The in-house legal department acts as a service provider to many other business functions, making its work requests often unpredictable in both nature and volume. For example, the legal team may routinely support the human resources department with advice relating to hiring, firing, contract negotiations, wage disputes and other common matters. However, it also has to be prepared to handle unpredictable mold breakers as well, such as an urgent and immediate threat to employee safety made by a disgruntled ex-employee. A situation like that will turn a typical day upside down in no time.

Since a high variation of work is expected in any corporate in-house legal department, it should be part of a future state value stream design. And therein lies the key: designing lean value streams to deal with the inherent variation so that the team can effectively counsel the business at any time and in any area.

This design process should start with the development of a detailed Service Family Matrixto identify families of similar requests that can be combined into value streams. In a legal department, it would be useful to take a sample of requests to build the Service Family Matrix since there is no way of knowing what will come in next. Over time, the families should be refined in order to make sure they are accurate.

With lean guidelines implemented and flow clearly designed, work will be flowed in families, and attorneys will be able to deal with each family on workflow cycles to achieve guaranteed turnaround times. That means support staff will know exactly when they need to move work forward to attorneys, and also know when they will receive it back, eliminating bottlenecks caused by unpredictable turnaround times of attorneys who may take from 30 minutes to three days to mark up and return a letter, brief or contract.

Since unexpected events are also inevitable, the team must design a value stream capable of handling them. Once flow for normal conditions is established, the team should create a system of visual management capable of identifying abnormal flow that all department employees can see. That way, any potential variance from the design will be immediately visible, such as an excessive volume of requests in a family or a mix of requests with a degree of complexity. When the team identifies the abnormal flow condition, it can implement standard work to deal with the unexpected and maintain turnaround times without management intervention.

Standard work for abnormal flow means there is a Plan B in place (approved by management) which dedicates certain resources (such as an attorney and a paralegal) be allocated to the red-condition problem, while remaining staff know they have to shift to their own Plan B and run longer workflow cycles or pull additional work from other FIFO lanes to keep the work flowing. And all this will occur without any management decision making. As soon as the visual management system indicates the need for a move to Plan B, the team switches its mode of operation independently, enabling all resources to be focused on getting work done rather than managing and checking the output of other team members.

In an environment as complex and variable as a corporate legal department, having a design for handling both normal and abnormal flow without management intervention is crucial to success, resulting in:

• Guaranteed Turnaround Times for attorneys to return work to paralegals
• Significantly reduced lead times when responding to requests for counsel from within the business as well as responding to requests from external counsel
• Ability to set Guaranteed Turnaround times and workflow cycles for interactions with external counsel
• Increased productivity as attorneys spend less time managing who is working on what and more time focusing on providing counsel and guidance to the business