[1][2] Generally, the terms refer to the sophisticated information management and workflow practices that are tailored to meet the legal field's specific needs and requirements.
[5] E-discovery in particular has a set of regularized, repeatable, and measurable practices and has been subject to great cost-control pressure for the past few years, making it a specialty within law amenable to traditional project management.
The practice of legal-project management varies from the schema in Steven Levy's book[2] to law-firm-specific regimens such as Seyfarth Lean[6] to corporate initiatives such as Cisco’s core-and-context[7] approach to legal work.
In Australia, mediation as an alternative dispute resolution (ADR) method is designed to avoid resorting to formal court-based adjudication and is now also being applied to criminal matters.
It was recognised some time ago, by courts here and elsewhere in the common law world, that a different approach was required to tackle the problems of delay and cost in the litigation process.
In its report in 2000, Managing Justice: A review of the federal civil justice system, the Australian Law Reform Commission noted that: "Over the last ten years Australian courts have become more active in monitoring and managing the conduct and progress of cases before them, from the time a matter is lodged to finalisation"[14]The Assisted Dispute Resolution program was introduced into the Federal Court in 1990 after a number of cases failed to reach resolutions having several directional hearings.
The scope of "active case management" is outlined in CPR 1.4(2): among the requirements set out there are the identification of all issues "at an early stage" and the need for cooperation between the parties involved in a legal dispute.
In-house legal teams (in the public and private sectors) have their own needs: generally these require less emphasis on billing and accounts (since clients tend to be internal), and even more on traceability, real-time integration and configurability.