"You can only collaborate successfully when you both know what the end goals are and how you both are going to achieve it." — Priti Shetty, General Counsel, ICICI Bank UK

There is no secret to making meetings shorter and more effective. Just think about the tenets of lean, effectiveness, and efficiency, and then do some planning. Plan the work, the roles and the use of each project asset.

Let's illustrate the dos and don'ts with a case study. Suppose Lawyer A is a trial partner based at a New York firm. Suppose his client has been sued in Texas. Lawyer A retains local counsel and decides to arrange a case conference. A meeting like this is an everyday event, but it can still be handled efficiently or inefficiently:

Inefficient Unstructured Meeting 
  1. Partner A decides to bring an associate to take notes and carry documents.
  2. Partner A briefs associate.
  3. Partner A drafts a comprehensive memo with instructions to the local counsel and sends these across ahead of time, with a full document pack.
  4. Partner A doesn't send an agenda, but the instructions state that the purpose is to discuss evidence and merits.
  5. Local counsel reads everything and prepares the subject widely.
  6. The day before the trip, Partner A prepares a short agenda. Meanwhile associate prepares a conference plan.
  7. The agenda and the conference plan are similar. The conference plan is much more detailed, but it never sees the light of day.
  8. The case conference is unstructured, it doesn't follow the short agenda.
  9. After a full day, the case conference ends with a discussion about what has been discussed. Local counsel offers to prepare a note of advice.
  10. The next day Partner A asks associate to create a full conference note. Partner A later reviews and edits this and sends it to the client.
  11. Two weeks later local counsel sends a note of advice to Partner A, who reviews it and sends it on to the client with a commentary.

This doesn't look terrible. The meeting may still be somewhat effective, because in a roundabout way local counsel gets engaged and informed. But it's inefficient. The entire event is blighted by task duplication, wasted effort on non-core activities and lack of focus. All of this creates needless expense for the client which, in turn, is a misuse of funds, which are a vital project asset. This sort of squandering can be avoided by careful planning and assignment of roles. So now let's make it leaner.

Lean Meeting
  1. Partner A habitually takes his own notes and carries his own documents. However, Partner A decides to include a junior lawyer for the experience, at no charge to the client.
  2. Partner A briefs the junior lawyer ahead of time.
  3. Partner A drafts a concise memo for the local counsel and sends this across ahead of time, with some selected key documents.
  4. Partner A creates a structured conference plan and sends this at the same time.
  5. Local counsel reads these materials. No further prep is necessary.
  6. The meeting broadly follows the conference plan.
  7. The first item on the conference plan is a discussion topic called 'Purpose, Process & Product.' In other words, why are we here, how will we work and what will the output be?
  8. After two hours focusing on what matters, next steps are agreed upon and the meeting ends.
  9. Among these next steps, the junior lawyer is tasked with drafting a short conference note for Partner A to review and send to the client and local counsel.