How many law firms can you say have displayed lean or agile principles? What would you say if you saw Lean principles and Agile values being displayed at your lawyers office - with stickies on the wall and teams of lawyers, legal secretaries, and senior partners all around a whiteboard "storming" on a case to help them win? Well this is my reality. Having left a large company doing Scrum across their 10 software teams building insurance software and moving to a small law firm of about 10, this is becoming a reality and way of working for us. Use of Lean and Agile principles outside of software development is happening in all sorts of areas - and I am actively trying to bring the legal practice into the 21st Century! Terms like collaborative, cross functional, transparency, maximizing flow are not terms you generally hear in a law firm, but that is all changing with law firms also needing to become more innovative and leading edge when it comes to reducing clients costs, delivering what the client wants, and understanding their clients needs clearly and effectively.

1. PRESTIGE LAWYERS
LEAN IN THE LAW FIRM
Applying Agile Outside SW Development
By Stephen Reed
@ScrumMasterNZ
stephen@prestigelawyers.co.nz

2. 2 Goals
• What we did in the Law Firm?
• What you could do for
other industries?

3. OUR TEAM

4. Why Agile / Lean?
“I try to embody the principles I believe in, and engage people in
dialog, figuring out what the real problems are that need to be
solved…
When a root problem is well understood, the solution will emerge
from the people engaged in the problem. Not from the managers or
experts or … “
- Tobias Mayer, March 31, 2012
• I’ve been in Agile/Lean for a bit now, and harping on about it to
my wife for years, which I think has paid off!
• It was natural to bring “what works” to the law firm, why not?

5. CLIENT FOCUS
• Our focus is solely the clients needs – not our need to win at any
cost – we still need to run the Law Firm after each matter closes -
win or lose.
• High Quality service
• Highly skilled practitioners
• Over worked with heavy workload that is reactive
• We decided to focus the business model on niche migrant market,
Mandarin speaking, those wanting to come to NZ themselves or
bring their families, their businesses, and their issues.
• What could we do to reduce the stress of managing the workload?

6. Visualizing the Work

7. Lots of Work…

8. CHANGE the MINDSET

9. Space to Think

10. Collaborative Spaces

11. Review the WIP

12. Daily Standup

13. STRONG Leadership
• Allows individuals to contribute and challenge the leadership
and how the case may be won
• Discussion is encouraged, and even expected of professionals
in a Legal career
• Your own approach created from proven case law and methods
is encouraged and expected from you being a lawyer
• ALWAYS for our clients interests – but within the law

14. accountability

15. Accountability
• Started seeing more accountability once everyone knew
what was being worked on
• We split the work up – created a team workload for large
cases,
• This created more accountability / redundancy in the
system

16. Use of Tools
Started using an electronic tool for managing the WIP – Kanbanize.com as it was free & easy to
use – integrated into our daily toolset.

17. Gather / Review Metrics

18. A LAW FIRM In The Cloud

19. Lean in the Law Firm
• Strong Leadership
• Fostering the team through empowering them
• Visualizing the work
• Limiting the WIP
• Iterative progression of the work
• Staying disciplined and focused (self organized)
• Utilizing tools to enhance the work
• Retrospectives of success & failures

20. Remember to have Fun

21. AGILE – LEAN
Practitioners
• Who are we – really?
• Does our belief in Agile / Lean / Lean Startup applicable?
In the room use these questions to discuss in pairs:
• Take 1 of the businesses you came up with before and discuss
which agile/lean techniques could they use to help them?
• Do they need our help – or would they be open to change?

22. Other Industries…
ACCOUNTANTS / ARCHITECTS…
I’m working with mine now…

23. PRESTIGE LAWYERS
LEAN IN THE LAW FIRM
By Stephen Reed
@ScrumMasterNZ
stephen@prestigelawyers.co.nz