The Agile Attorney Podcast
19 episodes - English - Latest episode: 21 days ago - ★★★★★ - 2 ratingsThe Agile Attorney podcast teaches legal professionals how to streamline their legal workflows using the principles, practices, and tools of the Kanban Method.
Join Accredited Kanban Trainer and award-winning legal operations professional John E. Grant as he shares the keys to implementing effective strategies, practices, and technologies to drive true efficiency in your legal processes.
For more information on how John can help you develop an agile mindset and bust through your legal delivery bottlenecks, visit https://agileattorney.com.
This is the show for you if you find yourself asking questions like:
-How can I make my law practice more efficient?
-What is the best way to implement legal project management in my legal workflow?
-How can I best leverage technology to improve my legal workflows?
-What is the best way to transition my practice to flat fees or other alternative billing structures?
-How can I get my legal team to perform better?
-How can I better build productized legal services?
-What is the best way to increase law firm revenue without adding headcount?
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Episodes
011. The Definition of Done
April 04, 2024 05:00 - 22 minutes - 18.5 MBHow do you know that you’ve done enough to meet the standards you’ve set for your law practice? Today, I have two specific tools that work beautifully together and amount to a specific type of quality standard policy that you can implement within your law practice. Tune in this week as I share two important parts of the Agile Framework - Definition of Done and Definition of Ready. I’m discussing the role that checklists play in coming up with your Definition of Done and Definition of R...
010. Make Policies Explicit
March 28, 2024 05:00 - 20 minutes - 17.3 MBIf you don’t have explicit policies, it becomes incredibly difficult to develop any consistency around how and when you deliver your work. Tune in this week to discover the importance of establishing simple but clear policies in your law practice. Those policies are going to be the key to improving the quality and consistency of your work product and your workflow. You’ll learn two different ways to think about policies that can help you accomplish the same thing, but ultimately, I think o...
009. Focus on Quality To Improve Efficiency
March 21, 2024 05:00 - 18 minutes - 15.4 MBWhat if the best way to improve the efficiency of your law practice is to not try to improve efficiency at all, but to focus on quality instead? This may sound paradoxical, but focusing on quality, not efficiency, is the key to unlocking more balanced workloads, smoother workflow, increased capacity, and ultimately greater efficiency while delivering an improved client experience along the way. On today’s show, I'm musing on why I believe quality improvement and process improvement are...
008. Building the Lean Law Firm with Dave Maxfield
March 14, 2024 05:00 - 49 minutes - 40.3 MBDave Maxfield, co-author of The Lean Law Firm, joins me today to provide an interesting look into how lawyers can adopt techniques from the Lean methodology to empower and improve their law practices. Tune in this week to discover how to take lean production systems of global production lines and use them to improve your law practice. We’re discussing the potential efficiency pitfalls of hourly billing, Dave’s simple formula for making changes that increase revenue, and we’re analyzing the...
007. Don’t Let Efficiency Destroy Customer Value
March 07, 2024 06:00 - 27 minutes - 22.4 MBStreamlining processes in your law practice makes sense. It saves you and your team precious time and energy and keeps the backend running smoothly. However, optimizing a system for efficiency doesn’t always go down well with clients. In fact, it can reduce customer value and loyalty, leaving them disengaged from the process you’re helping them through. Tune in this week to discover how you might unknowingly be alienating your customers in an effort to have efficient systems in your la...
006. What Clients Really Want from Lawyers
February 29, 2024 06:00 - 32 minutes - 26.9 MBWhen somebody hires a lawyer, what are they really looking for? One mainstay of being an Agile Attorney is delivering customer value consistently, so how do you invest your time and experience in your practice now to create an environment that prioritizes client value in your firm? Discover how you can pivot in your law firm to provide the kind of value your clients really want from you. I’m giving you tools that will help you expand what you’re able to offer your clients, aside from adva...
005. Close the Closable: Finding Balance in Your Caseload
February 22, 2024 06:00 - 27 minutes - 22.9 MBDo you have numerous cases close to being completed but, because they are no longer urgent, they sit among the rest of your work and make you feel overwhelmed by all there is to do? Many firms overlook addressing this common issue as an opportunity to reduce the total amount of work in their system. This week, I’m building on concepts we’ve talked about over the last few weeks to help you organize your law practice. I’ll cover two important concepts related to law practice management a...
004. Kanban Board Essentials for Lawyers
February 15, 2024 09:00 - 33 minutes - 27.3 MBThere is a wealth of tools out there designed to streamline your workflow, easy to pick up and capable of adapting in countless ways as you master them. A personal favorite of mine is the Kanban board. We'll explore various board types, identifying the one that best meets your practice's needs and pinpointing bottlenecks in your process. You'll learn how to introduce useful complexity into your workflow modeling, understand the differences between Matter-level and Task-level boards, an...
003. Finding and Fixing Bottlenecks to Drive Law Practice Efficiency
February 08, 2024 09:00 - 20 minutes - 17 MBAre you hitting roadblocks in your legal delivery systems because of stubborn bottlenecks that disrupt the flow of work? It feels like every new solution out there promises smoother operations, yet often, they just end up shifting the problem elsewhere. In today’s episode, I’m going to guide you through the most effective strategies for getting work to move seamlessly through your system again. We’ll take a close look at the bottleneck areas in your law practice and discuss why making ...
002. The Honest Reckoning with Capacity
February 01, 2024 09:00 - 20 minutes - 17.1 MBIf you're feeling overwhelmed or overburdened in your law practice, it may be a sign that you're operating beyond your current capacity. But how do you know what that is? And how can you go from prioritizing intake and growth to focusing on delivering quality work within the firm's capacity? In this episode, I provide tools to help you get back within a comfortable capacity and deliver the work you promised to clients and customers. You will discover how to think of capacity in a way t...
001. Four Agile Principles to Help Your Legal Practice
January 25, 2024 09:00 - 16 minutes - 13.9 MBDo you ever feel discouraged or overwhelmed by the amount of unfinished work in your law practice? Are you ever juggling so many balls that you’re worried something is going to drop and you may not notice when it does? Join me this week as I dive deeper into what the Agile Methodology is and how it can help you avoid the overwhelm that leads to problems and burnout. I share the four principles of Agile Methodology and how beneficial they can be for your practice and encourage you to s...
Start Here: Build a Practice That is Profitable, Scalable, and Sustainable
January 24, 2024 14:53 - 1 minute - 1.69 MBHi, I'm John Grant. I'm an operations expert on a mission to help legal professionals of all kinds build practices that are profitable, scalable, and sustainable for themselves and the communities they serve. I created this podcast for law firm owners, in-house leaders, practice group leads, and really any other legal professional who wants to reduce overwhelm and gain better visibility and control over their legal delivery workflows. After all, you should be running your law practice. It...
Voice of the Client: Jason
October 05, 2021 19:00 - 50 minutes - 116 MBIn this bonus series of the Agile Attorney Podcast, we are focusing on the Voice of the Client. I am bringing you the stories of real people, in their own voice, talking about the challenges and successes they've had dealing with lawyers. Today you will hear from Jason, a maintenance technician at an industrial plant who represented himself through the majority of his divorce proceedings in Massachusetts. Listen more to hear what happened to his original attorney, how he prepared for c...
Voice of the Client: Dennis
September 01, 2021 13:42 - 52 minutes - 121 MBIn this bonus series of the Agile Attorney Podcast, we are focusing on the Voice of the Client. I am bringing you the stories of real people, in their own voice, talking about the challenges and successes they've had dealing with lawyers. Today you will hear from Dennis, a financial planner in central California. In Dennis's Case, he's not hiring the lawyer as a client, but he is "hiring" lawyers that he can trust to handle the legal work for *his* clients. For show notes and more...
Voice of the Client: Amy
July 06, 2021 12:00 - 36 minutes - 25.3 MBDelivering customer value is at the heart of being Agile. That’s why, in this bonus series of the Agile Attorney Podcast, I’m focusing on the Voice of the Client. I am bringing you the stories of real people in their own voice talking about the challenges and successes they have had dealing with lawyers. Today you will hear from Amy who only has good things to say about the lawyers she works with regularly. For me, it highlights what's possible when there's strong mission alignment and...
Voice of the Client: Angel
June 24, 2021 11:30 - 48 minutes - 33.2 MBIn this bonus series of the Agile Attorney Podcast, we are focusing on the Voice of the Client. I am bringing you the stories of real people in their own voice talking about the challenges and successes they have had dealing with lawyers. Today you will hear from Angel who has had some serious challenges in the workplace at the intersection of racial and gender discrimination. There is a lot to unpack in this interview, but one of the things I hear is an internal struggle about how to ...
The Voice of the Client: Angel
June 24, 2021 11:30 - 48 minutes - 33.2 MBIn Season 1 of the Agile Attorney Podcast, we are focusing on the Voice of the Client. I am bringing you the stories of real people in their own voice talking about the challenges and successes they have had dealing with lawyers. Today you will hear from Angel who has had some serious challenges in the workplace at the intersection of racial and gender discrimination. There is a lot to unpack in this interview, but one of the things I hear is an internal struggle about how to value the...
Voice of the Client: Lynn
June 09, 2021 22:56 - 51 minutes - 35.4 MBIn this bonus series of the Agile Attorney Podcast, we are focusing on the Voice of the Client. I am bringing you the stories of real people in their own voice talking about the challenges and successes they have had dealing with lawyers. Today you will hear from Lynn who is in the later stages of a custody battle. I’m excited for you to hear her opinions about her lawyers and the legal process in general. She voices her frustrations both with her case and their implication for the la...
The Agile Attorney Podcast Intro
May 19, 2021 18:08 - 7 minutes - 5.4 MBAfter several years of pondering starting a podcast, here is the debut episode! My goal for the podcast is to have several different episode types that align with how I view Agile. Agile is a revolutionary approach to managing knowledge work of all kinds - including legal work. The Agile approach boiled down to 4 key principles- Focus should always be on value (specifically, customer value) Empower your team Optimize everything for delivering quality Improve, regularly and freque...