Being perfectionists generally serves lawyers well. With a low margin for error, most legal work benefits from a perfectionist bent. Perfection, however, has a dark side, especially where the world operates on a continuum (better to worse) rather than a binary divide (right/wrong). Voltaire warned that “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” Departmental improvement initiatives already have enough natural enemies. And perfect improvement initiatives are not just expensive, they are illusory.

Go for good. While it runs contrary to our intuitions, you can often make greater gains by taking the initial, obvious, and easy steps that get a process from 80 percent inefficient to 50 percent inefficient than you can by taking the advanced, ambiguous, and arduous steps that get the process from 50 percent inefficient to 0 percent inefficient—i.e., perfect.

Take an operation that currently requires an hour but the right combination of technology, process redesign, and user training could reduce to 10 minutes. That is, 83 percent of time spent (50 of the 60 minutes) is waste. Your plan for total waste elimination, however, encounters budgetary constraints on the technology, holdouts who won't let you redesign the entire process, and some team members who won't attend training. Because you could only make incremental progress on the people, process, and technology, instead of the optimal 10 minutes, you only reduce the operation to 20 minutes. As a result, 10 of the 20 minutes (50 percent) is still waste. But, in improving from 83 percent to 50 percent inefficiency, you shaved off 40 minutes of waste. The extra effort required to get you to zero could only save an additional 10 minutes—i.e., a quarter of what you already saved.