The general counsel of Agrium, a CDN $2.5 billion Calgary-based company, explained at a conference that his company faced some huge lawsuits. To involve his clients in the litigation and to inject project management skills, he obtained from the client a “business manager.” That person was responsible for assisting with logistics, planning, and costs of the sprawling, expensive suit (or that is what I suppose).
It makes excellent sense to draw upon skills outside the law department, such as financial planning, project management, and technology, to parry with the ferocious thrusts of high-risk litigation. That kind of support could be thought of as administrative; more valuable even than that is the heightened involvement of clients in the suit, as compared to them tossing it over the transom “for the law department to fix.”