Hi all. I’m making a few changes to the site, including moving away from a somewhat expensive hosting platform that I wasn’t really harnessing the power of. So it’s back to WordPress for now (and a really basic version at that, also for now). If you’re looking for a post that you can’t find, please don’t hesitate to contact me and I’ll steer you in the right direction. ... (Keep reading)
The Agile Attorney Blog
A bit of a mea culpa here: This is a post I started working on months ago and then never published because I didn’t think I’d gotten things quite right. As longtime readers will recognize, this is fundamentally inconsistent with the Lean Startup principles I espouse–better to put the darn thing out there and see what people think about it than to let it languish while I noodle on potentially unimportant details. And with that explanation, here I post my version of the Business Model Canvas for lawyers and law firms that I’m calling the Practice Model Canvas. It is useful for a few different scenarios: it is a great alternative ... (Keep reading)
We’ve had some good conversations going on in the Agile Attorneys Worldwide Slack group lately, and I thought I’d publish a taste of what’s going on in there. If you haven’t joined yet, the signup form is here (and I’ll embed it again at the bottom of this post.) This particular back-and-forth was between me and immigration attorney Greg McLawsen. mclawsen: More a Lean than Agile question, but figured I’d toss it out here. We’re experimenting with a new web-only storefront for our immigration firm (soundimmigration.com) and are testing this core presumption: clients are willing to work with us in the web-only (no office) environment. We’re driving a reasonable amount of ... (Keep reading)
Note: I originally wrote this post for Lawyerist back with it was primarily a blog site. At some point they re-orged their content and this one didn't make the cut, so I'm re-publishing it here. Everybody wants productivity and profit, and there are many theories on how to achieve it. Companies spend billions of dollars trying to sell you the promise of them. Most of the time, those products aren’t actually making you more productive or profitable. Instead, they only produce what renowned management theorist Eli Goldratt called local efficiency: an improvement to a part of a workflow that doesn’t translate to an improvement in the business overall. Find Your ... (Keep reading)
I just got done presenting at the Ohio State Bar Legal Technology Conference where I tried out a new idea: Kanban in a Box. I only made a couple of prototypes and I gave them both away, but I’m working on putting a few more together and making them available on this site. In the mean time, I thought I’d post the packing list: ... (Keep reading)
What do outsourcing, Lean, and Agile mean for your law firm? Find out by listening to this Special Report with legal entrepreneurs Basha Rubin and Mirra Levitt plus Lean/Agile evangelist John E. Grant. Together they discuss their respective Clio Cloud Conference presentations with Legal Talk Network producer Laurence Colletti. Tune in to hear where clients are searching for attorneys today, how the emoji lawyer problem affects your practice, and why lawyers need to adopt a culture for learning in their firms. In addition, hear Basha, Mirra, and John debate the merits of Agile principles as well as the minimally viable product concept in the legal profession. You can listen to ... (Keep reading)
That was super fun. For those of you who weren’t there, I just got done speaking at the Clio Cloud Conference 2015 where I was interviewed by Clio CEO Jack Newton on the basics of Agile and how to adopt it for legal practice. What I loved about the conversation is that Jack truly gets the power of Agile–Clio uses Scrum to develop its software, uses Kanban to manage other parts of the business like marketing and HR, and lives by Lean Startup principles in developing its product line. They even use the Business Model Canvas and Design Thinking when scoping out potential customer offerings. ... (Keep reading)
I joined Sam and Aaron on the Lawyerist podcast to share a few tips on how to adapt Agile for law practices. You can listen to the episode on Lawyerist's Podcast Page, or at any of the links below: Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Spotify ... (Keep reading)
As anyone who grew up with The Sound of Music learned, the beginning is often a very good place to start. Unfortunately, this isn't true when it comes to legal process improvement.I commonly hear something like this when working with attorneys: "I don't have time to do a bunch of process improvement work, but every so often something about my workflow drives me crazy and I resolve to fix the whole darn thing. So I sketch out the different parts of my process and get to work making them better. Starting at the beginning, I take a hard look at my client intake system and make a few changes to improve it. ... (Keep reading)
I’ve just finished my second watching of a great video posted this week by the Stanford Center for the Legal Profession titled “Implementing Innovation: The Challenges to Changing Big Law” (embedded below, h/t to Steph Kimbro). It features Stephen Poor, Chair of Seyfarth Shaw, Ron Dolin, Research Fellow with the Center on the Legal Profession, and Thomas Buley, JD/MBA candidate at Stanford. The whole thing is fascinating, but I’m going to skip over the bit where Dolin and Buley present their paper discussing whether the “Innovator’s Dilemma” will lead to large-scale incumbent failure in Big Law. (Margaret Hagan has a good set of tweets about it.) I’m also going to ... (Keep reading)
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