I gave a short talk this week to an audience of lawyers on the part that understanding process plays in transformation.
Any practitioner of "lean" thinking will advocate breaking down an activity into its component tasks, understanding these and then seeing if they can be done more efficiently or economically or maybe even missed out altogether.
In a manufacturing process this is straightforward enough. In looking at say the legal role in a corporate or an outsourcing transaction it seems at first site more difficult to disaggregate the tasks of a lawyer. In fact any legal transaction has different stages and once perhaps a certain professional pride is put on one side these can be quite readily discerned.
For example, in both corporate and outsourcing deals there is usually a first stage of due diligence where a considerable mass of information is organised, disclosed and evaluated. Is this a task that should be done by highly paid lawyers or by their trainees - or maybe nearshored or offshored to teams of lower paid professionals in Belfast or Mumbai?
What struck me in the conversations after the talk was how much progress we as a legal profession have made in understanding the need to understand process and then to find ways to improve. Maybe when Richard Susskind posed the question in his book "The End of Lawyers?" a few years ago he sparked a change in our profession, or at least a recognition of the need to change as technology advances.
I find this both exciting and encouraging for the future of the profession.
Any practitioner of "lean" thinking will advocate breaking down an activity into its component tasks, understanding these and then seeing if they can be done more efficiently or economically or maybe even missed out altogether.
In a manufacturing process this is straightforward enough. In looking at say the legal role in a corporate or an outsourcing transaction it seems at first site more difficult to disaggregate the tasks of a lawyer. In fact any legal transaction has different stages and once perhaps a certain professional pride is put on one side these can be quite readily discerned.
For example, in both corporate and outsourcing deals there is usually a first stage of due diligence where a considerable mass of information is organised, disclosed and evaluated. Is this a task that should be done by highly paid lawyers or by their trainees - or maybe nearshored or offshored to teams of lower paid professionals in Belfast or Mumbai?
What struck me in the conversations after the talk was how much progress we as a legal profession have made in understanding the need to understand process and then to find ways to improve. Maybe when Richard Susskind posed the question in his book "The End of Lawyers?" a few years ago he sparked a change in our profession, or at least a recognition of the need to change as technology advances.
I find this both exciting and encouraging for the future of the profession.
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