Think Differently, Work Smarter with New Legal IT Systems

In-house workshop: How "lean and agile thinking" can make your practice more competitive and profitable.

You want your people to "work smarter" to make your practice more competitive and profitable.  To achieve this, it is increasingly critical to make the best possible use of the new tools available in new legal technology and to harness the very different, flexible and collaborative working environment that creates new opportunities and challenges.  

Why introduce your people to "Lean Thinking"? 

This introductory workshop will enable your practice to decide to what extent you want to adopt "lean and agile" thinking across your practice; also how best to approach that initiative. Some of the benefits you can hope to achieve by getting this right include development of the capability to:

• Enable existing people to handle more work – (about best use of skills and resources)

• Release time to let lawyers add more value for clients

• Introduce more competitive prices, whilst you retain or improve margins.

• Improve client satisfaction by delivering more of what clients value.

• Innovate more , developing new services and and methods of delivery.

• Make internal processes as efficient as possible - simple, not complicated. 

• Deliver consistently great client service across the practice.

• Ensure consistency in operations across the business , probably benchmarking to compare different parts.

• Develop a better working environment for people.

• Reduce stress and pressure on your people.

• Create more time for high level fee earners to handle more high level work and to get more involved in developing business too.

Introduce new thinking BEFORE you implement new tech and systems.

Introducing new practice and case management systems should be the catalyst for initiatives that prompt a fresh, radical rethink of how people work, communicate, collaborate, promote themselves and much more; to find new and better ways to deliver more of what clients want at a lower cost to your practice.

Lawyers often let this opportunity pass by; or leave it too late, so only marginal process improvements are made to old, outdated ways of working.  Don't let that happen to you!

We can help your people (lawyers and everyone else too) to see the opportunities and untapped potential to handle their work and relationships with clients more effectively, adding fresh eyes, a different perspective focused on clients; and management tools that have been proven in other business sectors, but are still new to the legal sector.

You want to decide how the client's experience can be improved at all the touchpoints during a transaction, what steps should change, who is best equipped to do the work, where more collaboration and integration with clients (and internally) would add value ... and much more. Engage people across your practice in the thinking to capitalise on and share experience to define "best practice" and build it into the culture of your practice.  That's what creates the best competitive advantage; embedded in your people, so this is not easily replicated.

THE WORKSHOP

Delegates: This is an in-house workshop, ideally for up to 12 people. It generally includes a group of department/group managers and some members of the exec team, so they can engage effectively early on in any "lean" initiative that follows.

Presented & facilitated by :  Dr. Lee Williams and Allan Carton .

Content:   

• We agree our brief based on your plans and initiatives you want to get under way; then run a half-day workshop to introduce “Lean and Agile thinking”. We explore with your people how adopting Lean thinking can help them take a fresh approach to implementing ways of working that can add value for clients, improve internal operations at your practice; also reducing stress and improving profitability.  

• We establish and maintain a link between business objective s, plans for IT and opportunities for business improvement, providing delegates with new ways to explore potential to improve processes and to develop a tangible picture of the benefits of investing in lean thinking.

• Key components explored, to help you meet your defined business objectives include opportunities to improve teamwork across functional boundaries; eliminate wasted time and effort; prioritise and target “low hanging fruit”; increase customer focus, making it possible to do more; develop process thinking; improve the quality of work that people do; plan strategically for improvement; focus on process first, not technology … at this stage; improve communication and maintain longer term continuous improvements; and financial measures to justify investment – cost v benefit.

• We introduce more detail around some specifics of lean , such as the wastes that law firms should tackle, how to run a "Lean Workout", process mapping, SIPOC - and How to convert process maps into working practice.

• The role of people and management as we can’t improve process without getting this right. Lean is at lease as much about "people" as "process".

• How to avoid going to back to “business as usual” , measure and monitor progress to make results tangible and fill the gaps in skills and understanding as projects progress.

This workshop enables your lawyers to understand how to "work smarter" in every area of your practice and identifies ways to provide clients with substantially more of what they value.  Few lawyers have considered this effectively yet to anything like the extent of other industries and business sectors; so this is an opportunity to take a big step ahead of your competitors.