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Legal process improvement and efficient strategies for in-house counsel (Webinar)

Jun 13, 2018

Every lawyer – whether in private practice or in-house – is under pressure to work more efficiently and to provide high value results at a lower cost. One way to achieve this is by improving the processes that are used every day by identifying what is most valuable to the organization, identifying and eliminating waste in those processes, and implementing new strategies for efficiency.

In this second of the 6-part Best practices for the legal department of tomorrow webinar series developed by Osler’s Litigation and Dispute Resolution team, Mara Nickerson, Chief Knowledge Officer, and Jennifer Thompson, a knowledge management lawyer in the firm’s Litigation Group, provide valuable insight into legal process improvement using the principles of Lean Six Sigma, and in particularly the concepts of value and waste. They also offer tangible examples of litigation efficiency tools and projects that have been successfully implemented at Osler.

The essentials

  • Determine how applying the Lean Six Sigma strategies can help you deliver more for less
  • Understand how to define value from the business/client’s perspective
  • Adopt a tried-and-true framework for identifying and eliminating waste in your processes
  • Use process mapping to help achieve efficiencies

To earn CLE/CPD credits for watching this webinar, watch via our webinar portal.

Transcript

Review the slide deckDownload key takeaways

 


Video transcript

Evan Barz: Good afternoon, and welcome to Osler's webinar series-- best practices for the legal department up tomorrow. I'm Evan Barz. I'm an associate in the Osler's litigation department in Toronto. This is the second in a series of webinars that Osler is presenting on how your in-house legal team can position itself for success in this ever changing legal landscape.

In today's webinar, we will be discussing legal process improvement and efficient strategies for in-house counsel. I'm joined today by Mara Nickerson, Osler's chief knowledge officer and an accomplished Canadian industry leader and legal services innovation and services delivery. I'm also joined by Jennifer Thompson, a member of Osler's knowledge management team that facilitates Osler's efficient delivery of cutting edge legal advice to clients in the litigation context.

If you have any questions during the webinar, please email us or type them into the area provided on your screen and we will respond to them as time permits. With that, I'm going to turn over to Mara and Jennifer

MARA NICKERSON: Thanks, Evan. Jennifer and I really appreciate you joining us today to talk about process improvement. Every lawyer, whether they are in private practice, or in-house, or any other capacity is under pressure to work efficiently, provide high value work at a lower cost. Today, we're going to introduce you to some of the basic process improvement techniques, particularly applicable in the litigation context.

JENNIFER THOMPSON: Today, we'll be covering four topics. First, we'll review the basic concepts behind Lean Six Sigma and process improvement. Next, we'll review with you the eight classic types of waste that can be identified and eliminated from any given process. Following that, we'll discuss some of the legal processes in our litigation department at Osler that we identified as having a need for efficiency projects, and we will describe what we've done to cut out waste and make some of these processes more efficient. Finally, we'll review some of the other tools and strategies that are available to you from the Lean toolkit, such as DMAIC, process mapping, and the five whys. So let's begin with Mara explaining some of the basic principles.

MARA NICKERSON: So when using the principles and practices of Lean, you're really applying proven business tools and strategies to lower your overhead, improve turnaround times, increase client satisfaction, free up resources for other valuable work. With the result, hopefully, being a more profitable business. Now, I will admit when a vendor tells me those things at the beginning of a presentation, I always groan a little and say, OK, enough with those words, tell me actually how you do it? But with the Lean Six Sigma principles we're going to talk about, these will be direct benefits of that not simply indirect ones. So hopefully, we'll be able to establish that for you through this session.

So Lean is really about a way to deliver more for less, adding value, and eliminating costs and waste. At its essence, Lean is all about the voice of the client. Listening to your clients, understanding their needs and delivering them only what they value.

Lean Six Sigma is a hybrid of two proven business improvement strategies. Some of you may have heard of Six Sigma before, it was developed in the manufacturing industry, and is aimed at reducing defects and eliminating variation in the manufacturing process, making sure that every element of production is standardized and done the same way every time. So there's no mistakes and the quality is consistent. Every aspect of production is measured.

Lean focuses on increasing value by eliminating waste and smoothing the flow of services. Six Sigma along with its focus particularly on metrics and standard deviations is more difficult to apply in law and a little harder for lawyers to get their heads around. So legal has generally adopted this hybrid approach of both Lean and Six Sigma.

Two of the primary elements of lean Six Sigma and really any process improvement initiative are value and waste. Frankly, if you just focus on examining any process and considering these two things, you'll be able to make significant improvement.

So what is value? Value is whatever your client thinks it is. For many of you, your client is the business. For your client to consider that your work adds value, it has to meet three basic tests in Lean Six Sigma. First, the work has to move the matter forward bringing the job closer to the desired end state. Secondly, the client has to want the work and be willing to pay for it. And finally, the work has to be done right the very first time. Everything that doesn't meet these three criteria is waste.

And when considering value from the client's perspective, I always like to think of the client sitting on my shoulder, looking over at what you're doing. If they could see what you're doing, would they feel it was worthwhile to them? And this doesn't mean just overall at the end of the day, you've got a great work finished work product, it's looking at how you do that work from start to finish. And you know is that adding value every step of the way.

Learning to spot waste is your first step in improving what you do and delivering better value whatever you do. Now, when you're looking at waste, it helps to have a framework. In Lean Six Sigma, the classic framework for waste is these eight classic waste. This framework is simple, but makes it valuable in that respect. It's a really useful way to start looking at what you're doing and asking yourself, where is the waste? Lean uses the mnemonic downtime to remember these eight types of waste. We're going to go through all of these at a pretty high level, just to give you a flavor of what they are and some examples.

The first D is for defects. And defects are things like deadlines being missed, documents that are incomplete or incorrect, people not being prepared for meetings, data entry errors, I'm sure we've all had suffered some of those at one point or another, defects or work of lower quality in the wrong form requiring rework or corrections. So I'm sure you all immediately understand how defects add time and inefficiency to a process and that's waste.

The next is overproduction. These are preparing materials in advance when you may not have complete information. Often, this means you're likely going to have to regenerate those materials again later on. It could be excess printing, how many times have you not known how many people are coming to a meeting, and so you print extra copies. Or duplication of information in databases, different people maintaining the same information in different formats in different places. Even as simple as seeing too many people on email is overproduction. It's doing more than what's required or doing it sooner, which can result in a misallocation of resources and a mismatch between work product and need. So this is overproduction.

The next is waiting delays. This can be people late for meetings. Those are the rest of the people in the room are waiting, while people who are late get there. It could be documents waiting to be worked on. A simple thing like warm up time for computers, how much time do we waste sitting waiting for our computer to warm up? Interruptions is a big waiting delay, or late responses from counsel or other-- from clients or other counsel when we're having to wait for their response. This is lost-- this is any lost time when people, machines, documents, or information are waiting idle or warming up.

And I mentioned interruptions and they're actually a big source of waste. Often up to 30% of a day is spent dealing with interruptions. And whatever your interruption, it interrupted, it actually takes several minutes for you to get your head back into what you were working on. That means duplicating that time of reminding yourself where you were and the document, and that's wasted time. So think about how many times you're interrupted today by phone calls, texts, and emails? And can you imagine organizing your day in some way to minimize that? Now, of course, that doesn't mean you can't be responsible, you have to be, but is there a way to orchestrate your day to minimize dose interruptions? Or whenever you have to wait for a response, it takes extra time to get your head back into it, so what if you could what if you could find a way to minimize that?

The next is non-utilized talent. So this is work being done by the wrong people, not delegating work to the right level. It could be underutilizing talented paralegals, external counsel doing work that could be done by in-house counsel. Even as simple as misdirected questions, do you get questions that should be answered by someone else? Do you spend time answering the same question over and over again? Could anything be done to put an FAQ together or a little online video for common questions? So that's non-utilized talent or the wrong person is doing the work.

The next is transportation of things, and this refers to the unnecessary or inefficient movement of documents or information. For example, sending documents via carrier or fax rather than email. Now, we still see a lot of this with the courts where they require documents to be filed in person or by fax and it's inefficient. Now, I gather that a lot of the courts are now accepting email, filing of certain documents. So that's getting a bit more efficient. Things like hard copy documents circulating for handoff or approval. Probably less examples these days of transportation of things with the electronic world, but watch out for them where they are.

The next is inventory waste this is waste that results from any build up of inventory of any kind. And actually, inventory is very common in law, just looks different from manufacturing inventory. I suspect you all have some level of inventory of unanswered emails, or voicemails, or files sitting on your desk waiting for work, overflowing workstations and offices.

Work in progress is in fact, the most common form of inventory where services are being delivered. Letting work pile up increases the chance that it won't be done in the order it's needed, and that someone else may be wasting time waiting for something back, or that you waste time rifling through your piles looking for it. The other kind of inventory waste in organizations is space. Space is money. Cabinets filled with documents, dating back decades, or boxes of closed files sitting in storage rooms waiting to be sent to the sent to offsite storage, or examples of inventory that take up valuable real estate and those hard copies are actually hard to search as well. So not only the taking of space, but you're likely to waste time trying to find something in it.

The next is a motion of people, and this refers to the unnecessary or inefficient movement of people rather than things. An easy one can be unnecessary travel for meetings that could be held online with video and shared document functionality. Just think how efficient your being in attending this webinar rather than coming all the way down to our offices to see it. But it can also be things like poor office layout that makes it hard to find things or that doesn't otherwise support the way you work. It could be walking a long way to a shared printer. The wasted time of having to walk to the shared printers.

And a big one I like to focus on is computer skills. This can be small skills like not knowing shortcuts on your keyboard and word or larger ones like not knowing how to use Excel. When someone doesn't know how to use the technology they use or should use, they are likely taking longer to do it than they should. And that's going to be a waste that cost time and effort, not to mention the frustration. So that's motion of people. So thinking of it even as your hands are moving on the keyboard is motion of people.

The last of our eight wastes is extra processing. This is giving a client the gold standard when all they need from a business and risk perspective is something much less. To many turns of a document, making language or stylistic changes that have no legal significance because it's the way you would word it. To much research, then the issue warrants, overstaffing of a file.

I find when I talk to lawyers about this one on extra processing. It's a hard one for them because many lawyers feel that anything less than absolute best legal product is unprofessional. But it is about redefining best to be from the client's perspective and understanding how the client defines value. What is their business need? What's their risk tolerance that should be taken into account when delivering your work product? It doesn't mean sending out a document with typos, but it may mean sending an email with a high level summary of your view on an issue rather than a research memo with case law back up all beautifully cited.

So law is a process. You can look at pretty much everything you and your team does and likely identify some areas where you already see some waste. These would be the low hanging fruit for process improvement. But to gain real value, you can start digging into legal processes in more detail.

So what is a legal process? Just about anything you do involves some level of legal process. Well, we all like to think that we only provide bespoke strategic legal input. On a day to day basis, we and our teams around us are engaged in a variety of legal processes. Just for an example, say, you're drafting a response to a statement of claim. This could be broken down at a very high level into a process that includes reviewing the statement of claim, collecting key documents relating to the claim, conducting witness interviews, identifying the appropriate court form for the statement of defense, identifying any relevant precedents, collecting and inputting the factual information relating to the claim for example, the parties names, drafting the unique elements of the response, saving it into your system somewhere, sending it for review to a more senior lawyer or a client, getting comments back, finalizing the response, and filing it with the court. So what looked like a simple action of drafting a statement of Defense, in fact, involves quite a lot of steps. And if you get a group of lawyers into a room and walk through the steps they follow, you will undoubtedly identify some waste. Some best practices others could adopt and start standardizing it.

I spoke to one client a few years back who had a very high volume of a particular type of litigation, and they dealt with outside counsel on it. They mapped out the process between internal and external counsel to standardize various elements. One really small improvement they put in place was to require that all email include the clients identifying reference information for the matter in the subject line. This way, the client knew instantly what matter the email was about. In the past, external counsel, not ostler, who might be only dealing with one or two matters for the client would assume that the client knew what matter they were communicating about. But since the client had hundreds of these, it would take actually several minutes reading through the document to figure out which it was. So this small change made a huge difference. Jen?

JENNIFER THOMPSON: We thought it would be a good way for you to understand the different types of ways. It would be to provide a real life example. I think we can probably all relate to the fact that email management has become a bit unwieldy over the past few years, and this is an issue that will probably continue to worsen over time.

The sheer volume of emails that the typical lawyer receives these days can be overwhelming. Responding to all of those emails can be a daunting task, let alone filing them in the appropriate place. We wanted to assist lawyers with this task and identify some ways in order to create efficiencies in the email management process, so we introduced a firm wired email management program. The knowledge management team helped develop a very detailed guide that consists of useful tips and tricks to help lawyers better manage their email and utilize outlook. We then hosted group information sessions and one on one sessions, we track lawyers progress by monitoring their mailbox, size, and we followed up with lawyers who appear to still be having difficulties managing their email. I use this initiative as an example under our waste discussion, because it actually touched on all eight types of waste. I will go through those with you so you can see how identifying ways helped us make the email management process more efficient and less cumbersome.

So one example of how we addressed some defects in the old process, is we showed lawyers how to drag and drop an email from their mailbox into their calendar to automatically create a calendar appointment. This helped lawyers to avoid missing deadlines and appointments, and ensure that certain tasks got done on time.

Overproduction is a type of waste we often see in emails. We gave people many tips to avoid duplication of emails in our document management system, and in order to cut back on the amount of email people were receiving. So for example, we gave our lawyers guidelines on when to CC or BCC people and showed them how they could see an outlook if someone else had already filed the same email in order to avoid duplicate emails in the same matter space.

Interruptions are an excellent example of a weighting delay as Mara explained previously. I'm sure we've all experienced waiting in someone's office as they answer an email in order to continue a conversation or trying to get back into drafting a document after being distracted by an email. Our email management program encouraged our lawyers to try, and set, and deal with emails for a discrete period of time, and then sit and work on projects for a period of time.

Of course, we recognized that there would be client emails and concerns that would need to be addressed immediately in some cases, but we encourage lawyers to try and work on projects separate from answering emails as much as possible in order to cut down on the amount of time it takes for your brain to get back into a project or conversation after you've been distracted by an incoming email.

In terms of non-utilized talent, we introduced our lawyers to a number of ways they could utilize their assistance to help with email management. So for example, we showed them how they could color code their emails by matter, or create subfolders, or categories for matters, so that their assistants could better help with filing applications.

Recognizing that our more senior lawyers were receiving more emails than our junior lawyers, we also made it clear that associates were responsible for filing all emails on a matter that they were on, and that partners were only responsible to file emails that they alone received. This allowed partners to utilize associate time and email management, and it also helped with avoiding overproduction, i.e. duplicate files in the same matter space.

Transportation of things is all about the unnecessary movement of information. Therefore, to cut down on this waste, we asked our lawyers to consider whether they even needed to use email in certain instances. We suggested that for some situations, picking up the phone and calling someone might be a more efficient means of communication. We also suggested a rule of thumb that for basic scheduling or administration inquiries, Skype for business was probably the better, more efficient tool to use.

Letting emails pile up, increases the chance that they won't be answered in time or that someone else is waiting to receive instructions or a document in order to proceed. So in order to help our lawyers manage their inventory of emails, we encouraged a One Touch approach to email management wherever possible. Every time a lawyer opens and rereads an email left in their inbox to remind themselves of what was in it, they lose time. We encourage lawyers to read it once and deal with it in accordance with a 4D approach-- do, delete, delegate, defer. This approach helps them with the inventory of emails by ensuring that hundreds of emails aren't piling up in one person's inbox.

Motion of people refers to the unnecessary or inefficient movement of people rather than things as Mara explained. People who don't know how to properly use certain technologies can be quite inefficient. We developed our email management program with this in mind and showed lawyers dozens of tips and tricks to make their use of outlook more efficient. For example, we show lawyers how to set up automatic filing buttons, instead of having to drag and drop their email into folders that may be 20 meters down in their filing system. And we showed lawyers that they could group emails by conversations in order to make filing more efficient.

Identifying ways and resolving them can be simple and obvious. So to address an extra processing waste and email management, we simply asked our lawyers to actively unsubscribe to all of the spam email they received and delete it every day. I'm sure everyone has experienced an email they receive every day, they look at, they delete, and they put away. We encouraged lawyers to take the time to unsubscribe and never receive that email to begin with. Hopefully, those examples from our email management program helped you further understand the types of waste we're looking to identify in processes in order to make those processes more efficient.

Moving on, we're going to talk about some legal processes we identified in our litigation group that required some refinement to cut out waste. As I'm sure you're all aware, legal drafting is actually a large part of litigation. Redraft letters, memos, pleadings, affidavits, et cetera. Legal drafting is a process. So for example, if you're creating a notice of motion, you need to open a Word file, identify precedents, fill in the relevant court information and style cause, ensure there's an appropriately formatted back page, make sure the spacing is consistent, draft your work, had it reviewed, et cetera.

We wanted to address some of the ways we were seeing in this drafting process. So we introduced it introduced automated civil litigation or ACL in our litigation department, which is a software that speeds up the drafting process by using questionnaires to fill in matter specific information related to litigation proceeding. So for example your court file number, your party names, your lawyer names would be inputted automatically.

The software generates court forms like affidavits, a notice of motion, factotums, but it also generates letters, and memos, and task lists. ACL is kept up to date on the rules of civil procedure and practice guidelines in the relevant jurisdiction. So for example, if a new rule is introduced, requiring certain language to be in a statement of defense, ACL will automatically update that form. So that the next time you generate a statement of defense after the rule takes effect, that language will be in the form automatically. We've mandated the use of ACL in our in our litigation department for all court forms.

As you can imagine, ACL addresses many different types of ways. First, it reduces defects in our court forms. So for example, it reduces the instances of typos in phone numbers and fax numbers, it ensures we always include a back page, it ensures our forms are always up to date in light of the most recent rules and practice directives.

ACL also assist with the transportation of things as it has a built in file transfer system, which automatically serves and generates an affidavit of service with the click of a button. It's a very handy tool that allows our drafting process to be more efficient, and it also allows us to ensure that we as a firm have uniformity and consistency in our documentation.

In examining our drafting processes, we also discovered issues can arise when lawyers use precedents or samples. There's a risk that old names or figures can get left behind if a document isn't properly cleaned. We also identified errors that can arise when multiple lawyers are reviewing and commenting on a doctor on a document, such as a settlement agreement. Paragraphs get moved around and sections change, but aren't updated. To address these ways in the drafting process, we introduce contract companion, which is a proofreading software that's an add on to word that quickly identifies various types of errors in a document.

So you will see that it does a scan of the document and produces a report of potential areas where errors may be in your document. So you will see here it produces a report on names, dates, et cetera, a report on common terms, a report on references, et cetera. The symbol red, green, or yellow in the bottom left-hand corner of the Report tab indicates the severity of the errors indicated in that particular report.

You will see in the references report, for example, Contract Companion calls out all of the instances where a section of an agreement has been referred to. But that section does not actually exist in the agreement. It also pulls out wherever a clause or a section is referring to another clause or section so that you can cross-reference that the right section is being referred to.

This helps to address the issues we were seeing in the drafting process where multiple lawyers were working and commenting on the same document. The names, dates, et cetera scan helps with the cleaning of the document issue I mentioned before. These are just two examples of the type of information and errors Contract Companion can help us identify in the drafting process.

Contract Companion is also coming out with another product, Litigation Companion, in the near future, which will help us with identifying errors and factums and citations. In terms of ways this product obviously helps us reduce defects in all of our documentation from settlement agreements to affidavits to letters, it also helps with underutilized talent as assistants can run these scans and generate reports for the major issues for lawyers. It also assists with extra processing as fewer lawyers will need to proofread any given document to ensure that it's accurate and error-free.

Another process we examined is the process of drafting a factum. In that process, you usually review the pleadings and identify issues. You review the relevant legislation and documentation. You have a junior lawyer research certain issues and report back on them.

You collect precedents, you begin drafting, you have comments and review from senior lawyers and/or the client. You have juniors check the citations endnote of the case law. You have a book of authorities to put together and sidebar, et cetera.

Each of those stages can involve wastes and inefficiencies. CiteRight, a tool we're in the process of assisting develop, can address many of those wastes and inefficiencies. CiteRight is a program that allows lawyers to import case law from CanLII, Quicklaw, or Westlaw during the research phase of the factum drafting process into Word.

Once in Word, CiteRight can quickly and easily search and insert relevant paragraphs from the case law with proper McGill-style citations and short form names being automatically updated. Once a factum or legal brief has been drafted using CiteRight, a book of authorities complete with tabs and sidebarring can be automatically generated with the click of a button. Users are also able to use CiteRight to access all of the factums and memos generated internally, which cite a particular case, for example, the leading case on summary judgment, allowing better access to and use of your internal precedents.

CiteRight is slated to be ready for pilot in June of this year. And we're very excited to be one of the firms to have access to this tool. In terms of waste, CiteRight will work to significantly reduce defects in our documents by ensuring all citations and short forms are correct and in the proper order and that all relevant cases are properly sidebarred and organized. It will also assist with overprocessing as fewer people will be needed to review a document to ensure that the citations are correct. It will also assist with overprocessing as lawyers will be able to more easily identify internal precedents and leading case law in any particular area.

These three examples are just a few of the litigation efficiency projects we've undertaken. But I hope you can see how looking closely at a process and how it's done can help you identify value and ways to make that process more efficient and to reduce costs. Next, Mara will walk you through some of the other tools and strategies that are available to you in helping streamline your processes.

MARA NICKERSON: Thanks, Jen. As Jen said, I'm going to talk about some of the other tools that you can use in Lean Six Sigma that can help you analyze your processes.

The first is DMAIC. And although you can hit some low-hanging fruit just looking for waste, if you want to make lasting or significant change, you have to do it in a disciplined way. And DMAIC is the process you should go through to improve a process. And this is where the disciplined approach of Lean comes in.

So with DMAIC, you start by defining the process that you're focusing on. Be clear what process or part of a larger process you are going to try to improve. You don't have to boil the ocean.

Don't start with the full process of a litigation matter from beginning to end. Pick one segment of it to focus on. But in the define phase, you're really going to define what that process or subprocess is.

Then next, you want to measure it. Try to measure the efficiency of the process as it is currently done. Now that metric for measuring it will depend on the process of course.

It could be how long it takes from start to finish, from when the client gives you the work until it's handed back to them completed, or it could be the amount of time during that period that you actually spend working on the problem. Or you might use both measurements. But you need these measurements as a benchmark that you will measure your success against later on. So at the beginning of a project, you have to determine what those measurements are. And you may have to spend some time measuring and collecting those metrics on the as-is process for a little while.

Once you've defined and measured, then you analyze the process. That's the A. Look at how you can standardize the process, reduce the waste, add value, the kinds of things that we've talked about.

Then the I is Improve. So once you've identified improvements that can be made to reduce the waste-- and this could include checklists, precedents, training, better intake process. There might be technology that could help. Certainly, that's some of the stuff that Jen just talked about. But in the improve, you identify what those are and develop a plan to implement them and then actually implement them. So you're implementing those improvements.

The last stage and the one we typically forget or move onto the next project is control. You have to put some form of controls in place to make sure that people are using the new processes and implementing the changes and measure, again, to see if the process has been improved. If you don't put controls in place, there is a good chance that people will just slip back into old habits.

If you miss any of these steps, there's a good chance that you won't implement meaningful or at least lasting improvements. But it does take that discipline to go through all of those steps.

The next tool I want to talk about is process mapping. And it is one of the tools that you can use to analyze the process, so in the A section of DMAIC. A process map records every step, touch, task, document, and resource involved in a defined process.

Now to create a process map, you ideally get a representative group in the room of all the people involved in a process. And you literally start at the beginning and walk through it step-by-step. Now there are of course people with degrees and a lot of experience in process mapping. And it's great if you can hire those people. But if you just get those people in the room and start mapping out what they do, you'll get along way.

So in the example on the screen, you see the initial output from one of our mapping exercises for the process to incorporate a company. That included from the time the client called and it was determined that we needed a new corporate entity until the client had received all of the documents relating to it and it was all completed-- so a lot of steps along the way.

In process mapping, we use different-colored stickies to differentiate tasks, responsibilities, wastes that we might identify, resources that we might need, or where we need more information. Because it is so visual, mapping is a good way to see what you do and see where the problems really are. And frankly, just the exercise of walking through this process always throws up opportunities to improve things.

This is the end product. Once the stickies are on the wall, we transcribe them into a process map that kind of looks like this.

JENNIFER THOMPSON: In the litigation group, we also offer a process-mapping services to our clients to help them identify areas that need improvement and to clean up those processes to aid in efficiency and increase value. One particular client we have deals with a very large volume of litigation files due to the nature of their business. And we're in the process of helping them map out each phase of a litigation matter to identify what they value in the process and where there are inefficiencies and wastes.

So we went through that actual exercise that Mara just showed you where we had every relevant person to that process in the room. And we mapped out with stickies each stage and identified areas that could have improvement. We're hopeful that performing this exercise with our client will assist them with cleaning out their backlog of litigation matters that they're currently facing and then that they will also become more efficient at tackling those matters in the future.

As part of the project, we also help the client develop precedents. But we also help them manage and organize their current precedents. And we develop checklists, decision trees, and guides to assist in the implementation of the new streamlined process, i.e., when do you go to a certain person, what do I do if this part of the process is broken, who do I talk to, et cetera. So we've been very encouraged by that work with one of our clients.

MARA NICKERSON: Now as I say, once you complete a process map, it looks like what we just showed you. But of course, we don't expect our lawyers to actually use those maps. We turn that process map into a document that has a checklist of steps, related best practices, identifies the resources that are available so that-- really, something that the lawyers can more readily use when they're doing their work.

As well, we'll use these checklists and best practices and to-do lists and stuff for training purpose as well. So it helps in the process. And it also helps in training and onboarding of new lawyers.

Now of course, the simplified approach is just starting by developing a checklist of steps. Rather than doing the process maps, you can work through a checklist of steps. Creating a checklist undoubtedly is helpful to standardize what you do. But I will say it won't standardize how you do it. And waste is often created in the how. So it can be worth doing the full-- some form of the process mapping as well.

The next tool that I thought I would shout about is the 5 Whys. At any point in a process improvement project, when you identify something that isn't as efficient as you'd like, some step that isn't working smoothly, before you jump in with solutions to fix the problem, you must start with identifying the root cause of a problem-- why is it not working. If you don't do this, you could end up with a solution that doesn't address the underlying cause.

And one tool for finding the root cause or underlying cause of a problem is the 5 Whys. It's pretty simple. Basically, you just keep asking your group of people why, why, why, why until you think you have the underlying root cause. Someone will give you a superficial answer to the first one, and you dig a little further. So you keep digging.

An example-- if for some type of work you needed certain information from the client or the business, whoever, and they always take a long time to send it to you, you might first think, we need to build in reminders to our processes so we can get those responses faster. But if you talk to the client, the business unit that has to collect the information, and ask them why it takes so long to send you the information you need, you may find that they are slow for any number of reasons other than that they forgot. So a reminder would not have fixed the problem. Once you do understand that root cause, then you can brainstorm effective solutions.

So that gives you some of the tools that we think are available to help you with the process improvement initiative. And for the most part, they're tools that pretty much anyone-- and certainly, we here at Osler, people like Jen and others, are happy to help clients implement these tools, look at particular processes. But there are simple things that you can do right from the get-go to really start looking at some of your processes and trying to optimize them.

EVAN BARZ: Thank you, Mara and Jennifer. We already have a couple of questions that have come in. This first question is for Jen. You mentioned that you provide process mapping services to your clients. Why would those clients not just hire a process improvement specialist to assist with those projects?

JENNIFER THOMPSON: That's a really great question. And as Mara mentioned, process improvement consultants are a great resource. And we have always said we would be open to embarking on a joint venture with a process improvement consultant and a client if a particular project required that level of support.

And we think it's important for our clients to involve legal professionals in the process improvement exercise because, often when you're tackling the way a process may be refined or ways that may be identified and eliminated, substantive legal issues need to be considered and weighed. There can be legal repercussions or considerations that affect the structure of any given process that a person without a legal background may not appreciate. So I'm thinking of an example from the client we're currently working with.

We created a decision tree for them that will be reviewed upon receipt of an initial statement of claim. So when that claim came in, one person would receive all of the claims and determine who is it delegated to. And the person that's delegated to would receive this decision tree document. And they would determine whether the client would consider the statement of claim compliant or not. And that, again, would affect the process of the matter.

So if they follow the decision tree and they determined that the statement of claim is non-compliant, then they could move on to whether they were going to move to dismiss the action or otherwise. So as you can see from that example, it was necessary for us to work with the client and use our legal expertise to develop that decision tree as those decisions are substantive legal issues and not just necessarily process issues. So we just think the marriage of the legal expertise with the process-mapping experience adds a particular value.

EVAN BARZ: Thanks, Jennifer. We've got another question. This one is for Mara. You talked a lot about developing an efficient legal process. But you didn't really speak to how one would manage or implement that process. Could you tell us a bit about how you would go about implementing a legal process improvement?

MARA NICKERSON: That's a great question. That's really about the implementation and control segments of DMAIC. And certainly, implementation of any process improvement initiative is a change management project. And it's very important that you also consider how are you going to get people to adopt the changes that you want. The way you implement can be integral to its success or failure.

So it's important, right from the beginning, to try and identify champions and your challengers early on so that you can have them assist you in the implementation of the process and address any concerns with the new process. It's also important to identify people who are going to own each part of the process so that it can be updated on an ongoing basis and issues maintained or identified. A system also needs to be in place so that the process is reviewed periodically, ensure that it's being used in the manner that was expected, identify any new wastes. And this is very much the control that I spoke about in the DMAIC.

A lot of people have a tendency to think that change management is just about speaking to people-- communicate, communicate, communicate. And that is a core portion of it. But you can talk to people till they're blue in the face on why they should use this new technology. But if you don't train them to use it, if you don't give them the right incentives to use it, if you don't deal with any systemic issues around why they might not want to use it, then talking to them and convincing them isn't going to be enough.

So you need feedback, training, support throughout the project. And of course, the size of the change, the scope of the change depends on the amount of resources and the amount of involvement of users that you're going to want to have. But you need to think about that at the beginning.

And I would say I think to make it successful, the main thing is to include the people who are going to-- who do the process, who do that work, include them from the beginning. Never take one or two people off into a boardroom and have them do it themselves and try to impose it on everyone else. It really needs that engagement from all the people to raise all the current best practices, all the wastes, and use that process of improving the process as an engagement tool.

EVAN BARZ: Thank you, Mara. On behalf of Mara and Jennifer, thank you very much for joining us for this webinar. We hope it has given you some useful insights.