Legal Innovation: Bringing Legal Services and Efficient Process Management Together

Prior to my first Legal Tech & Innovation class, I had very little personal experience related to scientific/lean thinking. I assumed that people who started companies, dedicated their careers to innovation or handled project management roles simply just “had” the innate ability to do so. Clearly, that is not true, at least not to the same degree I had imagined. Early into the semester, Jeffrey Liker, a University of Michigan engineering professor and author of the best seller “The Toyota Way,” gave an introductory “lean thinking” session with our class and it completely changed how I thought about process efficiency.

After working through the KATA improvement process, the ability to utilize organizational tools to efficiently improve a process or skill became so much simpler to me. It was like I was standing on the outside looking in, and all it took for me to see the value of scientific/lean thinking was doing a nine-piece puzzle in teams and recording our “experiments” and “results” based on different process choices. However, the most interesting part of learning about the KATA process was the intensity of the first step: discovering the “current condition.”

Professor Liker explained the first step of KATA process as going to the “gemba,” or where the work gets done. He told us about how Toyota requires process managers to not just observe the production floor via spreadsheets or projections, but to physically go to the production floor and speak with those who work on it every day. This stood in such contrast to how the majority of legal processes work, it became my “ah-ha” moment. When you work with a client, you listen to them describe their legal issues and then continue to gain more insight into a matter based on the work you do, as you do it. However, when you perform scientific thinking processes, you observe everything you can about the “current condition” in order to best inform your next “action” steps. Imagine a transactional attorney setting up corporate governance documents for a company, but doing nothing for a week as they “observe” how the company functions on a daily basis in order to most efficiently handle their legal matters.

Obviously, that kind of dedication to scientific thinking may not be ideal in terms of current standards for the delivery of legal services, but where I saw the true value was when it came to augmenting those delivery processes. For our class project, my team and I are working on developing a tool for startups/entrepreneurs who wish to obtain a real human lawyer (as opposed to LegalZoom services) for traditional services (e.g., entity formation, restricted stock grants) but still have some autonomy over the billable hours they will be charged. Our first step was to go to the “gemba,” and we did so by speaking with a friend who was in the midst of working with a solo practitioner to convert his LLC into a C-corporation and handle other legal matters. His biggest complaint was that every time he had a question for his attorney and wanted to e-mail him or call him, he knew that it would cost him whether or not he could have found the answer himself. Thus, our team knew what kind of problem we needed to solve because it came straight from the horse’s mouth. We also spoke with a clinical professor at the University of Michigan Law School who agreed that empowering clients to take legal matters “into their own hands,” for lack of a better term, was a very powerful objective and we were heading down the right path.

It may seem obvious that going to the “gemba” should be the first step in any improvement process, but our Professor Dan Linna often tells stories about how many legal tech developers create tools before they go to the “gemba” and see if their solution is even right for their consumer market. As a cautionary note, do not become too consumed with understanding the “gemba” because this often leads to “perfect becoming the enemy of good,” in which you fall into a strictly observational role refusing to act until you find certainty in your understanding of a current condition. This is an easy trap to fall into, but once your current condition understanding is sufficient, it is important to start taking actions and following the KATA improvement process in order to achieve your desired results.

Ultimately, in just a few short months I have discovered the value of scientific/lean thinking and believe if the legal field adopted this kind of strategic thinking, many process improvements would naturally follow from changing the base perspective of most attorneys.