Peer to Peer Magazine

Spring 2019

The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association

Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/1097368

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42 I n this article, we will examine: 1) the concept of Lean; 2) the business case for using Lean in the practice of law; and, 3) examples of where to use Lean in the practice of law. A Primer on Lean Lean management relies on team effort to improve efficiency, speed and performance by systematically removing waste from a process and increasing its flow. While the concepts have been around forever, Mr. Taiichi Ohno codified the Lean management philosophy into the Toyota Production System. 1 Waste is defined as anything other than that which adds value. 2 The eight wastes of Lean are Defects, Overproduction, Waiting, Non- Utilized Talent, Transportation, Inventory, Motion, and Extra-Processing (commonly referred as DOWNTIME). Two significant aspects of Lean to the practice of law are its focus on the "voice of the customer" and its value of defect prevention over defect detection. The goal is to "get it right, the first time around." Many thought leaders advocate the implementation of Lean with Six Sigma for law. Six Sigma's is a statistical-based Legal Process Improvement Through Lean B Y L O U R D E S M . S L AT E R methodolo and set of tools to reduce and control variations. While Lean focuses on waste reduction in the end-to-end process, Six Sigma tackles areas of sub-optimization within that process to reduce variation. Six Sigma was developed by Motorola in the early 1980's based on quality management fundamentals and became a popular approach at General Electric in the early 1990's. Sigma represents the population standard deviation, which is a measure of the variation in a data set collected about the process. If a defect is defined by specification limits separating good from bad outcomes Bringing the Best of Business To the World of Law

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