Corporate legal departments are busy hubs that take work in from many sources and process the work through several different in-house professionals as well as external counsel. In effect, the legal department is a very complex shared resource – one of the most challenging areas in which to implement traditional improvement principles. However, by embracing the shared nature of the department, a future state flow of work can be designed that enables a guaranteed turnaround time for work, significantly reduced management burden, and shorter lead times.

In many corporate legal departments, paralegals and administrative assistants are shared by multiple attorneys, and across multiple cases or matters. Consequently, knowing what to work on next is often a key cause of unpredictable turnaround times for tasks. If a paralegal works for three attorneys, for example, how would he or she know which attorney's task to deal with next? Such a decision is often made in one of the following ways:

• Paralegal looks at inbox and picks the most enjoyable task.
• Paralegal looks at inbox and selects the task allocated by the most senior attorney, or perhaps the most persistent attorney.
• Paralegal looks at inbox and opts to do the easiest task.
• Paralegal looks at inbox and picks the task requiring interaction with external counsel, which he or she considers more urgent.

The list could go on but essentially, this approach is one of self-prioritizing, which results unpredictable lead times, inefficient allocation of resources and management intervention. To address these issues, some in-house legal departments utilize case management systems; however, even these tools are often only as good as the inputs they receive.

In this type of environment, a better approach is to create value streams that enable each and every employee to see the flow of value to the customer and fix that flow before it breaks down. To do this, corporate legal departments should use the nine lean guidelines for flow in the office. The resulting design will ensure that staff shared by multiple attorneys work using First-In-First-Out (FIFO) lanes and workflow cycles. The FIFO lanes will preserve the order of tasks, meaning that each individual will not set their own priorities but instead work on tasks in the order they were delivered, and the workflow cycles for emptying each FIFO lane mean that the work for one particular attorney will always move at the same time. Once established, the attorney and paralegal will not need to chase each other for status updates; they will simply have to wait for the completion of their next workflow cycle to see their work completed and returned.

The design will necessarily have to deal with abnormal flow to address what happens when a random and unexpected issue arises or a particularly complex issue comes through and prevents the emptying of a FIFO lane. Situations like these, and many others, should be factored into the design of flow. While there will be still be emergencies once flow is designed, the solution will not be addressed by firefighting but rather with a plan for how the department will react when flow becomes abnormal.

To determine whether flow has been established according to the guidelines, shared resources working in a corporate legal department should be able to answer the following five questions according to the value stream design:

1. How do you know what to work on next?
2. Where do you get your work from?
3. How long should it take you to perform your work?
4. Where do you send your work?
5. When you send your work, is flow still normal?

These questions in themselves are quite simple, but require a high quality value stream design to make sure they can all be answered at each process in the department. And when they are, no matter the mix of work entering the corporate legal department or the shared resources within it, the work will flow through without management intervention, status meetings or delays.