Whenever you conduct process improvement, you’ll come up with a long list of changes that need to be made. Different people in your organization will have different roles and responsibilities when it comes to implementing those changes, and you’ll have greater success with implementation if you lay out those roles and responsibilities up front.

Today’s tip: you’ll have much better success implementing your changes if you lay out those roles and responsibilities up front. For this, you need a responsibility assignment matrix, usually called a RACI Chart.

There are other terms for this type of chart depending on your organization's goals, but whether your law firm needs an RACI, ARCI, or LACI chart, the importance of designating responsibility and assigning roles is vital to the success of your projects.

What do RACI, ARCI, and LACI stand for?

RACI:

•  Responsible: the person or people in charge of doing the work, creating the deliverable, or making the decision. There may be a team of others supporting the responsible person as well.
•  Accountable: the one person who signs off on or approves the work done by the responsible person/people.
•  Consulted: people who need to give input or participate before the work can be completed.
•  Informed: people who need progress updates and need to know about the final deliverables but don’t provide any input

ARCI is used for organizations that prefer to have the accountable person come first in the chart, since that person usually has more authority. The terms themselves are the same. Only the order changes.

Either way, it doesn’t matter if your organization uses RACI or ARCI Charts. If you’re getting started, choose an order that makes sense for your firm and assign roles.

If you’re managing legal matters, as opposed to improvement projects, it makes more sense to use a LACI Chart.  It better reflects how we think about lawyers’ roles in a legal matter.

LACI stands for:

•  Leading: the one person leading the matter or leading a task within a matter
•  Assisting: the people doing the work
•  Consulted: other resources or sources of information or people with veto rights over a decision
•  Informed: people who need to be kept up-to-date, usually just by being copied on communications

Responsibility matrices are project management tools. Applying Legal Project Management will help you keep your legal matters on time & on budget and make it easier to effectively manage the work, especially on complex matters.

As Legal Ops continues to become mainstream, interest in Legal Project Management grows. That’s one reason we are offering our Legal Project Management training program this fall.