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How to make the best use of lawyers time when seeking process improvements

Why is making the best use of lawyers time an issue?

Lawyers are busy people and, thanks to the billable hour, their time translates directly into money.

In private practice law firms, time spent on process improvement activity is usually treated as ‘non chargeable’ time.

Under pressure to meet their billing targets, practising lawyers do not like working on non-chargeable activity.

Naturally therefore, even if they take part in process improvement projects, they will be sparing with their time.

This is a huge problem when seeking to make process improvements in law firms.

Usually input from practising lawyers is essential when seeking to improve most types of law firm processes and working practices.

So what can you do to make the best use of lawyers time when seeking process improvements?

Some suggestions are set out below.

 

Illustrative Scenario

Let’s assume you work in a small legal operations team in a law firm.

The Head of Legal Operations has asked you to work with a legal service team.  Your task is to help that team improve its performance.

All the legal service team members work in the same department, the Commercial Dispute Resolution Department.

Their roles are Head of Department (Senior Partner), Legal Directors (Salaried Partners), Senior Associates, Associates, Junior Associates, Paralegals and Trainee Solicitors.

The team has a new Head of Department, Frances, and she is keen to make changes and improve departmental effectiveness.

 

Early fact finding

My first recommendation to you is to do some informal research to understand how the team works and what problems they are facing.

You can start this by simply finding time to talk to some team members over a coffee.

I also suggest that you ask around your firm to see if the team has participated in any process improvement work previously.  You may well find that some process improvement work has been attempted.  If so, there will be a lot to learn from this earlier work.  Was it successful?  If not, why not?

Also check with the Knowledge Management team to see if there is any documentation available from earlier process improvement work.  If there is, find it and read it.  Anything from meeting notes to process maps could provide useful background for you.

If colleagues in the Knowledge Management team were involved in earlier process improvement work, you are in luck – ask them what worked well and not so well.

Finally, swing by your Finance Department and ask them to run off and perhaps walk you through some standard reports from your firm’s Practice Management System (PMS) concerning the Commercial Dispute Resolution Department.

 

Results from your early fact finding

During your informal discussions with the legal team members, several points kept recurring.

It seems acknowledged within the team that the department suffers from:

  • Poor delegation of work
  • Poor communication between team members and
  • ‘Hoarding’ of clients, including client communications, by more senior team members.

Your research also shows that matters handled by this department has more billable time written off compared to other departments, which means the department is less profitable than it could be.

There have been earlier attempts to improve department working practices, but these have achieved little – people tell you that previous process improvement initiatives ‘just petered out’.

 

Set expectations

Before setting expectations with others, you need to be realistic about what you can achieve.  You will not be able to help solve all the team’s problems immediately.

A reasonable assumption to make at this stage is that poor delegation of work is a root cause of many ills observed in this department.  Hence improving delegation could be the focus of a process improvement workshop.

Mindful of getting support from busy team members, you resolve to:

  1. Keep the workshop short (two hours, maximum)
  2. Plan the workshop in some detail so that
    1. You can best use your limited time with team members
    2. Team members can feel they can make improvements immediately and
    3. As a result, they are more likely to sign-up for further process improvement work.

 

Three weeks before the workshop

  1. Get support from key stakeholders, especially Frances, the Departmental Head.  Meet with her for 15 minutes and share with her results of your informal research. Explain what you would like to focus on (i.e., improving delegation) and why.   Frances agrees with you and says she is looking forward to the workshop.  She will make sure all team members attend.
  2. Book time for the workshop in all team member diaries and a room in which to run the workshop, as the workshop will be run live and face to face.
  3. In your covering email inviting people to the workshop explain its core purpose, that it will not last more than two hours, and you have the full support of the Head of Department.
  4. Make sure you have, or will have in good time before the workshop, all the materials you will require such as post-it notes, marker pens, flipcharts and large screen to display your laptop screen if needed.
  5. Even though this workshop will be short, it would probably be a good idea to arrange for some coffee and cakes at the end of the workshop.

 

Two weeks before the workshop

  1. Plan the workshop in more detail. Break the workshop down into chunks of time where you will be
    1. introducing each workshop activity
    2. allowing sufficient time for the activity to run
    3. allowing time for participant review of each activity (i.e lessons learned)
    4. and then allowing time for you to summarise results of each activity. (For inspiration about workshop structure and timing you might want to look at SessionLab).
  2. When planning the workshop, you need to consider things such as:
    1. Short introduction by you to frame the purpose of the workshop. This introduction should not take long – no more than three minutes.  Find time to practice your introduction.   You need to make sure you engage with the team straight away, so be concise and consider in advance the points you want to make.  I have always found that first attempts at short speeches always take longer than expected, so I practice and edit content down.
    2. Identify and confirm the problem. Because of the time constraint, the team cannot consider delegation generally.  Because of this you plan to ask them to consider delegation issues in context of a specific matter type which your informal research has shown to be problematic: say, Class Action matters.
    3. Prepare several activities and exercises which help attendees answer the following questions
      1. What are the root causes of the problem? Why do people find it difficult to delegate tasks?
      2. What tasks would individuals be ready to delegate?
      3. How can people start delegating tasks now?

 

One week before the workshop

  1. Meet with Frances, the Head of Department, for another short meeting to outline your approach to the workshop.  Hopefully, she will agree, but also ask if there is any particular point she would like to have covered.
  2. Send out a reminder email to all participants. In this email ask participants to start thinking about delegation issues during Class Action matters.
  3. Also remind participants that this will be a participative workshop, and they will get the most out of it by contributing fully and, although the content will be serious, the workshop will be fun to do.  Let participants know there will be cakes and coffee at the end of the workshop.
  4. If you are going to send out any pre-workshop material to participants, send it out now. Given the nature of this workshop, I probably would not send out pre-workshop material, but I would let participants know that I will send out post-workshop material (see below).

 

During the workshop

  1. Arrive at the workshop room early and make sure it is set up properly.  There are 12 people in the Commercial Dispute Resolution team.  It is always best to have smaller workshop groups, so you decide to split the team up into three groups of four.  You will know who will be attending, so prepare name cards in advance and place them on the tables.  Have plenty of post-it notes and pens on each table and a flip chart beside each table for each group to work with.
  2. After your brief introduction framing the issue to be considered, move straight on to the first activity you have planned for the team to do.
  3. Activities: I find the best approach is to start by having structured brainstorming sessions. This means you, acting as facilitator, need to supply the structure.

For example, when seeking to understand the root causes of poor delegation you might want participants to think of possible causes and group them under several headings such as ‘skills’, ‘experience’, ‘resources’, ‘time pressures’, ‘billing targets’ or ‘client expectations’ etc.

It is also usually most productive to get people to ‘work alone, but together’.  For example, ask participants to simply list what they believe is one root cause for poor delegation on a  post-note.  Participants should be encouraged to brainstorm freely, with no self editing. The purpose of this exercise is to generate as many potential ideas about root causes as possible.  Participants could do this brainstorming for, say 2 minutes, working alone and in silence.

Then after the two minutes workgroup participants put their post-it notes on their team flip chart and group them under the headings provided.  Participants can add other root cause headings if desired.

Each workgroup then has a short discussion about the points they have come up with for, say 5 minutes.

After that each workgroup does a short presentation (3 minutes maximum) of what they believe are the most important causes contributing to poor delegation within the team.

  1. At the end of all the group discussions, you as facilitator should summarise the main findings. In this example, this means that you must make sure everyone has a good understanding of the causes behind poor delegation within the team.  Take photographs of each groups flip-chart with your phone and explain this will be part of the post course material you will forward to everyone.
  2. You then move swiftly on to the next activity, aimed at understanding what tasks and activities individuals would be ready to delegate. Keep to the same broad format: structured brainstorming, while working ‘alone but together’, leading to group discussion and whole team review.

 

At the end of the workshop

  1. Summarise key findings. Hopefully, you can show that real progress has been made on improving delegation of tasks.
  2. Make sure participants commit to do follow-up work after the workshop. This could be things such as
    1. Reading the post-workshop material you will send
    2. Taking steps to delegate tasks they said they would delegate
    3. Committing to go to another workshop where everyone concerned will review the progress they have made with delegating tasks.

After the workshop

  1. Follow-up with participants by, for example,
    1. Reminding them what they achieved during the workshop by creating a workshop summary
    2. Including photographs of the flipcharts and post-it notes used during the exercises
    3. Reformatting any items they worked on into a more suitable format for day to day reference. For example, assume participants recorded in post-it notes detailed steps of tasks they were ready to delegate.  Rather than simply send only a photograph of the post-it notes, you could also create a checklist, using Microsoft Word, of all the steps to be followed for the task to be delegated and send that as well.
    4. Inviting everyone to a further workshop in a month’s time so everyone can review progress made.

 

Summary

Getting practising lawyers fully engaged in process improvement activity is often essential but difficult to achieve in practice.

A short workshop, focused on a specific problem area, can be productive.  It can also act as a gateway to further lawyer involvement in process improvement work if lawyers can see immediate results which help them in their day-to-day legal work.

This outcome does not happen by accident.  A lot of time and effort must be spent planning the workshop and ensuring support from a someone senior who can act as a sponsor.

To run a successful workshop, good facilitation skills are required as is the confidence to lead a group of demanding lawyers.

Increased confidence follows from detailed planning and knowing which workshop exercises will work best in any given situation.

If you would like to improve your legal process improvement knowledge, skills and confidence, why not sign up for one of my legal process improvement courses, which you can find out about here?

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