Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/34417
AN UNCONVENTIONAL ALLIANCE: LESSONS FROM A LEAN SIX SIGMA PILOT “Lean Six Sigma methods could be adapted to legal work through persistent effort, artful negotiation and consensus building.” challenging a Lean Six Sigma approach can be in a legal setting. The first challenge the team had to overcome was their perception that the jargon and tools of Lean Six Sigma were not a good fit for legal work. Since it is quite common in service industries to hear “we are different” and “each project is unique,” I was not surprised to encounter these perceptions when the subject matter was a highly creative and intellectual exercise like a complex transaction. In this case, mergers and acquisitions lawyers manage a tremendous number of variables in large deals often in non-linear and exceptional ways that are difficult to capture on a flow chart. However, as the team discussed these concepts and applied tools to define a transaction that represented a standard set of anticipated variables, they found that Lean Six Sigma methods could be adapted to legal work through persistent effort, artful negotiation and consensus building. By agreeing to a provisional state map that would allow partners to adapt the process to the particulars of a client matter, the team was then able to evaluate the flow of information and uncover some of the factors driving cost upward in a deal. USEFUL STATISTICS Lean, Six Sigma and the management approaches called by their names are fundamentally rooted in measurement, so it is common practice to observe the workplace and collect data either by conducting time studies or mining existing internal databases. Unlike some other service industries, law firms are technology-rich office environments where the intellectual, social and creative work is often invisible and impossible to capture in traditional ways. www.iltanet.org Knowledge Management 43