Key Points

• Lean for legal work focuses on delivering optimal value to your clients by streamlining the entire process.
• Key tools to utilize are Value Stream Mapping, Kanban, and Root Cause Analysis to aid in your implementation.
• Continuous improvement should be implemented at a cultural level for sustained success.

Are you making use of legal Lean at your law firm? It might seem counterintuitive at first glance, but there is some serious potential when it comes to using the methodology for streamlining your legal processes. It takes some adaptation, sure, but like any methodology, you’re going to be tailoring it to better suit the needs of your organization.

With that in mind, let’s look at some practical strategies you can apply to your legal organization using Lean. We’ll go through how to look at value within your organization, visualize the flow, and focus on where you can reduce the wastes present. Before you know it, you’ll have a more nimble, capable legal organization, thanks to Lean.

Identify Value

Quantifying value in the context of legal Lean isn’t about providing quality goods to a retailer. Instead, you’re going to be giving your clients a favorable outcome. From the perspective of a client, it’s rather easy to see the value in a law firm. You want clear communication, timeliness, and cost-effective work done within reason.

Taking Lean out of a manufacturing context does take some adaptation, as you’ll see from the very start. You’re looking to establish baseline metrics, which are difficult to quantify in a business sector that seldom concerns itself with the data behind the work.

Your first action when implementing Lean in a legal setting is going to be identifying value within the context of your services rendered. You’ve got plenty to pull from, so don’t worry about getting hard numbers just yet. Instead, we’ll focus on a few key metrics you’ll want to establish for your baseline before setting off on the rest of the process.

Valuable Metrics to Establish

I mentioned a few of the valuable metrics you’ll be looking at in the previous section. That said, in the context of a legal organization, the key metrics you should be looking at are as follows:

• Timeliness: Meeting deadlines and providing speedy resolutions.
• Clarity: Transparent and easy-to-understand lanes of communication.
• Predictability: Clear outlining of costs, timelines, and outcomes.
• Accessibility: Ease in getting a hold of legal professionals.
• Quality: Accurate, thorough, and effective legal work.
• Cost-effectiveness: Getting the desired results efficiently and affordably.

Quantifying these might seem difficult at first glance, but it takes time and practice. Conducting surveys and interviews with your clients and employees is one way to get actionable feedback. When constructed the right way, you’ve got hard data that you can use for later projects. Further, this will help you to establish a solid baseline now, so you’ll have targets to work toward in the future.

Map the Value Stream

Value Stream Mapping is one of the most powerful tools you’ve got at your disposal for visualizing how your organization renders legal services. This isn’t just for the initial contact, but rather an all-encompassing look at everything you do from start to finish.

This can be a time-consuming process, as you’ll be mapping each process with its corresponding steps. Depending on how many services your organization offers, this can take a considerable amount of legwork to get up and running.

Thankfully, you’ve got some actionable data points you can use for quantifying things.

Documentation and Metrics

If you’re familiar with Value Stream Mapping and Lean, the terminology you’ll be looking at shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. When plotting out your VSM, you’ll want to document the following criteria:

Lead Time/Cycle Time: How long does the step take?

Processing Time: Actual time spent working on a task.

Waiting Time: How long does the work sit between steps?

Resources Used: Who is involved with the step? What tools or software are used?

Information Flow: How is data shared between steps?

Quality Issues: Are there common errors during the step?

You’ll quickly find you’ve got a multitude of data points, and a fairly comprehensive visual map of each process in your legal Lean implementation.

Create Flow

Flow guarantees that work in Lean implementations moves smoothly. You want things to travel along, facing little resistance to minimize interruptions and bottlenecks. There are a few ways you can handle optimizing flow for your legal Lean implementation. You can start by reducing the size of the workloads you’re doing.

You’ll find that by focusing on smaller batches of tasks in a given time, you get more done efficiently. Another key area for improvement is the use of Kanban boards. These are visual job boards, which can help to organize tasks, show the status of current steps, and identify potential bottlenecks in the way you’re doing things.

Limits and Standardization

One area where you can optimize flow in your legal Lean implementation is by imposing harder limits on the maximum work in progress at a given time. As mentioned with the smaller batched tasks, this helps to retain focus while also preventing bottlenecks in the process.

Another area to focus on is standardizing work. In a law firm, you aren’t going to be able to standardize everything you’re doing. That’s a fool’s errand. However, having standard operational procedures in place can help reduce quite a bit of the variability and chances for errors. Further, it helps to train your personnel in a standardized fashion, reducing the overall time needed to get everyone up to speed.

Establish Pull

Pull in Lean implementations refers to starting the work only when there is a demand to do so. In a legal setting, this would mean only getting the ball rolling when you start the next step in any process. This contrasts with the more typical push systems seen in other offices, where the work is started regardless of whether the next step is ready, which can lead to bottlenecks.

Establishing pull relies on a pull signal, in this case, your client’s need. You can develop other internal pull signals, like on the aforementioned Kanban board or by clearly defining hand-off points for the next step to begin moving into action.

Pursue Perfection

Any legal Lean implementation is going to use Kaizen. Kaizen in itself is just another term defining continuous improvement. While you might have a rock-solid implementation in place, with your processes lean and mean, you still have room to improve. Things move out of spec, workers become complacent, and so forth.

You’ve got a few options to foster a culture of continuous improvement. Typically, this is conducted through daily stand-up meetings, which serve to identify progress, point out bottlenecks, and put a plan of action in place for the day.

Additionally, the use of problem-solving frameworks like the 5 Whys can help to get to the bottom of issues that arise in your processes. Root cause analysis is a valuable tool to keep in your pocket, and the quicker you get used to using it, the better the results.

Gemba Walks

Gemba walks are a fairly simple concept to wrap your head around. You’re basically just walking around the office, seeing the work being done. You’ll want to observe how paperwork is processed, how personnel handle client phone calls, and other areas that are part of your typical operations. Take notes while doing so, as you can identify other areas in need of improvement as you go.

Reducing Waste

Lean focuses on the removal of the 8 Muda, or wastes. Overproduction, waiting, transportation, over-processing, inventory, motion, defects, and skills are the typical areas you’ll want to focus on. Contexualizing these in the confines of a law firm isn’t as difficult as you might think at first glance.

Overproduction could just be drafting documents before they’re requested. Waiting can just be the amount of time it takes to receive communications from partners, the court, and opposing counsel. These adaptations apply across the board and will define the areas of focus you’ll need to work on as you go full steam ahead with your legal Lean implementation.

Other Useful Tools and Concepts

Ready to get the work day started right? You might want to take a closer look at how Six Sigma is being used in healthcare to improve patient care, streamline records, and make for a more nimble organization on the whole. While Six Sigma is primarily used in manufacturing, it is widely applicable to any industry.

Since you’re already reading, you might want to take a closer look at what unmanaged variation can do to your business. Allowing things to run rampant in your organization is a fantastic way of ruining your reputation and customer trust. Addressing these issues while you’re aware of them can mean the difference between your business staying competitive or falling behind.

Conclusion

Legal Lean is a powerful way of enhancing the client experience, streamlining paperwork, and ultimately making your organization the best it can be. It will take some adaptation, but with the right frame of mind, you’ve got the makings of a highly competitive and versatile organization.