Lean lawyer

 

If the rise of legal operations and legal technology has shown anything, it is that legal professionals are expected to operate with the same level of efficiency common in the manufacturing and technology industries. But becoming lean workers who can do more and better quality work with less resources is a tall task.

What exactly, after all, does being lean even mean in legal?  At its core, it is about harnessing efficiencies through a combination of utilizing technology and workflows, and changing the mindsets of attorneys. Many, however, will emphasize the importance of one over the other.

Alex Geisler, partner at Duane Morris, for instance, noted that while anyone can leverage technology and workflows, “having the mindset to bring [being lean] to every part of what we do is really the difference between being lean just some of the time and being lean all the time.”

He explained, “If you're a lawyer in practice or in a legal department and you have some best practices, those are just good habits. But what then has to happen is those habits need practice and reinforcement. It's a level of personal awareness about how you are going to do your work.”

For Geisler, a lean mindset means always having a strategic plan in place when tackling a task. As an example, he compares how two in-house attorneys—one of which works lean, while the other doesn't—handle a matter.

Upon receiving an assignment from the GC, the non-lean lawyer obtains and reads all the documents related to the matter, writes a memo documenting what the case is about, and then goes to speak to the relevant fact-holders. However, when speaking to the fact-holders, the non-lean attorney realizes the matter is not what he or she thought it was.

“Some other stuff is very important, and some of the things that seemed to be important aren't important or disputed, and actually a whole bunch of the documents didn't need to be read or at best no more than skimmed,” Geisler said.

So the next time another matter arises, the non-lean lawyer goes to talk to the fact-holders first. But not having read the documents, the lawyer is at a disadvantage and may need to talk to them a second or third time. The process, therefore, is still plagued with inefficiencies.

How the lean lawyer would handle the situation is markedly different. “What the lean lawyer would do is start with planning and have a kick-off call with the GC and ideally the main fact-holder; just have a quick, high level conversation to ask what [the matter] is about,” Geisler said.

After that, the lean lawyer would plan out what documents to read and what fact-holders to interview and adjust his plan according to the matter's needs. Geisler noted that compared to the non-lean process, this is a way of working that is “sharper, smarter, and in logical sequence.”

The Lean Six Sigma Approach

To be sure, there are other approaches to help lawyers become lean. One of the most well-known is Lean Six Sigma, a process improvement methodology that is based on five central steps: define the problem, measure the problem, analyze the root cause, improve the situation, and maintain the improvement going forward.

Though the methodology came out of the manufacturing industry, it is currently applied across various sectors, including legal. Seyfarth Shaw, for instance, relies on Lean Six Sigma as the basis for its SeyfarthLean Consulting service, which launched in 2005.

“The firm implemented it because we were very confident that we could together find a more efficient and client-centered way to develop our legal services,” Lisa Damon, partner at Seyfarth Shaw, told Legaltech News. “The purpose of SeyfarthLean and of being a lean lawyer at Seyfarth is to really stand in the shoes of the client and solve for their problems.”

The firm's reliance on Lean Six Sigma, however, goes beyond just SeyfarthLean. All Seyfarth Shaw lawyers are trained on the basic fundamentals of Lean Six Sigma through a program known as “Seyfarth experience.” From there, attorneys can go on to receive additional training to reach different levels, each one designated by a colored “belt.”

Those at the white belt level, for instance, understand basic concepts, while green and yellow belts apply the methodology in practice. Those at the final level, black belts, make up the firm's “lean solutions group, which is the group that works most closely with our clients,” Damon said.

Still, it's not just attorneys' mindsets that Seyfarth is changing. It's also adding technology, like a knowledge management (KM) system to better enable attorneys to serve clients. Damon explained that the firm's KM systems includes “easy access to handbooks and things that have been prepared for clients in the past. So we try to pull that together frequently with alternative pricing in a way that solves the clients problems as opposed to… recreating the wheel each time someone calls in with an issue.”

Legal Department Tech

Most of the time, corporate legal department clients will reach out to SeyfarthLean Consulting to ask for help in creating new processes in-house. “Usually the most fun way to work with them is on a particular project they are working on,” Damon said. “So maybe they are looking at an area of law, real estate or transactions and they want to make it more efficient, reduce legal fees, increase the efficiency or capture back time for their in-house people.”

Indeed, many of today's legal departments have little choice but to become lean given the “do less with more” approach their parent organizations have taken.

For Camden Hillas, senior corporate counsel at Nintex, becoming a lean legal department was necessity since her team consists of her and one other legal professional. Her company, meanwhile, has over 400 employees worldwide.

Instead of emphasizing Lean Six Sigma or changing mindsets, Hillas' department is focusing on technology and workflow changes to enable them to work more efficiently. To that end, the team looks to automate or offload as many manual processes as possible.

It's important to “figure out that processes you have, how often they are repeated, and what percentage of your work can be bucketed with repeatable processes,” Hillas said.  “Then you can look and apply either a technology solution or a design solution to see how you can efficiently handle that.”

The Nintex legal department has since automated its contract review process and its trademark due diligence workflows as well. And Hillas sees more opportunities for further automation in the near future as advanced technologies like artificial intelligence come into play. “I think there is a lot of room in this field, as it evolves, to leverage intelligence.”

Of course, while some situations call for deploying technology more than changing mindsets, or vice versa, the two pillars of lean lawyering will always be intertwined. By automating more legal operations, attorneys will be tasked with taking on more work with better results. And while technology may make attorney work easier, in the end, it forces them to rethink how they work from the ground up.