The image of the lawyer you think you want to be
Close your eyes and picture for a moment your corporate legal role model. A senior partner you would look up to. Someone for whom you would be honored to burn the midnight oil. Depending on your personality and sense of aesthetics, you might picture a suave, well-dressed, merger machine with a steely glint in their eye and a winning handshake.
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| Lawyer archetype: "The Specter" Image generated using: DALL-E |
Or perhaps you are inspired by the professorial type, a rumpled intellectual who mumbles bons-mots and directs affairs from beneath a stack of obscure journal articles.
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| Lawyer archetype: The "Atticus" Image generated using: DALL-E |
Either way, I'm willing to bet that, whatever your mental image, you picture the best lawyers as being brilliant - perhaps virtuosic, perhaps scholarly - but certainly they should be devilishly sharp and bordering on genius.
The image of the lawyer that I want to hire
If you ask me, as a client, to picture my ideal corporate lawyer, the one who I want looking out for me… I can't!
Because as long as they are personal, presentable and available I'm fine with it. Oh… and organized. Because, in business - as in sports - genius is fun to watch but a pain to work with. And for all but the rarest, most extreme situations, good systems are a more reliable path to success than great ideas. That's not to say smarts aren't important. They certainly are. But to deliver anything at scale, you need to be able to set up processes that take care of 80% of any given workload, so you can devote your precious, high-quality, very expensive brain to the 20% that's really worth your time.
Process: The beating heart of a winning system
Process is a bigger part of legal work than many lawyers realize (or admit), and I believe it comes in two distinct flavours.
The first involves sequencing actions within an individual matter. Legal systems have processes for managing cases, where one action formally triggers another one. Every transaction has a beginning, middle and end, and specific actions, exchanges and documentation associated with each phase. The better your system for moving through those steps, reliably, quickly and cheaply, the more value you can deliver to your client.
The second involves optimizing repeatable actions at scale. Many kinds of legal work are in fact volume-based industrial processes, in which efficiency of cost and effort become crucial. If you are in-house counsel at a commercial bank, you might be overseeing the review of dozens of loan applications a day. If you are leading a due diligence team on a mega-merger, you might need to get ten associates to review 10,000 document in ten days.
Tools and techniques for managing processes
So it's worth understanding, studying, and practicing some of the lessons from the world of operations management. As usual, there are better teachers than me whom you should turn to. I suggest you take a look at Work Clean by Dan Charnas and High Output Management by Andy Grove. But let me give you a very basic introduction to some helpful ideas.
Sequencing actions within an individual matter
- Mapping a process: Start by capturing all the steps involved, from start to finish. You can do this with a simple list, but for some complex processes you may find that a diagramme works better.
- Swimlanes: Layer up the list of actions by tagging them with the names of the teams or individuals who are responsible for completing them.
- Gantt charts and critical paths: Arrange this information on a timeline, and identify dependencies - things that must be completed in order for other things to begin. This sequence of necessary actions is the "critical path".
- Controls and feedback loops: Identify where in the process you are going to introduce a control mechanism to make sure that the process is operating correctly, and to make corrections if it is not.
Optimizing repeatable actions at scale
- Capacity: When running a process at scale, the capacity of the system overall system is very important. How many units can be churned through in an hour, a day, a week? But it's also important to measure the capacity at different points in the process.
- Bottlenecks: When you measure throughput at different stages of the production process, you will discover which areas have lower capacity than others. These are the bottlenecks. Since the capacity of the system is limited to the capacity of the bottleneck, this is where you should concentrate your efforts if you want to improve capacity.
- Planning and resourcing: Think of a production process as meeting a demand. Demand for the process might be seasonal, or driven by certain events. Understanding how demand for the outputs of a system fluctuate over time will help you understand what resources need to be devoted to running the process, or what investments need to be made in improving capacity.
Getting started
The tools and techniques mentioned above are very useful, but may take some time to get the hang of. You may find it's easier to start small, by experimenting with them in your own workflows.
Start with your own physical space and personal habits: Have you organized your desk? Can you log in to the software and systems you need without fumbling for your passwords every morning? Do you fill out your timesheets reliably?
Once you have mastered your own routines, you can start mapping out the processes that are embedded in the work that you are connected to: When a new matter shows up in your inbox, what are the first three things that you should do? What are the actions needed to complete the task? Who needs to complete those actions, and by when?
As you spend some time in your role, you will start to notice some activities are routine and repeatable at a team or organizational level. Perhaps there is an annual audit of case files, or a monthly billing process. Does it get done smoothly every time? Are there issues that get in the way every month?
Slowly, you will train your eye to spot inefficiencies, bottlenecks, backlogs. Once you do, you will start to think about ways to alleviate those problems. You will start to understand the importance of buffering, of batching, of choosing the right point in the process for quality control.
Not all of these will be within your control. There are some things you can fix yourself, others will need to be suggestions to the person in charge of the process, and some are things you may just have to work around. But at least being aware of the mechanics of a process is a huge advantage.
A word of encouragement
This might all sound a little unglamorous. But it's how you get results. And remember that some of the most wonderful, intricate, elaborate and beautiful things in life are the result of carefully run systems, not individual inspiration or brilliance. If you have ever eaten a fancy meal at an expensive restaurant run by a superstar chef, you should recognize that possibly no part of your incredible experience was personally delivered by the maestro. In fact, every aspect of it was the result of careful precise, co-ordination, and a disciplined adherence to process.
If you are able to cultivate a process management mindset, stay organised, and build efficient production lines for getting work done, your career will hinge less on the occasional spectacular win, and more on the reliable, serene, consistent and constant ability to deliver.