Course Overview

Clients expect their legal partners to be able to offer all the services they need as cost effectively and efficiently as possible. Keeping a clear record of the costs of specific projects and ensuring that your practice sticks closely to original costing estimates is critical in building long-lasting client relationships, as well as in running your firm efficiently.

When it comes to project financing and monitoring the finances of legal projects, there are often few concrete solutions or black-and-white answers, but simply “guessing” what the potential costs are is a recipe for disaster. Doing so could be extremely costly to your firm and, more importantly, harm your relationships with clients.

Through a series of real-world, African case studies, this course will help you to develop the foundational knowledge and skill-set in order to better budget for legal projects in your firm and practice by:

• Understanding the foundations of a working budget;
• Evaluating some potentially problematic assumptions common in project planning and how to avoid or overcome them;
• Creating well considered, accurate budget plans for each legal project; and
• Analysing some of the root causes of variation between project budgets and the true project costs, as well as how to address them in practice.

You will also be provided with a number of downloadable tools, templates and guidelines that you can use in practice to plan your budgets and monitor them.