Client Stories
Working with top in-house teams, we have tackled real-life problems and designed future-state solutions specific to each unique business environment.
Optimizing Team Capacity through Service Design
We help small departments manage the mundane while elevating the legal team’s strategic contribution
The in-house labor and employment legal team a global science and technology innovator faced increasing demand for strategic, higher value, and business-focused legal services. However, the majority of the small team’s time was consumed by lower value tasks.
Working with the GC, we designed a new labor and employment legal service model with three components: extensive self-help best practice tools, an internal portal, and a sophisticated, specially designed global L&E Helpline staffed by trained legal experts. The underlying technology platform incorporates detailed tracking, metrics, and data visualization to support continuous improvement of the new program, and identification of training needs across the organization.
As a result of the solution, the team got back the equivalent of approximately 85 work days over a one year period, freeing them to reallocate that time to higher value activities. Additionally, the team experienced other positive impacts, such as greater job satisfaction via broadened exposure, greater engagement by working on higher value matters, and learning and skills development.
Bridging the Gap Between Legal and Business
We can help you build a business case for law department transformation with data, process, and metrics
A newly appointed legal operations lead at a major retailer was charged with creating better processes and reducing costs. After data revealed that real estate matters represented one-third of all legal spend, we helped her focus her efforts there.
Collaborating with our Lean Solutions group, the team began by identifying matter types and mapping workflows to create clear task guidelines for in-house and outside counsel. This allowed the legal operations lead to restructure the in-house workload and clearly define the scope of outside counsel work for negotiation of AFAs.
To date, these changes have improved legal services while reducing overall costs across the department by 19%. Additionally, web-based tracking of all deals with data visualization on a dashboard offers close monitoring and control of legal spend in the future, along with the tools needed to communicate the value of the law department back to the business.
From Friction to Fun: The Power of Lean
Learn change management and leadership principles from our certified Green Belt Trainers
A Fortune 500 client with a brand new legal operations function came to us for help in defining process improvement projects and training team members on the skills needed to execute them. After in-depth interviews with the team, we helped the client choose three distinct projects with the most potential to improve operations.
The program kicked off with one full day of immersive, on-site training for 20 members of the legal team delivered by our Lean Six Sigma facilitators. Then, over a span of five months, we coached the team through their selected projects. As a result, the team was able to successfully address some of their biggest operational issues while fostering a mindset of continuous improvement, and improving internal service delivery - all while engaging in a program that participants unamimously agreed was fun.