I’m Melissa Shanahan, and this is The Law Firm Owner Podcast, Episode #207.

Welcome to The Law Firm Owner Podcast, powered by Velocity Work. For owners who want to grow a firm that gives them the life they want. Get crystal clear on where you're going, take planning seriously, and honor your plan like a pro. This is the work that creates Velocity.

All right, everyone. Welcome to this week's episode. I am so lucky to have two amazing humans on the podcast with me today. John Grant, who you recently heard on the podcast. Welcome back, John.

John Grant: Thank you. Yeah, excited to be back.

Melissa Shanahan: Yeah. And Ben Hudson. Oh, what did you say?

John: We manifested this.

Melissa: Yes, exactly. And Ben Hudson of Hudson Law, in Calgary.

Ben Hudson: Thanks for having me.

Melissa: Yeah. I asked you both to come on, if you'd be up for this idea. So, John, I'm super interested in the work that you do. It feels like every law firm owner needs you, so there's that. And then also, Ben, I have worked with for a bit. And so, he understands what it's like to work through the framework, being facilitated through all that, within Velocity Work.

He mentioned that it's so complimentary, the work he's doing with you, John. Which I guess I didn't say that. So, he also works with you, John. And the work he's doing with you is complementary to the work we're doing in Velocity Work. I wanted to provide a real example of someone who has worked with you to implement how you think about things.

I think, number one, Ben, just listening to you talk… The listeners having a chance to listen to you talk today, will give them more context for exactly what Velocity Work is, and will help showcase the value of using experts to help you accomplish the things that you want to get done.

First of all, will you just say a little bit about who you are, what you do, and where you are? And then once you do a bit of an intro, maybe just start in on how you think about the work with John and the work inside of Velocity Work, and how they are complementary.

Ben: Sure. I am a lawyer in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. I do business tax, corporate commercial, some estate planning as well. That's what my practice consists of. I started my career at a couple of big national and now international law firms before leaving to start my own firm in 2016. So, it's been seven and a half years now almost. Started with zero clients, like built it from the ground up. And so, a lot of the work of that has been building systems.

But I didn't want like a just out-of-the-box solution, so a lot of it is been finding things that fit with my values and how I feel the practice of law should happen, both for the clients and for lawyers. And so, that's really how I got on to both of you guys through different channels.

So, the question of how they're complementary, maybe I should start with how I actually think they're similar. Because I do think there are a lot of similarities. One thing that I get working with both of you is you're both trying to tackle the problem of focus and attention, just as an overall principle: avoiding distractions, avoiding interruptions. You might use different words.

But that's, I think, a principle that you're both big on. Using metrics and data to drive decision making. So, facts, not feelings, if I can say that without being sued. Is that a patented trademark? I needed evidence, not emotions. Or metrics, not mood; I don't know.

Melissa: It's free for all. Anybody can use it. Well, okay, can I ask you one question? It might be good for listeners to have insight into your brain. How would you describe being a client of Velocity Work? And how would you describe being a client of John's? The work that you do in each.

Ben: The work with Velocity Work and Mastery Group, a lot of that deals with how I operate as a business owner. So, the Monday Map/Friday Wrap process, that most of your listeners will be familiar with, that deals primarily with how I actually operate. And if you know the term “timeboxing”, that's a lot of what that is. And then there's also the Strategic Planning, where you're setting quarterly Rocks and goals for the firm.

The work with John is more of the flow of work for the firm as a whole. That's the way that I view it. Which also then dictates the work that I'm doing, as the owner and as a piece of the firm. But I find that there's a bit more of a team flow focus to the stuff that I do with John. Does that make sense?

Melissa: That makes absolute sense. I don't remember one of your Rocks off the top of my head, but I would imagine in the past, you've had a Rock, which is a key quarterly priority. You've had a quarterly priority that you can use John to fulfill. Is that correct?

Ben: Yes. And the work that I do with John actually helps inform what my Rocks should be. This has been one of the biggest realizations over the last few months. And it comes from the idea of bottleneck theory, and the theory of constraints. I don't know how much detail you guys went into in the last episode, because it hasn't aired yet, the episode with John.

But the idea of Kanban, which is making the work visible, and on a very, very basic level, there are cards that represent the work and they flow through columns on a left to right direction. And that's just the most basic description I think I could come up with of Kanban.

But what you can notice, one of the things I love about it, is you just get a visual snapshot of what's going on in my practice, at any given time. And what you can start to see is where the bottlenecks are, what's the column that's filling up, you can see that visually. And then, John and I have been working on actually looking at the numbers behind that, as well. So, we can say, cards are getting stuck in this column.

Right now, I'll tell you the column that they've been getting stuck in is, we call it “QC”, quality check. Which is my paralegal or my assistant or my associate, well, articling student, which is a Canadian thing. So, I've got a guy who's fresh out of law school, a year out of law school now, and I got to review his work before it goes out. So, I'm reviewing a lot of this work. And that's where things were getting plugged up and slowing things down. That's the bottleneck.

And the idea is, there's only one bottleneck at any given time. If I work on anything else in my business that doesn't fix the bottleneck, or improve some other part of the system, it's not actually going to improve my business, because I've still got the bottleneck. In fact, the biggest revelation I've had is, if I improve the wrong thing, it can actually make the bottleneck worse. Can I give an example?

Melissa: I would love one. I was going to ask for one.

Ben: Okay, so I'm the bottleneck, right? Last year, I hired the junior that I have right now. There was another person who I interviewed a while back, she went on to work somewhere else, then she came back to me and said, “You know what? I actually want to work with you.” And I thought, “This is great. She's great, good attitude, why not add another great person to the team?” She was very junior.

I ended up having to let her go a few months ago. And now, with all of this data that I have, and looking at the work I've done with John, I can tell you exactly why. I could have predicted that it wasn't going to work. Because adding somebody who's very junior, who does work ahead of the bottleneck, all that does then, is increase my bottleneck; of the quality check that I'm doing.

Melissa: The amount of time that you have to put into the quality checks.

Ben: Right. So, adding this person to my team actually did not increase production of the team overall. It actually decreased production because it worsened the bottleneck.

Melissa: So, I just want to clarify, I just want to make sure I understand. So basically, I feel like the way I was going to say this just felt too crude. But you can reword it the way you want to. Basically, she wasn't good enough at the job ahead of time, with the work she was doing. So then, when you come in to do the checks, there's a lot of fixes involved, that you otherwise, if somebody was better at the front end, you wouldn't have that friction during the quality checks.

Ben: Or more senior. I wouldn't say better, I'd say someone more senior.

John: Yeah, I'm going to chime in. And this is interesting, because that's something I run into a lot with lawyers. Like, “Oh, if I just had a better person. I can't find the right fit.”

Melissa: I do feel bad about saying that. I was just trying to get a point out. If I would have thought better, I would have said that better. Yes.

Ben: Yeah, if you're listening, you're good. She knows she was good. She just wasn't experienced enough. Because she was maybe, I think a year ahead of the person that I have now. So, not far enough where she could take some of that quality check load off of my plate.

John: Or one of the other things, that I actually think, Ben, we're working on this within your practice now, which is, it could be that if you had hired a person that was more senior… On one of the things that you and I talked about was maybe finding an attorney that you know, outside of your jurisdiction, who might even be able to help offload some of the quality check work that is right now on your plate. I think we're still holding that as an option, but it's not the path you're doing right now.

But the other thing that we've been talking about is how to improve your quality standards, upstream of the quality check. So, that you can be more certain that when work hits that point, it is of sufficient quality, and it doesn't take up as much of your time.

I've started trying to be a little bit more generous and politically correct; I use the term “newbie proofing” your practice. And it's about using your existing resources to not just do the work, but really build systems and standards, so that the work gets done consistently, every time. And also documented in a way that a new person can come in, and relatively seamlessly, pick up a task as it moves through.

So, one of the things that's really big in a lot of the areas of study that I focus on, Lean and W. Edwards Deming and all these things, is that it usually isn't the person, it's usually the system. So, when you're having problems, if you get the system built in the right way, then you can create all kinds of redundancies in your practice, because different people can go occupy different roles as needed.

If you're really dependent on one person being the “expert” in a particular thing, you're going to have point source failure. You will generate bottlenecks in that particular part of your process. It's very common, and I think Ben is experiencing this. It's really common for firm owners to be that expert, to be that point source failure.

Melissa: Yeah, absolutely.

Ben: When I bring it back to Rocks, and setting my Rocks for the quarter, if I'm looking at this thing and going, “You know what? My Rock: I'm going to post a blog post every day and do this in a TikTok video,” or whatever it is. If it's marketing, but my problem, my bottleneck, is actually down the road later on, it's not going to actually help anything. And it makes a bigger problem, right?

So, it's not just if you have somebody who's maybe too junior, it's also anything that's really upstream of that bottleneck. And so, the thing that you hear all the time, or that I see all the time, are ‘we help law firms get leads, we help you get new clients’. In my experience, that's not the problem.

There are enough people who have legal issues. There are enough people who are actually calling; there's enough of that. It's the issue of actually getting people through the workflow, that cycle time; get it in and get it done.

Melissa: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. That’s great. Because I also really like… It’s not terminology that I use inside of Velocity Work… It would probably be helpful if I just mentioned it, so that people can think about ‘upstream versus downstream’. That is a really helpful way to think about it. I don't think about it nearly as well as you, John. The instances that come up a lot, are someone who has grown...

I can think of a couple clients. They grew from $300,000 to 1 million+ in like a year, year and a half. And their Rocks are marketing Rocks. I'm like, “No, you need to get the house in order. You need to get the wheels back on the bus.” That's about the extent of how I think about… Which you are so much more in depth with on a granular level. Really what to attend to first. And you help people identify what to tend to first. I would imagine, correct?

John: I sure try. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting for me to think a little bit about Ben's journey. Because I think you, Ben, and remind me if I'm missing the timing, but I think you built your first online Kanban board over a year ago, just about a year ago.

Ben: Well, I don't know if you know this. The first Kanban board, that I built without you, we were having an issue at the time, this is four or five years ago. We were trying to manage this, and we identified this as an issue. We need to make this work visible so that we can see the workflow, so we have transparency, so everyone can see what stage this is at.

And we were using at the time, for intake, Clio Grow. And we use a different system now. But what we did, is we actually created… There's a “hired” pipeline. We created stages in there. So, once things were hired, we're flowing it through, at least the stages. So, it's not nearly as detailed as what you and I did a year ago. But we appreciated that the value of making that visible and being able to see the work. And then when I built a more robust one, you helped me build one. I want to say last January or February of 2022.

John: I think that's right. That's interesting. So okay, I'm not going to go too, too deep on this, even though I probably can. So, stop me if I'm taking too much line. There are a lot of tools, and Clio Grow’s a great example, that use a Kanban board interface. That Kanban board interface is great for entering, what I think of, as sort of level one Kanban. Which is making the work visible and has been talked about.

There's incredible power, for those of us that work in knowledge work environments, and you never really see the work that you do, right? It's either that part of your devices or between your ears. And so, humans that have visual capabilities, being visual creatures, if you can make that work visible, your brain just processes it differently. I think it gives you a level of understanding about your practice that is hard to get from lists and reports.

That said that sort of level one Kanban doesn't get you very far in the Kanban methodology. So, that first stage of making the work visible is incredibly powerful, but it's just the beginning. And I think that's what Ben's realizing, now that we’ve actually dived into some of these other pieces. And it's been really fun working with Ben because he's just getting it. He really understands it and is using the data.

So, Ben's using a tool called Kanban Zone. Kanban Zone is one of two of my sort of most recommended tools. Because they're built by people that are actually coaches and consultants and practitioners, in the world of agile management. And so, my whole thing is, taking these learnings from non-legal disciplines and trying to adapt them and adopt them so that they make sense for legal systems.

We have a lot of legal tools. And again, click Clio Grow. I think Lexicata has got a Kanban interface. I know NetDocuments has a Kanban interface. There's Lawcus, there's legalboards.io, there's a whole laundry list. I mean, chances are, if you're listening to this podcast, you have a Kanban interface somewhere.

And again, maybe it's not a legal one, maybe it's Trello, maybe it's Asana, maybe it's Monday, maybe it's Microsoft Planner. Almost all of those tools that I just rattled off, however, don't get you much further than that level one Kanban experience. And I think the next thing that we did it, once we really started working and you were attending these office hours that I held beginning of 2023, establishing queues was one of the things we did early on.

Or that you did, before we even started formally working together again. Which is to say, that instead of assigning work to a person… I sometimes refer to them as “desks”. So, we've got a writing desk or drafting desk, we've got communications desk, we've got a quality assurance desk.

And you don't necessarily know when the need for that work hits that cue, you just know that it's there. It allows Ben, in the role of the firm manager, firm owner, process director to say, “Oh, it looks like there's a lot of work in this queue. We need to apply some resources to it. Who are the resources on our team capable of doing that work? And how do we move it out that way?”

The other thing that we started to do was apply “WIP limits”. And WIP is an initialism that stands for “work in progress”. And it basically says that, we're going to limit the number of balls that we're juggling at any one time, at any particular phase of our process. And I think those two things initially were really helpful in terms of getting a handle on the overwhelm.

One of the things that I would maybe say, and Melissa, you probably run into this with other Velocity Work members is, it's really easy for that firm that's gone from $300,000 to $1 million, they're probably feeling a significant degree of overwhelm. Of, “Oh my gosh, this is what I wanted, but I'm not sure what I've gotten myself into.”

And so, with Ben and with other clients that I have, we use the Kanban board almost as a sense making tool, right? To help us really make better sense of what the processes are, what the workflows look like, and what the work within it looks like.

Ben: When I think any anybody who works with you Melissa, is at least somewhat familiar with the concept of “WIP”, at least in their own personal world. Because one of the things that you've said is ruthlessly weed out your list, do your brain download. Then you're putting it in your calendar. Then you're deleting what you can, or you're delegating it. And you're ruthless in basically setting a personal WIP limit, is how I would describe that, using John's terms.

And what John is doing is setting some WIP limits for certain stages of work. Where we're not going to move a new thing into… I’ll use the quality check, the QC, column again. But we're not going to move something into QC until we've actually cleared out everything that's already in that column. So, you're not allowed to go work on that one that's upstream of QC, until Ben has cleared out everything that's in QC.

And this is another area where I feel like it's very complimentary, what John does and what you do, because when you're doing your Monday Map, one of the things I'm doing is I'm setting priorities. And so, how do I do that? How do I look at my brain download, my list of everything that I have to do, and set a priority?

We have certain policies, explicit policies, with our board of work that says, if something's further along, you're starting with that. If something's higher value, you're going to start with that, and just these rules. You can look at the board and say, “Okay, that is what I'm working on. That is my priority. That's the first thing I'm doing on Monday morning.”

Melissa: I want to ask about, if you could just name a few workflows. I mean, I'm sure there's continuous tweaking and improvement as time goes on. But that you've implemented. That now you feel some ease, in a way that you haven't prior. You mentioned one for the QC. Well, I guess that's part of a workflow, a bigger workflow.

John: Yeah, let me project, and then then you can correct me if I'm wrong. One of the fascinating things, and Ben rattled off… You've got three or four different practice areas. And some of them are big, pretty complex projects. Some of them are relatively light touch, quick projects. They're all following the same workflow. And that's what's fascinating. So, there's not multiple workflows. We've kept them pretty high level.

There's an intake phase… I don't have Ben's board in front of me. But there's an intake phase, there's sort of an assessment and research and sense making phase. There is usually an initial drafting phase, then there's a quality control, then there's sort of negotiation agreement; whether it's with the client or with the third party. And then there's an execution finalization. And then, I think an internal closeout, is the last one we have. Which is what we want, to actually get the work all the way to done-done.

And for transactional practices, those columns… And maybe not those exact ones, different firms that I work with call them different things, but the high-level workflow is pretty identical.

Melissa: Okay. I did not expect you to say that. So basically, you have one workflow for your entire practice. Is that correct, Ben?

Ben: That’s correct.

Melissa: So, whether it's an estate plan, whether it's a transaction, it doesn't matter. Anything that you would provide, in terms of a service to the client, goes to the same workflow.

Ben: Yeah. And this is something I say with my team, even before I did any work with John. I'm big on systems and processes. And anytime you can just look at everything kind of bigger picture and categorize it and actually say, “Well, you know, this thing over here is actually the same as over here. So, why don't we just use the same process?” And then you can just streamline it and you're not having to go, “Well, this file X is special and has this…” No, it's, it's the same.

As lawyers, we need to stop fooling ourselves and be like, “Oh, well, my practice is different. This file, it has this little thing that's different.” Yeah, it does, but overall, it's the same general process almost all the time. Sometimes there's a different fork in the road. But there's only a couple of major forks, right? Litigation might go to questioning or it might go all the way to trial, right? There's, there's some different forks, but you know what those are.

And so, maybe there's a file that skips a column of our workflow. Sometimes that happens. We don't always have negotiations with opposing counsel. But there's definitely going to be client review on every single file. Generally, it does follow that same path.

Melissa: Okay, so oh, my gosh, I'm so glad we're talking about this. Like, now, I feel all the question marks popping up. So, there's one high-level workflow. Because then you have systems and processes, right? That support the steps to push each type of work through workflow. Correct?

John: Exactly. When something hits like the drafting phase, I almost think of it in terms of, okay, which recipe card are we going to pull out of the box? We know we're in the drafting phase, but if it's an estate plan, we're going to go to the estate planning part of the recipe book. If it's corporate formation, then the documents that we're drafting to handle corporate formation are completely different than those for estate planning.

The process, the workflow, is the same, but the recipes are different. And so, there's the high-level policies that govern all of the work in Ben's practice. And that doesn't mean that we can't have the nuance and the detail that we need, in order to deliver different types, different flavors, of work. Just to continue that, the advantage to having all the work on the same board, is that it lets Ben and his team really quickly assess and prioritize, what are we going to work on next?

And one of the things I talk about with my clients all the time is, there is a transition that happens when you start to use the Kanban methodology, right? And so, there's one thing about using the board, and the board helps you with sensemaking. But for that level one board, most of the time, what you're doing is telling the board what the team is working on.

When you flip into a higher level, a level two, level three, and I'm making these levels up, these are arbitrary levels. But when you flip into a slightly higher level, you transition from telling the board what you're going to be doing, to the board telling you what you should be doing. And I think that is, in some ways, really liberating, right?

Because it really sort of takes the act of decision making and the all the information that you have to carry in your head as a lawyer, as a business owner, about what commitments did I make and what deadlines are coming up. And once you get the board configured the right way, and it's a constant evolution, it's not like you're going to nail it right out of the chute. But more and more, you're able to just offload that entire set of worries and fears and considerations into the system.

And the system tells you, “Oh, yeah, this is a type of work that has high consequences if you miss a deadline. And this is a deadline, therefore, it's going to follow this prioritization structure.” Which is different from an estate plan, which aside from an urgency because someone might be on a deathbed or something, doesn't usually have a high consequence, if you don't get it done the day that you said it was getting done.

And so, the question is, how do you prioritize those different, in the Kanban world we call them “work item types”, which is a little technical, but those different work item types, so that your team is making sure that work of different types is continuously flowing.

Ben: And one of the things, I think maybe, if that's level three, level four, is where your team also knows those policies and they're just pulling cards. Because they know the priorities. Because Kanban is really supposed to be a pull system. So, when I started out, I still sometimes feel like this, but I was pushing the work on my staff and my team saying, “Okay, you're going to work on this,” and I'm doing this based on the principles of the board.

But the goal is to get to a point where they can just look at it and say, “Okay, I've got these priorities. We've got this work here; I'm going to pull that one.” And they shouldn't really even have to run that by me. I mean, we have a quick daily stand up, but they should be able to tell, okay, this is priority based on our prioritization rules.

And that's amazing. As a business owner, and as the project manager of the firm, to have that where then people are able to just pull their own work, it's great. And I can see that they're pulling it because it's visible, again. So, the transparency of it is great. I don't have to go to anybody and say, “Is this done? Where's this at?” It's in the card. Those tasks, the sub tasks, the recipe cards that John's talking about, we build that into the card on the board.

So, they will have different task lists within them. We put all our comments in there. So, we're not emailing the team. You know that email is one of the things that I can't stand. So, we have no internal emails, because we're communicating through the cards. And then, it lives in there. The comments are in there that says, “I talked to the client today, and this is what they said.” The status updates are in the card. It's all transparent.

So, as the person who is then managing the overall work, it's fantastic. It takes a lot of that burden off of me.

Melissa: All of your processes are in Kanban Zone, is that right?

Ben: Our task lists are in there. We use Tetra to have our processes. So, we have an operations manual.

Melissa: Do you sometimes link the tasks that are in there? Let's say there's a task that actually does have like seven steps.

Ben: The seven steps are in there. We break it down to the smallest step that we can in there. But if they need to read the document on this is the process for drafting a Unanimous Shareholder Agreement, we will have every step listed out. But if they want the written explanation, like course description, syllabus, or whatever, they can still go to Tetra. Go to the operations manual that has more commentary on it. But all of the tasks and subtasks are in there.

And we found, if we leave any of those out, they sometimes get skipped. Or then I'm back in that situation where I go, “Was is this done? Did you ABC and D?”

John: Let me give that color. So, I said, before we came in, that I was going to be like a pop-up video. For folks that are old enough to remember VH-1 in the day. It's really fascinating to me, as I've sort of watched different themes of this, because what it feels like, and even the way that some of the Kanban tools talk about it, is there's the card, which is the project. And then there are the subtasks, which are checklist items.

And how most law practices operate, is they will assign subtasks to people and think, “Oh, that's so-and-so's job to do all the sub tasks.” And one of the things that Ben’s done, and other teams have done, is like, no, these are the things that have to happen. These are the things that have to be true or accounted for in order for this particular, again, corporate formation to be a high-quality formation, or an adequate quality formation.

So, those subtasks aren't really a to-do list. What they really are is a Quality Control Checklist, right? And so, what Ben just said is, that if all of the subtasks aren't part of the card template… There are card templates that are for wills, and one for formations. Getting that template library is part of the evolution of a more mature Kanban system. But those subtasks in the template really are part of the standardization. The work is getting done the same way every time to this standard.

By the time it hits Ben, at the quality control desk, he can check and see, okay, if all of the quality items are ticked off, then I can be reasonably sure… I'm still going to go read it. He still has to do the actual review. But it sort of sets the stage for him.

A lot of this comes from the Atul Gawande book, The Checklist Manifesto. And I will often, if I'm giving a talk, I'll ask people, “Hey, without looking it up, can you tell me what the subtitle of that book is?” And the response I almost always get is, “Oh, getting things done.” And it's not. The subtitle of The Checklist Manifesto is How to Get Things Right.

It's a book about quality control. Right? Checklists are best when they're used for quality control. They function as good to-do lists, but that's not their primary purpose. Their primary purpose is quality control checks.

Melissa: Okay, so I'm just thinking, and I don't know if listeners have this question or not. You have the steps in there, as an example of what's in Tetra is maybe the Loom videos that go with it, and the images and screenshots, like, none of that is in these Kanban boards; the steps are listed. If you need help with understanding how to complete one of those steps, you can go to your book of processes, right?

Ben: There might be a thing that says, “Okay, in this step, for a probate file, now you have to courier the probate application to court.” And that's a checklist. But if you're like, “Well, I don't know how to courier that to court.” You go to Tetra, and it tells you how, okay, here's how you actually send the courier, and has that level of detail. But it's just one short item on the card.

Melissa: Yeah. And so, when your team is working, I mean, do you guys each have a screen up all day, or at the beginning of the day, that everybody sees, everybody looks at? How is this integrated into your practice?

Ben: We do a daily standup. Like I mentioned, we do 15 minutes in the morning. Everybody gets together. Our three questions are, did you get done your priorities from yesterday? What are your priorities today? And what do you need from the team to get those done? And I've kind of added a fourth one recently, which is, if you didn't get done your priorities from yesterday, why not?

Melissa: Yeah, this my jam. This is what I’m talking about.

Ben: That's the newer one. Yeah. Right? Like, why are we getting blocked? Or if you said you were going to get this done, and you didn't get it done, why didn't you get it done?

Melissa: Because it's insight. I'm imagining, and I know you well enough to know, that question is never…You never think that the answer is going to be because they're just not doing their job. It's like they are experiencing real barriers that you want to be privy to, so that you can understand how to maybe improve XYZ.

Ben: Yeah, yeah. And I can already see, as we're fixing this QC bottleneck, I can see that the next bottleneck is client review, client homework. That's the one. We can already predict that's what it is, as we fix this. So, that's our next focus. And we've had some things this week, where one of my team members said, “Well, the clients aren't getting back to me. That's why I didn't get it done. I needed this...”

And then, we can have a discussion about how do you properly assign client homework and set deadlines with the client? And how do we then make that less of a problem? It's not, “You're in trouble because you didn't get this done.” It's, how do we improve our systems, so that you're not blocked when you get to those steps. And you're able to actually get it done.

And that's another similarity. Not to jump around too much. But another similarity, I feel like, between the two systems, working with Mastery Group and Velocity Work and, working with Kanban, is I've really shifted the idea of what productivity is. It's not, did I get every single thing on my to-do list done today?

It's not did I stuff as much as I could, in these 8-10 hours that I was in the office today? It's, did I get done what I needed to get done? Like the priorities that I said I was going to work on. Did I do what I said I was going to do today? And that is now my definition of productivity and success on a daily basis. And I feel like that matches between what both of you teach.

Melissa: Will you go back one minute, though? So, you have a standup. Does everybody already look at the board before the standup?

Ben: Yes.

Melissa: Do you need it up all day? I’m just wondering what it really looks like in your practice.

Ben: We have it up because you're updating it. So, as I finish something; I had a call with this client, I'm checking something off the list, I may be moving it to a new column. So, I do have it up in a tab. I don't necessarily have it right in front of my face, but it needs to be up to date so everybody knows what's going on.

So, everybody does look at the board. We don't do our daily standup the second everybody walks in, we give everybody some time to get settled, go over their board, figure things out, update anything that maybe they missed updating the day before. And also, they pick their priorities.

We're on to that pull system now. We're working to get there, the pull system that I mentioned, where they choose their own priorities based on the rules that we've set and what's on the board.

Melissa: Okay. What were you going to say John?

John: Two things, and I’ll actually work my original thought into this one. That pull system is key. I'm actually hearing that there are two different sort of intertwined pull systems that Ben is talking about. One of them is the pull system for the work, for the actual client deliverables.

And one of the things I talk about, and I'm increasingly using a debt metaphor to talk about. So, we think about, we engage the client, and that pushes work into our system. And then, we have to work the board from left to right through our systems, because that's how the workflows. But I encourage people to work the board from right to left. Which is to say, those items on the board that are closest to done should be a higher priority than those items that just got started.

Melissa: This is like Dave Ramsey's Debt Snowball, right? Get the little ones first, the ones you're closest on first. And then you work on…

Ben: Do you remember the highway metaphor, Melissa, that we talked about? I got that from John.

Melissa: I was about to bring that up. I remembered that. That's why I was going to bring it up on this call. Because the group that we were with, when you were talking, they were all really fascinated by what you said. So, maybe that's ties in here. Is that why you brought it up now?

Ben: Yeah, I think it does tie in here. Because if you are on the freeway, you know that if there's too many cars on the freeway, it's going to take you longer to get where you need to go. And so, there are metered freeways, right? I don't know if there are any here in Canada, but there are in the U.S. Where you can't just get on to the freeway, because it's already too full. Right?

So, the way to free that up is get some cars to take the exit. And that means you finish the file; you get them out of there. And the phrase that I say to my staff is, “Finish more to start more.” I think the actual phrase might be, “Start less to finish more.”

John: Start less to finish more. Yeah, stop shoving work in there and actually get some stuff done. But no, they both work. I think that's right. And the way you solve a traffic jam isn't by pushing harder on the last car in the backup, right? It's by trying to remove the blockages that are up at the front. That's how you resolve a traffic jam.

The debt metaphor, what I was going to say, is that when you sign that engagement agreement with your client, they're basically saying, “Yeah, I owe you money.” But you're saying to them, “Oh, yeah, I owe you work.” You've created a deliverable debt for yourself and for your team, and the longer the debt stays open in your system, it has a carrying cost, right?

Your client satisfaction is going to go down. They don't pay you to enjoy the experience of having a legal problem, right? That's not a thing. Right? They want it done, they want it accomplished, they want to move on with whatever it is.

Again, I haven't perfected this metaphor yet. So, I'm workshopping it with you two and all the listeners. But this idea that we owe them something, and the longer it takes us to deliver that something, the more costly it is. Whether it's in terms of our own investment, or in terms of a diminishment of the client experience.

Ben: It takes up space in your brain. If there's work that's been there and it's been neglected, I'm thinking, “Oh, man, I’ve got to get to this. I know I’ve got to get that done, this thing that's been sitting there forever.” And maybe there's no deadline, and it's easy to think, “Oh, it doesn't matter. I'll do these other things first.” But it's taking up mental space.

And the phrase, “Be honest reckoning with capacity,” is John's phrase. That we mentioned before, and I wanted to bring up. Which is, your capacity is finite, your firm's capacity is finite. And you have to be honest about it. And when you're realistic about it, you have to then start making choices about priorities.

So, when I'm doing my Monday Map, it's what am I actually going to do? I have to be realistic. And there's not enough time in the week to fit everything from a to-do list on my Monday Map. So, how am I going to prioritize that? And what am I going to do? And that's where bringing in these rules and these policies, about setting priorities from the Kanban system, I feel like is really complementary to what I'm doing with Monday Map.

John: Yeah. My flip side to the honest reckoning with capacity is the brutal assessment of priority. Right? And it is, it's brutal having to drop things, having to decide I'm not going to do that. It's hard. And I think it's especially hard for lawyers, who tend to be really high functioning, high capacity, folks. Capacity is still finite, no matter what.

Melissa: Well, I mean, play that all the way to the end. I wish I could just think of the same language you just used. But people who aren't really willing to assess being brutally honest in assessing, it's impossible anyway. You might as well just take the time to assess it so that you can know it ahead of time, instead of magical thinking the whole way through.

Ben: Putting your head in the sand. That still exists.

Melissa: Yeah, exactly. This is awesome. I had no idea that there is one basically, the thing that the two of you have been working on together is one workflow. Am I correct in that?

John: It’s one big board.

Ben: I'll show it to you sometime, Melissa.

Melissa: Yeah, I would love to see it. Yeah,

Ben: I’ll walk you through it.

John: It's another reason that I love the two tools that I really like. It’s because they’re just so much more flexible with their design of boards. The more simple tools, I won't rattle them off again, but they just don't quite have the tools you need to design a board that is going to accommodate different types of work, the same way that Kanban Zone and Kanbanize are able to. There’re others, those are just the two I use the most.

Ben: I think if you're doing baby steps, and you're just starting out for the first time, the thing to measure is number of cases matters, whatever you call it, you're bringing in versus how many you're getting finished. And Melissa, I actually started tracking this when I was working with you, before I was working with John. You're like, track the number of files you close, you got to track that.

So, using the traffic jam analogy, we were seeing that we were bringing in more files, and we had a number, per day, that were coming in. We could see the statistics now versus how many were going out. And so, you can predict we're going to have a traffic jam if this continues.

Melissa: Right. And you can also, I haven't totally thought this through within your scenario, but there's some private clients I work with, “net cases” is what we call it. So, the net case number is indicative of when hiring needs to happen. You can use it to make decisions. It depends firm to firm, and practice areas.

But if you understand that, which this just puts it on steroids, because I think technically, you can increase capacity with work like what John is doing. But you can still use that number as data to help you make a decision about the needs that your firm really has.

Ben: As long as you're adding the capacity at the right spot.

Melissa: Yeah. Oh, great point. Great point.

John: Okay, because that's the thing that we learned. Ben was, I don't know what he was seeing in the numbers when he brought on that associate before, but it's like, “Oh, I'm bringing in more work that I'm finishing. Therefore, I have a capacity problem. So, I'm going to buy capacity.” Right? And he did.

And let me pause for a minute and say, the exact same thing is about to happen in thousands of law offices all over the world with ChatGPT. We're going to use generative AI, and we're going to say, “Oh, my gosh, this tool is amazing! It's going to add capacity.” The problem is, if it adds capacity in the wrong place, and again, given the current state of the technology, those tools are going to require significant quality assurance work or quality control.

And so, if you're adding capacity upstream of quality control, but your actual bottleneck is that quality control, which it often is for law firms, then getting more things drafted could actually make things worse, whether it's by an associate or by a robot.

Melissa: Absolutely.

Ben: There's one thing that John and I have started working on that I'm actually really excited about, too, which he alluded to before. I'd love to mention it, if I could just shift gears just slightly. The client perception of the work that's being done. Because often, as lawyers, we think, “Well, I was busy. I was here, I was doing client work from the second I walked in to the second I left,” and these clients are still yelling at me, “Going, where is this? Where is this?”

And that's because most firms are focused on utilization, or what John would refer to as resource efficiency. Where this now focuses on flow efficiency. Let's optimize the flow of the work coming through the firm. And that's what the clients see. Clients judge us on how fast did we get it done, where we good at communicating and giving updates. They don't really know the technical accuracy of the work. We know that, other lawyers know that.

But they're judging us on those things, and that's what this focus is on. Okay, when we get a file in, let's prioritize those files that have been in the longest, let's get them through. And then from a client perspective, that looks better, right? Because we've optimized that process.

Where if you're trying to stuff every minute of every day, with as many files as you can, and you're not doing it in a smart way, then what you're actually doing is you're going to delay the delivery time for that client on that matter. So now, instead of six weeks, because you've stuffed so many things in there, you have so many cars on the freeway, that now is eight weeks, 12 weeks, whatever it is.

Som those are now the statistics we're getting into. What's our average cycle time, our throughput for getting certain types of files in? What should our standard be? We've got metrics on 80% of those type of files that get through in this amount of time, can we bring that closer to what the average is? Can we get that to X number? And that's the stuff that I'm really excited about right now, that we're starting to work on.

Melissa: That’s so cool.

John: We're using terms like “service level expectation”, which is something that comes out of software and tech support. Like, how long does it take you to get something done, as a proxy for the client experience. And that's not something you really hear talked about, I don't think, nearly enough in law practices.

The other thing is this idea of resource utilization. And again, to tie it back to this idea of hiring. Because, Melissa, what you talked about is using your net cases, or total open cases, as an indicator that you need to hire somebody. If you bring that someone in, there's a very natural tendency to say, “Well, I'm paying for them, I better stuff them as full of work as I can,” which, again, creates the potential to worsen your bottleneck.

And so, one of the things that I talk about is it's okay for people to be idle. Or it's okay for people to be working on non-hourly stuff, once you're focused on flow efficiency. And we didn't mention it, and this is actually probably pretty important, is that all of Ben's work is flat fee. And so all of these things hold true in hourly billing models. So, I have got lots of clients that I work with who are hourly billers, and are definitely benefiting from focusing on flow loops and flow efficiency and things like that.

However, with hourly billers, there becomes a point of diminishing returns. Where the efficiencies you're building into your system actually start to eat at your profitability of your work. You can't just replace an hour billed in matter A with an hour billed in matter B, because there's processing costs of bringing matter B on board, right?

And so, one of the interesting side effects, and at one time, I was sort of anti-hourly billing, I'm a lot more agnostic now. But part of why I'm agnostic is that I know that firms, as they get more efficient, if they're billing hourly, eventually, the light bulb’s going to go off and they say, “Oh, we’ve got to change our billing model. It's time.” But they'll have the data, right? They’ll know, because we're sitting here looking at it, and we'll be looking at the finances and we'll be looking at the flow metrics, and they'll be saying, “Oh, our profitability is going down. But there's ways to fix that if we just change our model.”

Melissa: I love talking about this. We've talked about, John, you coming to maybe do something for Mastery Group, and introduce these concepts to the group. And if you're still willing to do that, that'd be amazing. Because this isn't my area of expertise. And when I am talking to clients about the neck cases, for example, which is essentially the growth, we can see what's coming in versus what's getting closed out.

And if they understand their capacity, and I have something to say about that. But if they understand what each pod can handle, in terms of attorney and support staff can handle, then they can set their threshold for when to make that hire. Otherwise, if they don't have that number, it feels like a hot mess. It's like, sooner the better, for a hire.

But what I am not an expert in, and I'm not going to pretend to be, is to help them figure out how good is your workflow, and how good is your capacity? Or how reliable? You think of your capacity in one way. Really, is that the truth? And what's the possibility there to increase efficiency? And so, there's a bunch of questions and a deep dive there that's really important. And I want listeners to clue into this, to give you a call, if that's something you still do these days.

John: Absolutely. No, I love talking about it. I love working with folks on it. I mean, I love seeing the light bulbs go off. And then just taking the concepts and running with them, which Ben has done. There is there's so much to learn, and a lot of it is counterintuitive. I mean, even the thing about capacity, right?

It really is taking a step or two back. Whenever there's a bottleneck, adding resources is only one way to fix it. Right? There’re process improvements you can make, there's sometimes technology improvements you can make, sometimes it's cross training you can do. There's any number of ways to address it.

And so, I try to encourage folks, and the Kanban system tries to encourage folks, that the method to really take a systems thinking approach, and understand okay, well, what's going on here? And what are different experiments I can run? And how am I going to measure the success of those experiments in order to get the results that I'm looking for?

Melissa: Yeah, yeah. And, you're saying there are different ways to approach the bottlenecks or approach the issues. But the only way to really figure out what probably the smartest move is for you, your firm, and your set of circumstances is to dig in and evaluate, in the ways that you help people do. I don't mean to say that, if you don't hire John, you're just screwed, that's not what I mean.

John: A lot of successful lawyers out there that I've never met.

Melissa: Right, totally. But this way of thinking, if there's something attractive about it, for people who are listening, certainly I think they should reach out to you. Do you have, or do you plan to, ever build a course on this that people could do? Tell me the ways that people could engage with your brain and how you deliver it.

John: I actually do have some courses. One of the things that's actually been really exciting for me, I've been teaching Kanban for a long time, but I only recently, and I think you and I might have talked about this on the last episode. But I had sort of really dug into the methodology as practiced by an organization called Kanban University.

And I spent some time, I’d get up at 5am, for two weeks straight, to get certified in teaching some of their materials. I'm in the process of actually updating a bunch of those materials, because a lot of the examples they have, their audience is primarily technology teams. So ,a lot of the examples they have are technology examples.

But I'm updating those materials with more legal industry-specific use cases. And Ben's probably going to find his way in there, maybe by name or under a pseudonym, we'll figure some of those out.

Melissa: For the university or for your own company?

John: Well, I'm helping build versions of their trainings that are specific to my audience, which is lawyers. There's only one other person that I know of who is certified under Kanban University that trains lawyers, and she's in Europe. And so, I'm frankly happy to have other people’s training materials. I want as many people to learn this methodology as possible, because it really works. It makes lawyers lives better, and it makes the communities they serve better.

And so, I don't have them. Hopefully by the time we publish this episode, I'll have some training dates up on my website for taking these courses. And I think these courses are going to be the best sort of introduction to the methodology. It's very hands on, so they're very interactive. It's not just like you're going to listen to me lecture. No, we're going to do exercises, we're going to try some things, we're going to see it work in an abstract way, not in your personal practice.

But if the concepts resonate with you, and for a lot of people they do. For some people, they don't, and that's fine. But if they do, then we can talk about coaching. Or one of the things that I haven't done yet but I'm thinking about, is doing some group work like you've got.

Melissa: Oh, my gosh, it's so funny. I have a hunch that everybody that listens to this podcast is interested in this stuff. Because I think they would have kicked me to the curb a long time ago. Because I care about dissection, and really understanding things, and so it feels like a lot of the listeners probably also have that value.

John: Well, I think it's why you and I always wind up having such good conversations. It’s that we're both cracking the same nuts, we just have slightly different angles that we come at it from.

Melissa: Yeah, I have, I don't know what it is, like some intellectual envy of how your brain works. I love the way my brain works around certain things. I'm pumped about that. I'm grateful for it. It's great. But man, I see the way that you think about this stuff, and I'm like, “That's so valuable,”

John: I feel the same way about you.

Ben: I feel the same way about both of you.

John: Right? It's a point you made at the very beginning of this episode, which is expert help is amazing.

Ben: It really is. I think I figured something out and I bring it to either one of you, where I go, “Hey, this is what I'm thinking.” And sometimes I'm close. Sometimes I'm off, but sometimes I'm close. And you're like, “Yeah, but  what about this?” You shift it just a little bit, and it clicks. And it's just so much more effective than what I had figured out on my own.

Melissa: Yeah, yeah. I'm a big fan of getting expert help. It makes everything streamlined. I mean, what are you going to do, just keep beating your head against the wall with something? I find that, and I'm sure that you guys can appreciate this, and I'm sure listeners can, I find that, as an owner, a lot of the times it's me with ideas just swimming in my head. Like new and improved ways of seeing how we could do something in a company. It's all here.

And the second someone asks about it, or there's a conversation, it's the first time being articulated, you realize the value of having an expert on the other side. Like, you should have just done it so long ago. Get it out of your head sooner, instead of just swim and swim. So, I don't know.

I really appreciate the work you're doing. I so appreciate you, Ben. Thanks for coming back with John and I.

Ben: Thanks for having me. This has been fun.

Melissa: Yeah, it's been very fun. Well, for anyone listening, Ben has a podcast. You should go listen to it if you're interested.

Ben: I do. Season two will be starting soon. We actually took a break, tying it back to this whole conversation. It's been a little while since I’ve posted an episode. And it's because marketing is not, that's not the area. So, I am really trying to follow this.

As much as I love doing the podcast, and I love doing that, you know that it's a lot of time to do a podcast. Especially if you're also doing videos and posting all the time. It's coming back. So, check it out. It's more aimed at clients than at other lawyers. But I go on rants about the billable hour and I talk about whatever I want to talk about. Feel free to check it out.

Melissa: The reason that I mentioned that podcast, I know it tends to be for clients, but I think a lot of owners get in their own way about starting a podcast, but you did a really good job. You got the stuff you wanted to get, you just spent the money, which I don't even know that you had to invest that much. But you just got what you needed, you had a good setup, and you just pushed go. You didn't overthink it. You talk about what you want to talk about. I think it's a really good example of what it looks like to be agile. Or to just go for it.

Ben: Just take the first steps, just take action.

Melissa: Yes, definitely.

John: I'll plug my dormant podcast, too. And I haven't recorded a new episode in a while. But the set of episodes that I do have is a series that I called “Voice of the Client”. Where I interview people that have had interactions with the legal system, and ask them about how it really was from their perspective.

Because it's hard getting that client input. And for lawyers that haven't taken the time to do that… It may not be your practice area; it may not be whatever. But I think just hearing, in their voice, how clients talk about working with lawyers is really interesting.

Melissa: Yeah, absolutely. Will you give your website one more time?

John: AgileAttorney.com. It's the Agile Attorney podcast on Apple, and all the other things. So, I’ve got that alliteration going.

Melissa: Awesome. Thank you, guys. What a treat.

Ben: Thanks.

John: Thanks for having me back.

Melissa: Bye-bye.

Hey, you may not know this, but there's a free guide for a process I teach called Monday Map/ Friday Wrap. If you go to velocitywork.com, it's all yours. It's about how to plan your time and honor your plans. So that, week over week, more work that moves the needle is getting done in less time. Go to velocitywork.com to get your free copy.

Thank you for listening to The Law Firm Owner Podcast. If you're ready to get clearer on your vision, data, and mindset, then head over to velocitywork.com, where you can plug into Quarterly Strategic Planning, with accountability and coaching in between. This is the work that creates Velocity.