Sufian A.

Doleh CSU ID# 2356325 OSM 511 Summer Semester Paper 06/25/2012 A Leaner Law The core idea of Lean Systems is to maximize customer value while minimizing the amount of waste produced. Lean Systems create more value for customers with fewer resources or steps. An organization that utilizes Lean Thinking understands customer value and focuses its processes to continuously improve it. Here, the goal is to provide perfect value to the customer through a perfect value creation process that has zero waste. The term lean arose from literature written by James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones. Lean Thinking has also become popular because of the Toyota Production System. Toyota understands what constitutes true customer value and focuses on managing and refining its key processes to continuously improve the value it provides. Lean System are very popular in the manufacturing industry but has also gained steam in the service industry as well. Lean systems are no typically applied to the practice of law, but through the proper implementation it can be a very useful and profitable tool for law firms around the world. Lean thinking is a set of management principles used extensively in other sectors in the world and is now being used in the legal profession in the United States. These principles have been proven to keep clients costs down by between 15% and 50%; improve time to respond, improve overall quality, and keep the customer informed of progress. In 2009, Seyfarth Shaw LLP, a US-based national law firm with over 750 attorneys,

made public the results of their implementation of lean system techniques into a law firm. The Association of Corporate Counsel stated positively about that firm as being five years ahead of every other AmLaw 200 firm. The firm has stated that the benefits, to them and their clients, are: 1. Responsiveness time to complete instructions is cut resulting in a reduction in the fees charged to clients of between 15% and 50%. 2. Value clear understanding of client needs and shared definitions of success, enabling fixed fee or alternative payments to be agreed with clients. 3. Engagement the clear value understanding helps internal staff to understand which skills and experiences are needed at each stage of instruction and helps the client understand which staff will be handling the work and why. 4. Costs cost structures are understood, transparent and variability is eliminated allowing the alternative fee structures to be developed. 5. Satisfaction clients are delighted with this approach and are assigning a greater number of matters, increasing the overall revenue for the firm. The five core management principles of lean thinking consist of: 1. Only customers can place a value on the solutions (products/ services) an organization provides. 2. Companies should understand every activity in the processes they use and whether these add value to the customer aiming to remove those activities and processes that dont add value or is part of the seven wastes. 3. Businesses should organize around the solutions valued by the customers breaking through the functional and departmental barriers to create flow.

4. Every process should only be operated when required (pulled) by the customer, not (pushed) when the company desires or targets dictate. 5. An organization should strive to continuously improve and refine the value its solutions deliver to its customer. Direct savings measure the savings in actual cost and indirect savings are the savings that occur as a result of improving the overall efficiency of the process. Another important aspect of this is the savings in terms of time. Commonly, it is viewed that the reduction in overall processing time is as good as or even more important than measurable cost reductions. Apart from this considerable reduction in time, there is also an improvement in the efficiency of the process, i.e. improvement in the overall running of the lawyers firm and also the process in which the cases and the clients are handled in an attorneys firm. Some of the Lean principles that can be used to bring about this process improvement are: 1. Grouping: This is a very important lean tool. One should be on the lookout for major outputs, within the value stream, look for changes that can be made to do the work and then group steps together based on major differences. A process for handling a legal case usually consists of the following 6 steps: a. Register a case in the firm b. Allocate lawyer and schedule an appointment c. Meeting with client d. Documentation & Case filing e. Case in court f. Post processing, which includes contacting the client, Rescheduling etc.

Lean thinking can be applied to this to make a more efficient process in dealing with cases. 2. Include case checklist: Generally, when a client has a legal issue, he selects an attorney or a law firm and comes to the firm with the legal issue. If he/she arrives at the firm for the first time, he communicates with the front desk staff or attorney assistants, gives some basic background information about the case and schedules a meeting with a lawyer or lawyers to discuss the issues further. The thing that can be modified here is that a client could download an online form or checklist, which would be a questionnaire in nature and then bring it to the law office. This step would serve to avoid any communication gaps that may result between the client and front office staff. This step could also save the client and the office the time and hassle for entering the information into the computer system. 3. Cross training: The third process element Meeting with client is where the client meets with the allocated lawyer in the scheduled time to discuss and review the legal issues. The fourth element in the process is Documentation & Case filing. This follows the third process, where the assigned attorney forms a report about the cases potential issues and the overall background of the client/clients. He then meets up with the senior partner. They attorney can be cross-trained in the different systems or equipment that the assisting staff do. He can do some of their work where needed such as in cases where none of the clerks or typists turns up. Additionally, the attorney could do a partial documentation in the computer as soon as his meeting with the client is over. This would be very useful so some of the documentation is already done and the information provided by the client gets recorded correctly as it is done without a large time gap and minimizing the

possibility of mistakes. 4. Proceed unless halted: At some firms, the junior associate attorneys must wait to get approval from the senior partners and only then can file the case at the local court. This, very often, leads to an enormous amount of waste if the partner is not available. Here, the process is in motion and should stay that way. If the partner sees something in the case and wished it to be halted, only then the action should be put on hold. In this way, time will not be wasted and this firms processes will be more efficient. 5. 3 days Max Set Service Level: At times, it takes about a week to schedule an appointment with the attorney. Such practices often lead to client dissatisfaction and an enormous waste of time. Here, a Service Level can be put in place across the firm. This would mean that regardless of the situation, the client would meet the attorney within three days. 6. Kanban & Poka yoke: These are common lean tools, which could apply to any office, to improve the overall efficiency of the process. Here, it could improve the documentation and filing tasks and reduces the direct cost associated with the firm. 7. Include Checkpoints: Periodical checkpoints can be useful in a law office to see if there are any backlogs, issues, or updating the status of the case and so on. Conclusion Applying these lean principles to a law office setting can prove to be rewarding by making the office run more efficiently. Additionally, it will help the firm save their clients and themselves time and money. Lean thinking will remove the wastes and inefficiencies that can plague an organization. As Toyota and Tesco found, law firms around the world can discover that the implementation of lean principles has many satisfying and rewarding benefits.