legal costs, it is the way of the future.