How Gunderson Dettmer Streamlines Project Management
In 2023, Gunderson Dettmer, a Silicon Valley law firm that specializes in venture capital and growth equity, aimed to improve project management and client response times.
After evaluating Dashboard Legal by Bloomberg Law, the firm saw an opportunity to boost their efficiency by streamlining task management and division of labor. Chief Knowledge Officer Naveen Pai led adoption efforts, as he was impressed by the platform’s ability to optimize operations.
Challenge: Navigating the inbox folder maze to track legal project tasks
Before implementing Dashboard Legal by Bloomberg Law, Gunderson Dettmer’s attorneys relied on email to manage legal tasks, which led to fragmented and disjointed workflows.
Teams needed to comb through lengthy email chains to find the information they needed and didn’t always have complete visibility into important project details, which could be sitting in someone else’s inbox.
“Everyone was trying to keep track of tasks on their own,” said Pai. “They spent too much time searching their inbox to find an email that lays out a set of items to be done.”
Confronted with information silos, employees often dealt with duplicated, delayed, or overlooked tasks. This led them to get bogged down in day-to-day task management.
“The bane of any corporate attorney’s existence is being tasked with keeping track of outstanding items, all while in the middle of a large complex transaction moving at warp speed,” said Brent Armitage, a corporate associate at Gunderson Dettmer’s Los Angeles office.
By needing to organize requests and priorities coming from other team members, attorneys and legal professionals at Gunderson Dettmer had less time to focus on higher-level work, such as client advising.
“Rather than spending time in the flow state — working on the thing that’s adding value — they’re spending time managing emails,” said Pai.
Gunderson Dettmer lawyers weren’t alone in using their inboxes as a project management tool — many law firms do the same. According to Pai, this creates operational inefficiencies that can have a widespread impact.
If a client calls and asks for the status on a project, lawyers may have to go through multiple email threads or reach out to multiple colleagues to get the correct information, which can lead to delays and client dissatisfaction.
“Project management is part of the value that you’re providing when you’re an attorney,” said Pai. “And not having a tool to do that works against you.”
Solution: A user-friendly, centralized platform for real-time project tracking
When Pai first shopped around for tools that would better organize Gunderson Dettmer’s communication and task management, he looked into general PM software, not realizing that a legal-specific solution existed.
“We almost stopped our search for a project management tool until we saw Dashboard Legal,” he recalled. “And we said, ‘Okay, this is what we’ve been looking for.”
Dashboard Legal was born from the pain that co-founder Mat Rotenberg felt during his seven-year tenure as a corporate attorney in New York City.
Year after year, Rotenberg watched as attorneys coped with growing volumes of complex information and knew that an inbox wasn’t a long-term sustainable solution to keep pace with demands. He set out to change that.
“At Dashboard Legal, we’re really taking the benefits of market project management tools and bringing them to the attorney workflow, with specifically designed tools to facilitate legal work,” Rotenberg said.
After a long-awaited search, Pai was glad to find a platform that directly addressed the needs of the firm: to streamline day-to-day workflows of attorneys and paralegals.
Pai reached out to Rotenberg and his team to learn more and was impressed. Dashboard Legal not only could improve the firm’s organization but also enhance collaboration and communication through these key features:
- Checklists: enable lawyers to keep track of all deliverables, the status of individual tasks, and the responsible party to complete a task
- Template libraries: give teams the ability to standardize complex projects and not have to build each checklist from scratch
- Internal chat: facilitates collaboration, reduces email overload, and offers open lines of communication, which can be critical in time-sensitive situations
- Software integrations: allow lawyers to open, save, and organize their Outlook emails, iManage, and NetDocuments, all within Dashboard Legal
- Project roll-ups: provide a visual on progress. Lawyers have more visibility into what their colleagues are doing and what still needs to be done
Pleased by the product’s offerings, Pai helped lead the charge in implementation. Dashboard Legal was first rolled out in Gunderson Dettmer’s Los Angeles office, where the legal tool quickly gained traction among associates.
“Dashboard Legal allows you to keep track of everything in real time with increased visibility for the entire team as you’re doing it,” said Armitage. “I think the earlier and more often you can adopt and incorporate this platform in your everyday practice, the more it pays off on the back end.”
Once decision-makers saw the value that Dashboard Legal was bringing to junior and senior-level staff, the platform was then adopted firmwide.
Results: More streamlined communications and lower costs for the client
As an associate at Gunderson Dettmer, Armitage handles a lot of high-stakes deals, which have quick turnarounds. Clients often ask his team for updates on projects, which used to be a time-consuming process. However, Dashboard Legal changed that.
One of the first projects Armitage created on Dashboard Legal was a finance transaction for a company client. He made a dashboard for the transaction, invited team members and stakeholders, and opened up a standardized checklist.
“We were off to the races,” he said.
One night, a few weeks later, the client sent an email to the partner on the deal, wanting an update. Instead of the partner pinging Armitage asking about the status and Armitage needing to summarize a checklist in Microsoft Word that might have been outdated, the process was a lot more streamlined.
“All the partner needed to do was simply ask, ‘Is Dashboard Legal up to date?‘” Armitage said. “And the only thing I needed to say was, ‘Yes.’”
The partner exported the checklist and send it off to the client in a matter of minutes. Pre-Dashboard Legal, the handoff process would have taken much longer, which would have also resulted in a heftier bill for the client.
“Not only did the speed of our response time increase but it also saved me probably 30 minutes to an hour trying to put together an outdated summary,” said Armitage. “And the client was happy because the bill was substantially lower too.”
Streamline communication and foster collaboration for your team
Join Gunderson Dettmer in gaining a more dynamic and organized way to work — beyond the inbox. Dashboard Legal is purpose-built for lawyers to simplify task tracking, document management, and team-wide communication.
Effortlessly track deadlines, assign tasks, and monitor progress in real time using project dashboards. Say goodbye to the hassle of manually updating and sharing separate checklists in MS Word. Keep all your documents from iManage or NetDocuments conveniently within the dashboard and easily export them for seamlines sharing. Request a demo.