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 ... (Keep reading)
The Agile Attorney Blog
One of my coaching clients, Ben Hudson, and I joined Melissa Shanahan on her Law Owners Podcast and had a great conversation. Read what Melissa says about the episode here: Do you ever wonder what kind of impact having an expert by your side can have on your practice? What are the similarities between the processes Melissa teaches in Velocity Work and other experts in the field? Can you apply different approaches and see results in your firm? This week, you’re hearing Melissa’s conversation with Mastery Group member Ben Hudson of Hudson Law and John Grant of Agile Attorney Consulting who you recently heard on the podcast. Ben has worked with ... (Keep reading)
The Oregon Court of Appeals recently issued an opinion vacating and remanding a trial court's modification of a prior parenting time order due to "an internal inconsistency as to the number of overnights that the child is to spend with each parent." A short version of the facts: Both parents appeared at the modification trial pro se. In the bench trial, the judge relied on the father's (mistaken) interpretation of the couple's existing parenting plan instead of taking the time to understand the plan himself. The judge issued an oral ruling granting mother slightly more parenting time than father (4 days a week to mother, 3 to father). With no ... (Keep reading)
Pioneers and Pathfinders is a podcast about the people driving change in the legal industry. I was honored to be invited on the show earlier this year. Stephen Poor and I talked about: What I learned from working in tech The need for human connection in the A2J space Applying Kanban principles to legal organizations How I helps attorneys with overwhelming workloads You can listen to the episode on Seyfarth’s Podcast Page, or at any of the links below: Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Spotify ... (Keep reading)
I joined Melissa Shanahan from Velocity Work for an episode of her Law Firm Owner podcast. We dive into the importance of looking at your practice through the lens of your client and their experience. You’ll hear why doing this inherently forces better quality legal work, how he’s navigated shifting to a client-first approach in his business, and how unbundling your business internally has the potential to help you up-level client satisfaction. What You’ll Discover: • What the Kanban board entails. • The value of divorcing your business model from the act of examining the components of your delivery pipeline. • What happens if you solely focus on expanding your skillset and knowledge ... (Keep reading)
This is part of my series where I try to help anonymous strangers on Reddit (as u/AgileAtty). You can find the original post here. This is my answer to a follow-up question; the original question is in my Part 1 post. Thank you for this wonderful reply. We are tracking these metrics on spreadsheets and need to rely on the data more seriously to make decisions. Question for you, excluding partner salaries, what do you see as a typical range of overhead costs at a firm that does $3-5m in revenue? $600K to $1m in overhead? Remainder in profit? I'm not aware of any well-designed study that would give us the ... (Keep reading)
This is part of my series where I try to help anonymous strangers on Reddit (as u/AgileAtty). You can find the original post here. There was a follow-up question in the comments which I also answered in part 2 of this thread. How does your firm determine when to hire a new attorney? Do you look at cases per attorney, new cases filed and project out, or some other metrics? New attorneys mean more overhead but also more firepower so it seems to be a balancing act that I haven't quite figured out yet. Add to the complication the determination as to whether to hire an attorney vs paralegal. Any good ... (Keep reading)
Software company VersionOne (now part of Digital.ai) has conducted an annual State of Agile survey for 16 years now, and I thought I'd share a few tidbits from this year's report. While it is still heavily weighted towards the tech sector (where Agile methods are widely used), it is the best long-term gauge we have on Agile adoption overall.The biggest news for those of us on the Kanban bandwagon: "Kanban use has exploded from 7% in the 14th survey to 56% in the current [16th] survey."This makes sense in the context of another of the report's findings, that "Agile continues to extend beyond the original software development or IT team to cross-functional ... (Keep reading)
As we close out 2022, I've now spent over 8 years trying to convince lawyers and other legal professionals to use kanban boards — and the Kanban methodology more broadly — in their law practices. Back when I started, my biggest challenge was getting people to recognize that Kanban was even a thing. Much of my outreach focused on getting people to make a kanban board for the first time. I even made a Vine about it (remember Vine?):Ahh, the satisfying schlup of a sticky note unsticking.These days, the challenge is different. Kanban boards are kinda everywhere — well, in a lot of places at least. Software teams have been using ... (Keep reading)
Jonah Perlin asked me to be on his podcast and I didn't hesitate to accept the invitation. We discussed my path to law, my work in the tech industry before going to law school, and my work now counseling lawyers to work smarter not harder using process-oriented frameworks.You can listen to the episode on How I Lawyer's Podcast Page, or at any of the links below:Apple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyOvercast ... (Keep reading)
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