What blocks lawyers in legal departments if they want to streamline how their department’s work gets done? It’s not lack of funds, management intransigence, lack of creativity or ideas. Assuming they would like to increase productivity, it’s not the crush of work, the lack of rewards, risk aversion, or barriers to change. No, it’s an unwillingness to step away from the flow of their work and think about how it might be handled more effectively.
That’s it, the long and the short, the summum and the bonum. Simply put, it’s the failure to pause and reflect. If lawyers in legal departments would deliberately, open-mindedly, and creatively stop and think about their input, processing and output, they could bring to bear some of the most basic improvement techniques: A follow-up post explores those core productivity techniques.