As the chief operating officer of the law department at Aon Corp., Audrey Rubin is responsible for budget management, negotiation of outside legal fees and much more.

In 2015, she discovered a way to boost efficiency for her department in all those areas, leading to big savings and stronger relationships. It's a process she's continuing to build in-house.

It all started for Rubin when she agreed to attend a Legal Lean Sigma Institute training, which focused on process improvement and project management in the law. Catherine Alman MacDonagh, the institute's co-founder, met Rubin years before and over time convinced her the training would be useful.

After the session, Rubin told MacDonagh that she'd learned good lessons, and wanted to find a way to apply them to address some of the issues facing her own legal department.  The challenge was, her in-house colleagues at Aon and the company's outside firms didn't know the Legal Lean Sigma concepts.

To fill this knowledge gap and simultaneously create new efficiencies at Aon, Rubin and MacDonagh began preparing a pilot training for members of Aon's legal department and their preferred law firms. 

“Rather than get trained in a hypothetical vacuum, we're training together and then starting to solve our problems as part of the training,” Rubin said. 

Rubin noted some recurring problems springing up in Aon's relationships with the outside firms, and asked her colleagues about issues they'd noticed. Some of the most prominent issues were lags and miscommunication in billing and subpoena processes.

Then, she and MacDonagh converted Legal Lean Sigma's hypothetical training scenario issues into the real ones Aon faced with its firms. This way, they'd have a chance to use process improvement and in-person communication to make a change.

They started with two firms, Sidley Austin and Foley & Lardner, each of which got their own training session with Aon.

“Aon approached the relationship partners here at Sidley, explained why they were interested in this model and how it might be beneficial for these partnerships Aon had,” said Ami Wynne, a partner at Sidley who was involved in the training. Wynne says her team had never done anything like this before and went in with an open mind.

On the training days—one with Sidley, one with Foley & Lardner—Aon legal team members broke into groups with people from the respective firms.  

The groups were divided into “stakeholders,” or those involved in a process on either end. One set of stakeholders, for instance, consisted of law firm attorneys who bill time, law department attorneys who review time, and billing personnel working to cut down the number of rejected invoices. In some cases, Aon staff were talking to firm employees who they'd emailed, but never met in person.

The groups spent the day learning process management and discussing how those skills could be applied to make billings, M&A transactions, and subpoena and contract processes more efficient. Rubin says the teams were able to then see which steps in each of these processes were unnecessary and cut them out. 

Meeting and speaking in-person, group members were able to figure out each individual's role in the process, eliminating the need for multiple forwarded emails or bounce-backs and reducing errors, according to Rubin. Processes were streamlined as participants set clear steps and lines of communication—for example, Aon decided to use collaborative platforms for processing subpoenas rather than bounce the documents around. She said the lessons continued even after the training day was over. 

“Each team has to assign itself a leader to keep it moving, so there is homework, but then we come back together for a half a day,” Rubin said. “We report out what we've been able to accomplish in terms of the process improvements and then we set up a monthly report.” 

After the half-day meeting, Rubin says the teams continue to touch base by phone with a monthly report that allows the groups to spot issues and improve, until the process improvement strategies become ingrained.

And the hard work has paid off for Aon. According to Rubin, the Lean/Six Sigma Process Design  decreased the total dollar amount of rejected invoices for legal work by 41 percent and decreased the average subpoena cycle time by 44 percent from 175 days in 2014 to 98 days in 2015. She says aside from just increasing efficiencies, the changes have led to fewer errors.

The project has also strengthened Aon's relationship with the firms, Rubin and Wynne say.

“Even though Aon is a client we know very well and have very strong relationship with, there are always areas we can work together to enhance,” Wynne said. 

The lessons learned in the training days and follow ups have extended outside Aon's relationship with the two originally selected firms. Rubin says her department has plans to go through the same training with other outside firms to address specific issues. She's also had legal staff approach her since the training with new, innovative ideas to improve process management at Aon.