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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
