The Oregon Court of Appeals recently issued an opinion vacating and remanding a trial court's modification of a prior parenting time order due to "an internal inconsistency as to the number of overnights that the child is to spend with each parent." A short version of the facts: Both parents appeared at the modification trial pro se. In the bench trial, the judge relied on the father's (mistaken) interpretation of the couple's existing parenting plan instead of taking the time to understand the plan himself. The judge issued an oral ruling granting mother slightly more parenting time than father (4 days a week to mother, 3 to father). With no ... (Keep reading)
The Agile Attorney Blog
This is part of my series where I try to help anonymous strangers on Reddit (as u/AgileAtty). You can find the original post here. This is my answer to a follow-up question; the original question is in my Part 1 post. Thank you for this wonderful reply. We are tracking these metrics on spreadsheets and need to rely on the data more seriously to make decisions. Question for you, excluding partner salaries, what do you see as a typical range of overhead costs at a firm that does $3-5m in revenue? $600K to $1m in overhead? Remainder in profit? I'm not aware of any well-designed study that would give us the ... (Keep reading)
This is part of my series where I try to help anonymous strangers on Reddit (as u/AgileAtty). You can find the original post here. There was a follow-up question in the comments which I also answered in part 2 of this thread. How does your firm determine when to hire a new attorney? Do you look at cases per attorney, new cases filed and project out, or some other metrics? New attorneys mean more overhead but also more firepower so it seems to be a balancing act that I haven't quite figured out yet. Add to the complication the determination as to whether to hire an attorney vs paralegal. Any good ... (Keep reading)
Software company VersionOne (now part of Digital.ai) has conducted an annual State of Agile survey for 16 years now, and I thought I'd share a few tidbits from this year's report. While it is still heavily weighted towards the tech sector (where Agile methods are widely used), it is the best long-term gauge we have on Agile adoption overall.The biggest news for those of us on the Kanban bandwagon: "Kanban use has exploded from 7% in the 14th survey to 56% in the current [16th] survey."This makes sense in the context of another of the report's findings, that "Agile continues to extend beyond the original software development or IT team to cross-functional ... (Keep reading)
As we close out 2022, I've now spent over 8 years trying to convince lawyers and other legal professionals to use kanban boards — and the Kanban methodology more broadly — in their law practices. Back when I started, my biggest challenge was getting people to recognize that Kanban was even a thing. Much of my outreach focused on getting people to make a kanban board for the first time. I even made a Vine about it (remember Vine?):Ahh, the satisfying schlup of a sticky note unsticking.These days, the challenge is different. Kanban boards are kinda everywhere — well, in a lot of places at least. Software teams have been using ... (Keep reading)
This is part of my series where I try to help anonymous strangers on Reddit (as u/AgileAtty). You can find the original post here. Like the majority of us, I am currently dealing with an increased work load, and finding it a challenge to stay on top of things. I'd really appreciate your insight and experience on the below. What systems or routines do you have in place to stay on top of work? Do you use a First in, First Out system? How do you track open files and ongoing requests? Of course, whenever an urgent matter comes in, that takes priority, but I'm finding my trusty to do list ... (Keep reading)
One of my first best bosses was fond of saying “measure what you treasure” (it’s catcher than the Peter Drucker formulation). But finding the right things to measure in a law practice can be confusing. A recent guide from Clio recommends 62 Key Performance Indicators your firm should measure. 62 KPIs! That’s a lot of metrics.Before I get to the six measurements I care most about, understand that the thing I treasure is the flow of work through your law practice. Specifically, I care about flow in your delivery pipeline. Expanding briefly on the Theory of Constraints I've written about before, there are three high-level systems that make up a ... (Keep reading)
Before I get started today, a quick plug: Just yesterday I was waxing poetic about summer, but for a lot of you (especially those with school-aged kids) you probably feel like fall has already started. Not to rush you, but that means we’re on the downhill slope to the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023. Which means it’s time to start thinking about your strategy planning for the next 12-18 months. Strategic planning is one of the things I truly love doing with law firms and legal teams. If you’ve never done formal strategic planning, I can help you get started. If you’ve done it before but without ... (Keep reading)
One way to think of Agile is as a set of practices that a team engages in to achieve a desired result. I'm a child of the 1980s so I think of this as the "wax on, wax off" part of the Karate Kid training sequence. If your actual delivery team is working under an experienced Agile coach or other practitioner, that might even be how you get introduced to Agile. In that case, you wouldn't get to decide whether to have a daily standup (more on that later), it would just be something your team does.Examples of Agile practices include those daily standups, plus weekly planning, weekly review, backlog ... (Keep reading)
One of the biggest challenges facing the firms I work with is too many in-progress matters. Lawyers love doing intake (for a variety of reasons, including that serotonin boost I mentioned yesterday), but we have a tendency to over-stuff our “doing the work” system without getting those cases closed and archived. My goal is for your firm to achieve equilibrium between your “getting the work” system and your “doing the work” system. The former should respond to the available capacity of the latter. That’s the nature of a pull-based system. It is also very different from how most firms think. It is a common mistake to be demand-oriented. “We should ... (Keep reading)
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