ADDING VALUE OR WASTE?
By Karen Dunn Skinner and David Skinner
Over the first three articles in this series, we’ve explored the eight classic DOWNTIME wastes or, as we like to call it, the eight ways you’re losing time and money in your law practice. Our objective: we want you to look at your practice through the optic of value and waste. Is the activity or task you’re doing adding value to the practice? If not, it’s waste.
To improve your productivity (without working harder), you need to identify the waste in your daily work and then reduce or eliminate it. The DOWNTIME framework helps you identify waste.
Each letter in DOWNTIME stands for a different category of waste:
1. Defects
2. Over-production
3. Waiting
4. Non-utilized talent
5. Transportation
6. Inventory
7. Motion
8. Extra Processing
Every waste you spot in your practice is an opportunity for improvement. Today, we’re going to walk you through an easy waste-finding exercise you can do with your team. Step 1: Prepare your team
Select a process that you’d like to improve. Think about a workflow or a process in your firm that seems to take too long or feels more complicated than it should.
Start small, ideally with a process from one of the bookends of your practice. Your bookends are all the administrative tasks that happen before you begin the legal work (like intake and file opening) and everything that happens once the legal work is done (like billing and collections). Improving a bookend process will impact every matter that comes through your firm, so you’ll get more return for your improvement efforts.
Get your team together (if you have one). Ensure you include people who work actively in the process you’re trying to improve. They will know where the problems are, and they’ll likely have lots of ideas for how to fix them.
Ask the team to read this series of articles and give everyone our free guide: Eight Ways You’re Losing Time & Money in your Law Firm.
Step 2: Hold a working session
Get your team together for an Eight Wastes working session. Review the guide with them and then challenge them to come up with as many examples of each waste as they can in your target process.
Capture them all. We like to use large flip charts, one for each DOWNTIME waste. Write them down. Once people get going, you’re likely to generate a large list. That’s great!
We run a session like this in every project we do. In one firm, the team identified 18 flip-chart pages of problems with one matter type. The Practice Group Leader was shocked and upset. For there to be so much frustration and waste, she thought she must have failed her team. But remember, every waste you identify is an opportunity to improve. She wasn’t responsible for the problems her team spotted. She didn’t even know about most of them. But as soon as she found out, she and the team were able to develop solutions that ultimately made the entire process better for everyone.
Step 3: Go on a waste walk
Take the team on a tour of the area of your firm where the work gets done. Sometimes, you need to see the office space itself and talk to others working there. Ask questions about the work environment: is there enough light? Is there enough space? Are there stacks of boxes in the hallways that get in people’s way? Are the printers too far away?
We do a waste walk in every on-site project.
We have discovered brand-new open-plan offices where the light was so bright and the acoustics so bad that people had to wear sunglasses and headphones to get work done.
We’ve found printers located so far away from work zones that paralegals were walking 50-75 yards each way, as many as 50 times a day, every time they needed to print something (instant improvement: we relocated the printer). The solution was obvious, but until they’d walked the process with us, they’d just never seen the problem. They were simply working as they’d always worked.
Never underestimate the power of visiting the areas where the work gets done. And if your team is remote, get each person to talk through their workspace. Are there things in their environment that interfere with their productivity? If so, are there ways you can fix those things? Obviously, it’s different when people aren’t in your office, but you may still find ways to improve.
You’ve found the waste…now what?
After your working session and your waste walk, you’ll likely have a long list of improvement opportunities…probably more than you can handle.
You need to prioritize and then start knocking them off one by one.
Start by asking your team if they could fix one thing on the list, what would it be and why. Your goal is to get consensus on the issues that are having the biggest impact on your team’s productivity. Ask them: Which ones are preventing you from delivering on a must-have for your clients or your firm? Which ones are the biggest frustraters?
Once you’ve narrowed it down to 2 or 3 things, you’ll want to determine why the problems are happening and develop solutions to the root causes. We recommend the Five Why technique. It’s an easy tool you can use with your team. Learn more here.
When you understand the root causes of the issues you and your team have identified, you’ll be able to brainstorm solutions that address the real problem rather than the symptoms.
Test your solutions, tweak them as necessary, and then move on to the next issue on your list.
The Eight Wastes in Action
When you work with your team, you’ll often be able to identify really simple solutions that have a big impact. Here’s one example of a team that saved hundreds of hours of wasted attorney time with an inexpensive scanner and a small process change:
Our client wanted to improve the productivity and profitability of their real estate conveyancing process. During an Eight Wastes working session, they identified a very big issue that was causing them to lose valuable attorney time at every signing. Why? Because local bar rules required that lawyers check client IDs before signing. When clients arrived, the partner running the signing would take the client’s ID, go to the printer, scan it, and upload it to the client’s file. This could take as much as 15 minutes. The practice was doing over 1,800 transactions a year; they were losing a lot of lawyer time.
The team dug deeper and asked why the receptionist didn’t do the scanning. Answer: because there wasn’t a scanner at Reception. The firm bought an inexpensive desk-top scanner and instituted a new process: the receptionist notifies the attorney when the client arrives. While the client waits, the receptionist collects their ID, scans it directly to the client’s file, and hands it to the attorney when she comes to Reception to meet the client. The attorney checks the ID as she hands it back to her client. All bar requirements are met and no attorney time is wasted.
This was a quick and inexpensive solution that saved the firm over 400 hours of attorney time every year, all for the cost of a desktop scanner. It was a great example of how quickly a team can use the Eight Wastes to identify and then solve inefficiencies in a law practice.
DOWNTIME is one of the most valuable tools in your improvement toolbox. You can use it alone or with your team. It’s easy to use and it doesn’t require a lot of training or any special software.
As you strive to improve the productivity and profitability of your practice, use the resources in this series. Review the articles, download the Eight Wastes Guide and block off time to do a waste-finding exercise with your team. You will undoubtedly discover a long list of opportunities to improve your practice.
If you’d like more information or you’d like help building a more profitable and productive practice, book a free strategy session with us.
About the Authors
Karen Dunn Skinner and David Skinner help lawyers earn more from their practices without working as hard. They believe every lawyer deserves a successful practice and the freedom to enjoy that success.
Together, they founded Gimbal Lean Practice Management Advisors after practicing law for more than 20 years in Canada and Europe. They’re the exclusive Global Advisors on Legal Process Improvement to the International Institute of Legal Project Management, and Karen sits on the IILPM’s Global Advisory Council.
Karen and David are global leaders in the application of Lean to the legal profession. They write and speak regularly, facilitate legal process improvement projects, and have taught Gimbal’s proven LeanLegal® approach to thousands of legal professionals around the world.
They combine their deep understanding of the legal industry with their training in Lean Six Sigma to provide practical solutions to the competitive and budgetary pressures on practitioners and clients alike.
Karen and David live in Montreal.
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