Building NewLaw is working to change the practice of law by creating a new legal industry standard. I joined them on their podcast brining my experience trying to implement change in law firms. We discuss the successes as well as the failures I have had in those attempts. You can listen to the episode on Building NewLaw's Podcast Page, or at any of the links below: Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Spotify ... (Keep reading)
The Agile Attorney Blog
For anyone who has been following the Agile movement, it is no surprise that Agile has grown far beyond its roots in software development to encompass business processes of all sorts. McKinsey consulting has a step-by-step guide for Agile Marketing. Leading Agile trainer Steve Denning talks about Agile for Human Resources in Forbes. And a growing segment of respondents to the annual State of Agile survey come from outside of technology teams. More recently, Harvard Business Review featured Enterprise Agile as its cover story, ... (Keep reading)
Larry, Dave and I had a great conversation on their Lean Law Firm Podcast. It's a quick listen, so check it out on The Lean Law Firm's Podcast Page or at any of the links below: Spotify Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts ... (Keep reading)
Technology is pulling lawyers and law practices into the modern age but how can you, as a lawyer and business owner, use technology to improve you practice management while remaining compliant with the ethics rules? Along with using technology, how can you apply project management concepts to improve your business? I joined Megan Zavieh on her podcast to discuss. What We Discuss in This Episode: Why lawyers seek to derive intrinsic value from their practices What the correlation is between the first five rules of the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct and project management? What project management is and how it’s applied in a law firm setting The lean ... (Keep reading)
It’s been awhile since I made a blog post out of a Twitter thread, but this seemed like as good a topic as any. (Oddly enough, the last one also had to do with the concept of waste). I recently re-published an old post on “The Seven Wastes of Lawyers” which I readily admit is the most click-baity post I’ve ever done. Who doesn’t like to think of lawyers as incredibly wasteful? In the four years since I originally wrote it, however, my thinking has evolved a bit, and I still plan a more detailed post on that. In the mean time, I had an interesting exchange with Peter Connor, ... (Keep reading)
Before I dig too far into the importance of setting goals, and setting them the right way, let’s get this out of the way: The Goal of any business system, process, or workflow is to derive Profit for the business by delivering Value to the customer. This is undeniably true. Now Profit, as I explained in one of my earliest posts, isn’t just about money. But in the broadest sense, you need to be deriving some Profit from your practice or else there’s no point in having one. (This notion of “The Goal” is taken from a book by that name by seminal Lean thinker Eli Goldratt, father of the ... (Keep reading)
Greetings from ABA Techshow 2018, where today I learned that Larry Port and Dave Maxfield have just published the book that I’ve been thinking about writing for years. It’s title: The Lean Law Firm. Honestly, the similarities between what they’ve produced and the outline I generated are uncanny, right down to the idea of using bicycle manufacturing as the parable for teaching lawyers how to build a Lean practice. I have to admit, my heart sank a little when I saw it. It’s not like I didn’t know it was a possibility—Larry and I had a great conversation about Lean for Lawyers a couple of years ago and he told ... (Keep reading)
A quick tangent from my Domains of Activity series, I’m putting together some case studies of firms I’ve worked with and the improvements they’ve made. Here’s the first one: Case Study: Optimizing a Small Family Law Practice The Situation A family law firm consisting of two attorneys and three staff struggled with workflow optimization and task balancing among staff. In order to keep track of the tasks and cases that were in process the head attorney (and firm owner) had put elaborate checklists and a rigid schedule in place. This approach had left the support staff disempowered and limited their investment in the completion of each case. ... (Keep reading)
In Part 1 of this series I laid out the four domains of activity for your law practice (any human enterprise really). If you haven’t already, you might want to read it first. The Mission domain, sometimes expanded to Mission, Vision, and Values, should be the North Star of your operation. It is why you have a law practice to begin with—your declaration of purpose—and it should both encapsulate and permeate who you are as a business. ... (Keep reading)
I’m probably most often thought of as a legal project management guy. Which makes sense since I’ve named my business after my preferred project management toolset. But for most of the teams I work with, project management turns out to be a relatively small part of the job. Why? Well, for one thing it may not be their primary bottleneck at the moment (although there are solid Lean and Agile techniques to help determine what that bottleneck is and help understand how to fix it). More often it is because using project management is a Strategy, and specific project management efforts are Tactics, and Strategies and Tactics are of only ... (Keep reading)
Page [tcb_pagination_current_page] of [tcb_pagination_total_pages]