How Kanban can help Lawyers
Key problems faced by lawyers
The legal industry is facing a number of problems relating to how they manage their work. These problems include:
- Overburdening – Faced with too much work and tight time constraints, lawyers are working longer and harder than they necessarily should
- Context switching – Switching between different clients and different aspects of the law causes a drain on time and capacity
- Dependencies – there are so many people you need to coordinate with – clients, regulatory bodies other parties which tend to block work from being completed
- For managers, maintaining staff levels and avoid high staff churn
- Predictability is also problematic due to all of the things above – making it difficult to keep commitments
COVID has exacerbated many of these things – with increasing demand from clients and “the great resignation” putting additional stress on practitioners.
How Kanban can help
Kanban uses visual management create greater transparency in the work so that we can “see” all that invisible hard work that lawyers go through on a daily basis. We use cadences to ensure we’re taking on the right amount and the right type of work. They also assist to ensure that it flows back out to clients to meet their expectations. Kanban can help you create a more predictable system, even in complex environments with different client needs. This ensures that you can keep the commitments to your clients.
How to get started
You can learn about Kanban and how to start it with your group of lawyers. Whether you’re an in-house team or in private practice, our training has been tailored to the needs of these specific practices. If there are just one or two of you, you can participate in public training or if you have a group, please contact us below for a private training session.
- Legal Kanban Practitioner – a new course aimed to get legal professionals started with kanban.
We also offer consulting to support you in a number of ways:
- helping to get you started with the process
- checking in along the way to make sure you keep focused on the right things and deal with any issues as they arise
- examine how it can fit with existing tooling or introduce new tooling to enable better practices and behaviours
- coaching for lawyers / practice managers on how they can successfully lead changes to reach the desired outcomes
