The business of law in 2016 is where the rest of the business world was in 1911, when William Howard Taft was president, the Titanic was being assembled in a Belfast shipyard, and two global world wars were off into the future.
Frederick Winslow Taylor catapulted business management forward. In his seminal work The Principles of Scientific Management, Taylor sought to point out “the great loss which the whole country is suffering through inefficiency in almost all of our daily acts.” He sought, as a remedy, “to try to convince the reader that the remedy for this inefficiency lies in systematic management, rather than in searching for some unusual or extraordinary man.”
My coauthor and I wish to remedy this same situation in law more than a century later.
In applying science to the management of labor, Taylor sought to wring inefficiencies from the American workforce. He sought to reduce process times by studying labor and maintained that it was up to management to identify the best method to complete each task.
As a result of Taylor’s work, corporate management has never been the same. For a time, Harvard University made Taylor’s ideas the cornerstone of the first year of its new graduate business school. Shortly thereafter, Henry Gantt introduced the Gantt Chart, a revolutionary way of diagraming projects that is still a critical process tool today. Taylor is widely considered to be the father of Industrial Engineering.
As time progressed and the world shifted from manufacturing to an information economy, Taylor’s influence continued to reverberate. Even though banks and software firms didn’t need to perfect the precision timing involved in bricklaying, they had their own interdependent processes that required error-free and efficient delivery. Institutions of all sizes and disciplines use process analysis and refinement to maximize their profitability.
As remarkable as Taylor’s ubiquitous influence on business is, it’s equally remarkable how little the business of law has evolved in the same time period. In many ways, most law firms exist in a pre-1911 world. There is the noble work of serving the client, but there is little to no awareness of process. Most law firms do not step back to take a look at how they do things and what processes they’ve adopted over time. Rather, they perform the client work, react to judges and opposing counsel, and hope for the best.
Modern law firms often rely on the “unusual or extraordinary man” that Taylor referred to. The law firm is driven by the Herculean capabilities of an attorney. The fate of the firm depends on these individuals. Smaller law firms in particular are often without management knowledge. Lawyers are not taught how to run a business in law school. The commercial aspects of law are commonly considered unpalatable next to the nobility of advocacy.
The result is that law firms, according to a Georgetown Law study, collect 71% of the work they perform. Small law firms must juggle marketing, selling, running invoicing, and collecting for their work without even thinking about serving their client.
Our aim by teaching Lean techniques is to fix this situation and set Law Firms on a course to operate effective, efficiently, and ultimately, provide better client service in the process of doing so.