The case for simplifying legal advice

Today’s newsletter is slightly different from normal, and it is inspired by a recent conversation I was having with a colleague Renée Hasseldine, System Founder and CEO of Think RAPT. Think RAPT is an award-winning framework for explaining complex business services and products visually. Renee is offering my contacts a special deal on her amazing book – Get Visual! I’ve included the details at the end of the Newsletter.

As a profession, lawyers love words, and their work product is based on the written word. Many lawyers don’t seem to know that sometimes the words and expressions they choose to include in advice or use to explain a point of law are often incomprehensible to their clients. That’s why concepts such as Plain Legal English and Plan Legal Writing are so important and sometimes feature in the curriculum offered by major law schools.

I have seen the provision of lengthy, cumbersome, and often indecipherable legal advice provided by many of the firms and legal teams that I have worked with. Indeed, I’ve been on the receiving end of such advice too many times, both when managing major international regulatory reform programmes, and when seeking advice for my consulting business.

I have a super high IQ and I’m a sophisticated client, so if I can’t understand the legal advice that I am given, then how can it meet my needs?

A picture paints a thousand words

Over the last decade, I have been encouraging all lawyers that I come in contact with – either through lecturing, as my clients, or where I am their client – to use more diagrams in their advice.

?It’s surprising how challenging this can be as many lawyers don’t seem to have a visual perspective on their advice, and then they are intimidated by the technology tools to support diagram creation. I take things like PowerPoint, Visio, and the diagramming capabilities of MS Word for granted because I’ve been using them for decades. Although I’ve seen my students hit a brick wall when it comes to including diagrams in their assignments. The same for the lawyers advising me.

Let’s bring this to life with two examples…

When I was lecturing for The College of Law in a Master’s level unit Multi-Disciplinary Project Management, I introduced assignments aligned to the major deliverables of Legal Project Management. The preparation of a Matter Plan required the production of a Matter Overview or Matter Structure diagram to indicate the scope of the matter in terms of the workstreams and physical deliverables required to achieve the outcomes. I soon realised that this was a source of concern for many cohorts as they had no experience considering legal matters in visual terms, and no skills in preparing electronic diagrams in MS Word or PowerPoint. Some more technical savvy students got stuck in, upskilled, and did a great job. Others outsource the diagrams to their spouses, and others simply drew them the old-fashioned way and sent in a scan. It didn’t worry me as long as they achieved the learning outcome. Although it did shock me how little experience they had in this area.

It's critical for lawyers to start seeing legal advice as business advice and to produce professional, contemporary outputs that meet the needs of their clients. If a diagram can increase meaning, then a diagram is required.

A few years ago, I was working with a team from a prominent mid-tier firm, and we had a frustrating and expensive experience (too expensive). My business partner and I were seeking advice on how best to set up the legal entity structures for boutique development projects. I was recommended to engage a Partner in their Property and Construction area. We sat down and briefed him on the advice we required, and he assigned a Senior Associate to work with us.

We started to receive draft advice documents and other legal deliverables that we didn’t understand. Some of the legal language was indecipherable so we went in and asked them to answer questions and talk us through it in Plain English. It became apparent that the Senior Associate had little experience in the area and the partner had not trained or supported her adequately, it also became clear that we needed a diagram of the desired structure so that everyone was on the same page. This would avoid confusion and ensure all work was aligned to our scope and requirements. You could see the panic in their eyes when I asked if they could provide a diagram of the recommended structure. I asked if any other clients had ever requested a diagram and they looked even more worried.

I proceeded to draw the diagram after painstakingly extracting the information from the Partner and the Senior Associate and we were able to breathe sighs of relief and move forward. I also requested and received a massive write-off on the bills as I wasn’t prepared to pay for the training of an inexperienced Senior Associate who had undertaken work that was outside of the brief. When I engage an expert, I expect to receive an expert or for the expertise to be imparted at no cost to me, and I expect them to be able to provide advice in a way that I can understand.

Transforming ways of working

This is where frameworks such as Legal Project Management and Legal Process Improvement come in. As well as providing improved approaches to delivering legal matters and legal outcomes, these frameworks provide recommendations for visual management deliverables and non-legal precedents that enable both clients to better understand the complexity of the legal services being delivered and also enable new legal team members to get up to speed more quickly.

The visual management deliverables within Legal Project Management include – matter overviews; matter structures; responsibility assignment matrices; and matter schedules.

The visual management deliverables within Legal Process Improvement include – high-level process diagrams (input-process-output); detailed process diagrams; and Kanban boards (To Do-Doing-Done).

These visual concepts can also be applied with amazing results when interacting with clients to ensure they understand the scope and complexity of the legal work, this greatly reduces write-offs and improves the approval of variations.

Lawyers can go one step further and also include diagrams in legal advice to provide overviews and summaries for complex legal concepts and structures.

In my opinion, if you can’t draw a diagram of it, then you can’t explain it!

Legal Process Improvement

Legal Process Improvement (LPI) is an emerging discipline in the legal sector that utilises Lean Six Sigma frameworks and tools within a legal context. It is equally relevant to in-house teams and external firms. The techniques can be applied by legal teams and law firms of all shapes and sizes to drive more effective and more efficient client-based legal outcomes.

The tools and techniques from Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma are applied to the processes of providing the legal services to improve quality, reduce resource requirements and deliver more quickly. Typically, substantial improvements can be obtained in both the legal and administrative processes involved in delivering legal outcomes. By doing so legal processes can be made more efficient and more effective, and the quality of legal outcomes improved.

Lean Six Sigma and Design Thinking

There are several leading frameworks available to change the way that legal work is conducted, the most mature is Lean Six Sigma. It was developed during the 1980s and 90s in Japan and the US and derives from a combination of Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma process improvement methodologies, which in turn both draw on concepts from Total Quality Management.

It is a highly mathematical approach to process improvement that aims to reduce all defects down to 3.4 per every million units or opportunities. It is used to great effect in manufacturing processes that produce physical deliverables. It has been applied to service-based processes since the early 2000s. The six sigma unit of measure for defects is often unreasonable in service-based processes, resulting in a less formal application of the statistical analysis and a broader application of the concepts and principles when it comes to these types of processes.

More recently, we have seen forms looking to more modern frameworks such as Design Thinking. Legal Design combines the basic principles of process improvement and simplification with a more human-centred approach that puts the client first. LSS does this as well by considering the Voice of the Customer when improving or designing processes and also taking the client’s definition of quality as the benchmark for process performance.

It is becoming more common for firms to adopt Legal Design as opposed to LSS as it is more accessible and doesn’t require the mathematical rigor or statistical analysis The diagram below shows a comparison between the core approach DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, Control) used in LSS and a common approach from design thinking EDIPT (Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test).

Find out more…

You can find out more in the articles here -

Understanding Legal Process Improvement

Understanding Legal Project Management

For a free copy of Renée’s book head to https://thinkrapt.com/offer/ and use the coupon code positivelawyer

You can always message me, or book a chat with me here .

My aim is to inspire you to transform your working life and achieve great things, and I look forward to joining you on your journey!