QLex Consulting Inc.
Biography
James R. Buckley, JD
James R. Buckley is a pioneer in the application of strategic legal project management. As Vice President & Associate General Counsel for Lockheed Martin Corporation, he worked closely with his internal clients and observed first-hand their management of the delivery of multi-year, highly complex and very expensive products to their customers. Through this close collaboration with the business units, he recognized the potential for project management in the legal department. He adapted his internal clients’ project management and budgeting tools to the legal department. He applied them to manage major litigation matters, including setting corporate objectives, developing the strategic litigation plan, deploying in-house and outside counsel, managing internal/external communications and providing day-to-day tactical direction/decision-making for the team’s efforts.
This involved the novel application of traditional project management tools such as stakeholder analysis, development of project requirements and process mapping, together with less traditional use of decision-tree analysis and game theory concepts. In a major demonstration project, he and Ms. Leventon applied agile, extreme and emertxe project management principles to a distressed case—a major class action—to test the applicability of project management to complex multiparty cases as well as to the more routine.
He also chaired a company-wide task force charged with evaluating the use of technology by Lockheed Martin’s Legal Department, developing recommendations for a new, wholly integrated set of technology tools and spearheading their implementation.
At Lockheed, from which he is now retired, Mr. Buckley was the company’s chief environment, safety & health counsel with a specialty in managing environmental and other complex litigation. He managed extensive litigation at the corporate level, directing outside counsel in the conduct of pre-trial, trial and appellate matters in state and federal court as both plaintiff and defendant, with an emphasis on providing strategic direction for coordinated matters, incorporating an integrated stakeholder analysis and applying project management tools to shape the litigation objectives and manage the Corporation’s resources.
He writes and consults on the management of complex litigation. He is the author of the seminal series “Escape from LawyerLand,” published by the Association of Corporate Counsel illuminating novel practices in managing litigation. He also is a faculty member for the ACC Master Class on project management.
Mr. Buckley has a J.D. degree from the University of Southern California and a B.S. degree in chemical engineering from the University of Rochester. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Environmental Law Institute.
James may be reached by email at james@qlexconsulting.com or by phone at (310) 489-9266.
