The Agile Attorney Podcast

If you’re like a lot of attorneys, one of the more significant sources of overwhelm in your law practice comes from the sheer volume of emails and other communications you have to process in the course of your day.

In today’s episode, I share my recommendations for designing a better communications policy for creating more effective, efficient communications that will ultimately reduce the administrative overhead of dealing with email, Slack, Teams, or other related tools. I also share how to get hold of a downloadable template for creating your own communication policy in your law practice, prefilled with recommendations from this episode.

For full show notes, transcript, and more information, visit: https://www.agileattorney.com/13

One of the hardest things to recognize in a law practice is how the default way in which lawyers approach and deliver their work creates barriers to access for everyday people trying to reach that lawyer’s services. So, how do you identify it and what can you do about it?

This week, Alexandra Devendra, founder of design-focused B Corp law firm Aligned Law and I discuss the design elements that help meet your clients’ human needs. We explore Alix’s passion for organizational design, development, and alternative ownership models, and Alix shares her tips and tricks for more intentional design in your law practice.

For full show notes, transcript, and more information, visit: https://www.agileattorney.com/12

How do you know that you’ve done enough to meet the standards you’ve set for your law practice? Today, I have two specific tools that work beautifully together and amount to a specific type of quality standard policy that you can implement within your law practice.

Tune in this week as I share two important parts of the Agile Framework - Definition of Done and Definition of Ready. I’m discussing the role that checklists play in coming up with your Definition of Done and Definition of Ready, and you’ll learn how these tools help you ensure the flow of work and client-facing deliverables through your systems.

For full show notes, transcript, and more information, visit: https://www.agileattorney.com/11

If you don’t have explicit policies, it becomes incredibly difficult to develop any consistency around how and when you deliver your work.

Tune in this week to discover the importance of establishing simple but clear policies in your law practice. Those policies are going to be the key to improving the quality and consistency of your work product and your workflow. You’ll learn two different ways to think about policies that can help you accomplish the same thing, but ultimately, I think one of them is more powerful than the other.

For full show notes, transcript, and more information, visit: https://www.agileattorney.com/10

What if the best way to improve the efficiency of your law practice is to not try to improve efficiency at all, but to focus on quality instead? This may sound paradoxical, but focusing on quality, not efficiency, is the key to unlocking more balanced workloads, smoother workflow, increased capacity, and ultimately greater efficiency while delivering an improved client experience along the way.

On today’s show, I'm musing on why I believe quality improvement and process improvement are the same thing. Plus, I'm sharing the cascade of events that occurs when you focus on defining and prioritizing quality in your services and deliverables.

For full show notes, transcript, and more information, visit: https://www.agileattorney.com/9

Dave Maxfield, co-author ofThe Lean Law Firm, joins me today to provide an interesting look into how lawyers can adopt techniques from the Lean methodology to empower and improve their law practices.

Tune in this week to discover how to take lean production systems of global production lines and use them to improve your law practice. We’re discussing the potential efficiency pitfalls of hourly billing, Dave’s simple formula for making changes that increase revenue, and we’re analyzing the things that prevent law firms from being as efficient and profitable as they could be.

For full show notes, transcript, and more information, visit: https://www.agileattorney.com/8

Streamlining processes in your law practice makes sense. It saves you and your team precious time and energy and keeps the backend running smoothly. However, optimizing a system for efficiency doesn’t always go down well with clients. In fact, it can reduce customer value and loyalty, leaving them disengaged from the process you’re helping them through.

Tune in this week to discover how you might unknowingly be alienating your customers in an effort to have efficient systems in your law firm. I’m discussing how to find the line that separates efficiency and customer value, and you’ll learn how to help customers see intrinsic value in becoming part of your streamlined systems.

For full show notes, transcript, and more information, visit: https://www.agileattorney.com/7

When somebody hires a lawyer, what are they really looking for? One mainstay of being an Agile Attorney is delivering customer value consistently, so how do you invest your time and experience in your practice now to create an environment that prioritizes client value in your firm?

Discover how you can pivot in your law firm to provide the kind of value your clients really want from you. I’m giving you tools that will help you expand what you’re able to offer your clients, aside from advancing their legal matters, to meet their human needs without neglecting the social and emotional complexities that people experience when navigating the legal system.

For full show notes, transcript, and more information, visit: https://www.agileattorney.com/6

Do you have numerous cases close to being completed but, because they are no longer urgent, they sit among the rest of your work and make you feel overwhelmed by all there is to do? Many firms overlook addressing this common issue as an opportunity to reduce the total amount of work in their system.

This week, I’m building on concepts we’ve talked about over the last few weeks to help you organize your law practice. I’ll cover two important concepts related to law practice management and how to prioritize where you set your and your team’s finite time and attention. I’ll also introduce new concepts to help you reduce administration overheads and close cases and tasks that are closeable in your law practice.

For full show notes, transcript, and more information, visit: https://www.agileattorney.com/5

There is a wealth of tools out there designed to streamline your workflow, easy to pick up and capable of adapting in countless ways as you master them. A personal favorite of mine is the Kanban board.

We'll explore various board types, identifying the one that best meets your practice's needs and pinpointing bottlenecks in your process. You'll learn how to introduce useful complexity into your workflow modeling, understand the differences between Matter-level and Task-level boards, and decide which one suits your practice's requirements.

For full show notes, transcript, and more information, visit: https://www.agileattorney.com/4