The Agile Attorney Podcast

John E. Grant

Episodes

Mentioned books

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Mar 28, 2024 • 21min

010. Make Policies Explicit

If you don’t have explicit policies, it becomes incredibly difficult to develop any consistency around how and when you deliver your work. Tune in this week to discover the importance of establishing simple but clear policies in your law practice. Those policies are going to be the key to improving the quality and consistency of your work product and your workflow. You’ll learn two different ways to think about policies that can help you accomplish the same thing, but ultimately, I think one of them is more powerful than the other. For full show notes, transcript, and more information, visit: https://www.agileattorney.com/10
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Mar 21, 2024 • 19min

009. Focus on Quality To Improve Efficiency

What if the best way to improve the efficiency of your law practice is to not try to improve efficiency at all, but to focus on quality instead? This may sound paradoxical, but focusing on quality, not efficiency, is the key to unlocking more balanced workloads, smoother workflow, increased capacity, and ultimately greater efficiency while delivering an improved client experience along the way. On today’s show, I'm musing on why I believe quality improvement and process improvement are the same thing. Plus, I'm sharing the cascade of events that occurs when you focus on defining and prioritizing quality in your services and deliverables. For full show notes, transcript, and more information, visit: https://www.agileattorney.com/9
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Mar 14, 2024 • 50min

008. Building the Lean Law Firm with Dave Maxfield

Dave Maxfield, co-author of The Lean Law Firm, joins me today to provide an interesting look into how lawyers can adopt techniques from the Lean methodology to empower and improve their law practices. Tune in this week to discover how to take lean production systems of global production lines and use them to improve your law practice. We’re discussing the potential efficiency pitfalls of hourly billing, Dave’s simple formula for making changes that increase revenue, and we’re analyzing the things that prevent law firms from being as efficient and profitable as they could be. For full show notes, transcript, and more information, visit: https://www.agileattorney.com/8
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Mar 7, 2024 • 27min

007. Don’t Let Efficiency Destroy Customer Value

Streamlining processes in your law practice makes sense. It saves you and your team precious time and energy and keeps the backend running smoothly. However, optimizing a system for efficiency doesn’t always go down well with clients. In fact, it can reduce customer value and loyalty, leaving them disengaged from the process you’re helping them through. Tune in this week to discover how you might unknowingly be alienating your customers in an effort to have efficient systems in your law firm. I’m discussing how to find the line that separates efficiency and customer value, and you’ll learn how to help customers see intrinsic value in becoming part of your streamlined systems. For full show notes, transcript, and more information, visit: https://www.agileattorney.com/7
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Feb 29, 2024 • 34min

006. What Clients Really Want from Lawyers

When somebody hires a lawyer, what are they really looking for? One mainstay of being an Agile Attorney is delivering customer value consistently, so how do you invest your time and experience in your practice now to create an environment that prioritizes client value in your firm? Discover how you can pivot in your law firm to provide the kind of value your clients really want from you. I’m giving you tools that will help you expand what you’re able to offer your clients, aside from advancing their legal matters, to meet their human needs without neglecting the social and emotional complexities that people experience when navigating the legal system.For full show notes, transcript, and more information, visit: https://www.agileattorney.com/6
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Feb 22, 2024 • 28min

005. Close the Closable: Finding Balance in Your Caseload

Do you have numerous cases close to being completed but, because they are no longer urgent, they sit among the rest of your work and make you feel overwhelmed by all there is to do? Many firms overlook addressing this common issue as an opportunity to reduce the total amount of work in their system. This week, I’m building on concepts we’ve talked about over the last few weeks to help you organize your law practice. I’ll cover two important concepts related to law practice management and how to prioritize where you set your and your team’s finite time and attention. I’ll also introduce new concepts to help you reduce administration overheads and close cases and tasks that are closeable in your law practice. For full show notes, transcript, and more information, visit: https://www.agileattorney.com/5
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Feb 15, 2024 • 33min

004. Kanban Board Essentials for Lawyers

There is a wealth of tools out there designed to streamline your workflow, easy to pick up and capable of adapting in countless ways as you master them. A personal favorite of mine is the Kanban board. We'll explore various board types, identifying the one that best meets your practice's needs and pinpointing bottlenecks in your process. You'll learn how to introduce useful complexity into your workflow modeling, understand the differences between Matter-level and Task-level boards, and decide which one suits your practice's requirements. For full show notes, transcript, and more information, visit: https://www.agileattorney.com/4
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Feb 8, 2024 • 20min

003. Finding and Fixing Bottlenecks to Drive Law Practice Efficiency

Are you hitting roadblocks in your legal delivery systems because of stubborn bottlenecks that disrupt the flow of work? It feels like every new solution out there promises smoother operations, yet often, they just end up shifting the problem elsewhere. In today’s episode, I’m going to guide you through the most effective strategies for getting work to move seamlessly through your system again. We’ll take a close look at the bottleneck areas in your law practice and discuss why making improvements in the wrong areas doesn’t really cut it. For full show notes, transcript, and more information, visit: https://www.agileattorney.com/3
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Feb 1, 2024 • 21min

002. The Honest Reckoning with Capacity

If you're feeling overwhelmed or overburdened in your law practice, it may be a sign that you're operating beyond your current capacity. But how do you know what that is? And how can you go from prioritizing intake and growth to focusing on delivering quality work within the firm's capacity? In this episode, I provide tools to help you get back within a comfortable capacity and deliver the work you promised to clients and customers. You will discover how to think of capacity in a way that avoids feeling overwhelmed and instead lays the foundation for future clients, while also keeping the promises already made to your people. Start the process today of striking a better balance between your real current capacity and the commitments that you make in a way that is agile and free of burden. For full show notes, transcript, and more information, visit: https://www.agileattorney.com/2
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Jan 25, 2024 • 17min

001. Four Agile Principles to Help Your Legal Practice

Do you ever feel discouraged or overwhelmed by the amount of unfinished work in your law practice? Are you ever juggling so many balls that you’re worried something is going to drop and you may not notice when it does? Join me this week as I dive deeper into what the Agile Methodology is and how it can help you avoid the overwhelm that leads to problems and burnout. I share the four principles of Agile Methodology and how beneficial they can be for your practice and encourage you to slow down and think about what each of these principles means in the context of your firm or business. For full show notes, transcript, and more information, visit: https://www.agileattorney.com/1

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