Continuous Improvement is a structured and logical approach to analysing and improving how people work. It is not new: in fact, it can trace its history back over 100 years to the manufacturing innovations that heralded mass production, but adoption in the legal industry is still rare.
Kaizen’s objective is to be the preferred partner of choice for law firms at the forefront of the deployment of Continuous Improvement techniques in the legal sector.
“If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you are doing.” - W. Edwards Deming
Continuous Improvement is a combination of the well-established process improvement methodologies of ‘lean’ (which is about doing the right things) and ‘six sigma’ (which is about doing those things right). Continuous Improvement is more than just process mapping; it is a collaborative approach where an expert in the tools and techniques of Continuous Improvement helps a group of people familiar with the relevant task to analyse what they are doing and to find ways of doing it better. Put simply, it involves applying scientific rigour to determine the best approach to carrying out a piece of work. The starting point for any Continuous Improvement project is the ‘voice of the client’: establishing what the client wants, what they value and making sure that is precisely what is delivered every time.
Despite the fact that process improvement principles are now used in many different walks of life, it is rare to hear lawyers discussing a ‘value stream map’ or seeking out the input of a ‘black belt’, the experts in this craft.
However, the legal sector is now undergoing a number of important developments that are likely to change this. The increased emphasis on value is most certainly a driver. Many organisations are seeking to control carefully their legal spend. They are looking to their law firms for discounts or other fee arrangements to help reduce costs. Efficiency improvements can often have the same effect.
Equally important to clients is finding a better, more sustainable way of doing things. Simpler, more manageable, transparent, predictable and, indeed, faster delivery of projects and transactions brings huge benefits to in-house legal teams pressurised by their own constrained resource and ever-broadening responsibilities.
Another critical shift is that legal advice is now seen as a more integral element of the commercial picture. The scope of the legal advice required is adjusted to match the risk of the matter, meaning that it is no longer a fixed or absolute concept; the legal dimension has become another consideration in the matrix that will decide whether a transaction, or particular course of action, is attractive or feasible. As a result, lawyers have become part of the process and legal fees part of the financial model – creating greater expectations of flexibility on behalf of external advisors to ensure their input and effort are commensurate with the client’s need.
As a result of these factors it is becoming increasingly important for external lawyers to have both an in-depth understanding of their clients’ business as well as a good grasp of their processes. It is only in this way that the client and its legal advisers will be able to work effectively as an integrated team. While excellence of legal advice remains critical, how a firm works can, in fact, be a significant differentiator.
Based on our positive experiences to date, we expect the journey towards increased efficiency, supported by Continuous Improvement methodologies, to continue to gather pace.
Continuous Improvement will, at some point, change from being something that we do ‘to’ the way we work and will simply become the way we work. This will involve an even greater focus on understanding the client’s particular requirements for each piece of work. We expect to see our legal teams increasingly incorporated into the client’s team, not as a supplier or external adviser, but as an integral element of the transaction.
This type of thinking will bring our lawyers closer to their clients and their way of thinking. Our best lawyers already have strong commercial sense – a focus on efficiency reinforces that understanding, and helps them to develop greater business awareness across their entire teams and from earlier on in a lawyer’s career.
Even at the high end, where legal work is characterised by complexity, it will become more project managed and process-driven with procedures in place to measure and control the performance of each step in the process. As a result of this increased transparency of process, we are likely to see greater involvement of a range of talent from within the law firm with professionals, other than lawyers, bringing their particular area of expertise and Continuous Improvement skills to bear in the effective delivery of legal services.
A deeper understanding of the legal process, and greater transparency about the steps involved, may also be a driver for a fundamental shift in the way in which law firms and their clients value and price legal services.
Continuous Improvement may have been a long time coming to legal services but we fully believe it will become integral to how many private practice and in-house teams work over the next few years.
Kaizen Talent Solutions is at the forefront of partnering with pioneering firms in the deployment of Continuous Improvement techniques in the legal sector. One of Kaizen’s first successes was recruiting Martin Cox as Business Improvement Director at Shoosmiths, a top 40 UK Law firm. The Business Improvement team provides a new opportunity for the firm and its’ strategy is designed to build strong foundations whilst delivering improvements that help meet the firms’ vision and ambition. Creating a culture of business improvement is a long term goal but aligns to their existing client strategy, brand, values and foundations. This is pioneering and innovative stuff – in my search exercise for Shoosmiths I discovered very little had been done in CI outside of the ‘Magic Circle’ and London. I look forward to continuing partnering with Shoosmiths on building their BI team in the future and helping them be at the forefront of the deployment of Continuous Improvement techniques in the legal sector.