There is a wealth of tools out there designed to streamline your workflow, easy to pick up and capable of adapting in countless ways as you master them. A personal favorite of mine is the Kanban board. I've been championing it for years, often introducing it to folks for the first time. Today, Kanban boards have gained widespread popularity, with numerous software options available to create your own.In this week's episode, we're going back to Kanban basics, offering insights perfect for both newbies and seasoned users. I'll highlight two key types of Kanban boards that could revolutionize your law practice. Plus, I'll pass on some hands-on advice that I've shared
The Agile Attorney Blog
Are you hitting roadblocks in your legal delivery systems because of stubborn bottlenecks that disrupt the flow of work? It feels like every new solution out there promises smoother operations, yet often, they just end up shifting the problem elsewhere.In today’s episode, I’m going to guide you through the most effective strategies for getting work to move seamlessly through your system again. We’ll take a close look at the bottleneck areas in your law practice and discuss why making improvements in the wrong areas doesn’t really cut it.Join me as we explore how to identify those bottlenecks in your law firm and address them effectively. I’ll share some practical tools
I sat down with Chad Main of legal technology company Percipient for his Technically Legal Podcast. Chad was a great interviewer because he uses Agile practices in his own work, and he got me to break down some of the basics of Agile and Kanban for lawyers who may be new to the concepts. We give a high-level overview of Agile overall, and then dive into the core practices of the Kanban method, including:Making work visible with kanban boards; The value of a daily standup meeting (and other tools for effective team communication); The importance of WIP Limits (work in process limits); andWhy lawyers should invest more of their efforts on
If you're feeling overwhelmed or overburdened in your law practice, it may be a sign that you're operating beyond your current capacity. Capacity is a multifaceted concept, encompassing time, energy, skill, knowledge, and more. This week, I focus on having an honest reckoning with capacity, focusing on the relationship between capacity, priority and overwhelm.Often, when discussing capacity, the emphasis is on expansion or addition. While this isn't inherently incorrect, it can be a challenging starting point. To effectively scale the capacity of your business or firm, it's crucial to first understand your existing capacity. In this episode, I provide tools to help you get back within a comfortable capacity and
Do you ever feel discouraged or overwhelmed by the amount of unfinished work in your law practice? Are you ever juggling so many balls that you’re worried something is going to drop and you may not notice when it does? If so, you’re in the right place. The Agile Attorney podcast is being revived, and each week, I’ll be offering ideas, practices, and principles to help professionals like you infuse Agility into their legal practices.Over the past decade, I have helped lawyers and legal teams harness the tools of modern entrepreneurship to build practices that are profitable, scalable, and sustainable for themselves and their communities. It all starts with becoming
Anyone who has been around the Access to Justice space for more than a few months has likely run into one or more efforts to help people with criminal records expungement. And with good reason — even a decades-old criminal conviction on a person's record can create substantial barriers to finding housing, employment, and a range of other services and privileges.Here in Oregon, we're fortunate that a host of factors has combined to make records expungement easier than ever. I won't get the order of events quite right, but they include:Then-new lawyer Michael Zhang (himself a software coder) combined forces with Code for PDX's Jordan Whitte, Kent Shikama, and a
A few weeks ago I had a great interview with Mountain Goat Software's Brian Milner for his Agile Mentors Podcast, and I'm happy to announce that our episode is live. Most of the podcast interviews I do are from folks who are catering to lawyers and the legal operations crowd, so it was a fun change to talk with someone who is primarily focused on Agile in the technology space. Brian was especially interested in why I think Kanban is a better solution than Scrum for most situations in the legal space, especially as a tool for reducing overwhelm in an overburdened law practice.A few other points we cover:How a kanban
Several months ago a legaltech friend asked me to read through their in-progress e-book on the role of generative artificial intelligence in in-house legal workflows. The first several chapters were a useful background on AI and its potential uses for general counsels and their teams, but I physically recoiled when I got to the first sentence of the chapter on "How to Implement AI." "Because generative AI is such a revolutionary technology, implementing it correctly requires special considerations and a new approach." I highlighted the sentence in the Google Doc and at-mentioned the author with a one-word comment, "Why?" This led to a substantial re-write of that and several other
A couple of months ago I had a fanboy moment. Jonathan Stark is someone I’ve been listening to (and reading) for nearly a decade. He’s the prolific host of the Ditching Hourly and Business of Authority podcasts, author of the excellent book Hourly Billing is Nuts, and a proponent of sending daily emails to your list. (Those of you who have followed me for awhile know that I tried and failed at the daily email thing). In any event, Jonathan reached out to ME with an invitation to chat on his Ditching Hourly podcast, so of course I said yes. And it was not a bash session on the billable hour. Jonathan and I more or less agreed that there
Ernie founded the 80/20 Principle podcast where he discusses law firm practice management and how to create better systems in law firms. I joined him to discuss the Kanban method for visualizing workflows, the concept of Kaizen for continuous incremental improvement, and practical strategies for optimizing law firm operations. In our discussion, we dissected the concept of bottlenecks in your workflow and demonstrated how fixing the worst offender can drastically improve your entire system. Delve into systems theory, feedback loops, and the Goldilocks zone, where information is just right. We also identified the three high-level systems of a law practice and reveal how improving just one of these systems can
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