Ops for Law
Law Practice Operations
Operations Fundamentals
Operations Fundamentals in Legal Work
If we want to improve how legal work is done, we must apply the scientific method. To do this, we must be able to describe legal work in operational terms, assess how it is done, hypothesize improvements, and test them. Law practice does not have a vocabulary for describing how legal work is done. Operations science provides that missing link.
When driven to its end, the operational vocabulary for law practice must include the language of logic, just as the operations vocabulary of a production facility ultimately includes the language of physics and chemistry. One cannot build a document production system to produce a legal document without knowing the relevant laws and practices and how they logically relate.
History of Operations Fundamentals
Since the beginning of civilization, people have used transforming processes to produce goods and services. As a separate discipline, however, operations management is relatively new.
While the Industrial Revolution, which began in the 1770s, saw the introduction of machine-based production, Frederick Winslow Taylor’s work in the early 1900s marks the beginning of a more systematic approach to managing the production of goods and services. His “Principles of Scientific Management” argued that work tasks should be studied and improved scientifically, with best practice methods taught to specialized workers who performed individual steps. He also proposed a new class of workers, industrial engineers, who designed and improved the processes executed by workers and their machines. Henry Ford adopted Taylor’s methods in the production of automobiles, and by combining these scientific concepts with consistently interchangeable parts and moving conveyance created assembly line production – a concept that revolutionized manufacturing.
Throughout the 20th century the operations management discipline was extended by the development of numerous quantitative techniques for inventory modeling, quality management, and other operations decision-making tasks. This application of mathematical approaches to operations decision making is generally referred to as “management science.” The latter decades of the 20th century also witnessed the growth in the application of operational principles to the management of non-manufacturing activities, including knowledge work. Today, operations management includes a robust set of concepts and tools that can be used to improve the performance of any enterprise.
Key Concepts
Process
A series of steps that transforms inputs (e.g., capital, labor, energy, facts) into outputs (goods or services, including documents and oral statements).
Process Map
A diagram that shows the sequence of activities in a process using symbols. This analytical tool helps one to understand how the steps in a process fit together and is a first step in studying and improving a process. A process map may have the structure of an activity diagram (see the defined term under Project Management).
Capacity
The maximum rate of output for a process or system of processes measured in units of output per unit of time. In legal work, this can grossly be measured in the number of professionals available for work at a point in time, but is more accurately measured as the legal work that could be accomplished taking into account the actual productivity of the available professionals. A law department who uses productivity enhancements to cut the cycle time (see below for definition) for software contract review from six hours to three hours has twice the capacity of a like-sized department that still has a cycle time of six hours.
Throughput time
The amount of time each unit spends in a process. This includes the time the unit is being processed and the time the unit waits for processing. Assume work on a particular legal matter begins at 8:00 a.m. and is completed at 5:00 p.m.; the throughput time for this matter is nine hours. This elapsed time includes time actually spent working on the matter (say 1 hour for analysis and 2 hours for drafting) and time the matter spends waiting while the resources involved are otherwise occupied. Throughput time reminds us that work may spend most of its time waiting to be done. We should reduce the time the work is waiting.
Cycle Time
The average time for the completion of one or more successive steps of work. As used in the example above, the cycle time for initial review of a software contract may be six hours. We may use checklists or automated review assistance to reduce the cycle time to three hours without reducing the quality of the review. We should reduce the cycle time required for any step in a process.
Bottleneck
The resource that limits the capacity of the overall process. If all work must proceed through three steps, A (fact acquisition), B (analysis), and C (drafting), and the cycle times of A, B and C are 1 hour, 4 hours and 2 hours respectively, step B (analysis) would be the bottleneck. The capacity of this process would be two matters completed per 8 hour day.
Utilization
The input actually used over the amount of input available. Labor utilization, equipment utilization and capacity utilization are key metrics for many systems. In law practice, the utilization of professional staff is critical, because they are expensive to maintain if idle. A lawyer who bills collectible hours for 100% of her expected workday is fully utilized.
Batch size: The number of units of a particular product or service that are produced before beginning to produce another type of product or service. This can be measured in discrete tasks, such as when a lawyer has a transaction requiring five documents, three of which are worked on in a single session as a batch. This can also be measured in processing time, such as when a lawyer decides that she will spend two hours this afternoon working on documents for this transaction before turning to another.
Flow shop
Productive system in which resources are organized to produce high volumes of a single (or several highly similar) products. A flow shop organizes its work stations in the order needed to produce that product. In this way, flow shops are product-focused; i.e., the needs of the product govern the way in which the productive resources are organized. Because the inputs, sequence of required steps, and outputs are predictable, the main management challenge of volume production in flow shops is to minimize the cost of production.
Job Shop
A productive system that uses general purpose resources to produce a variety of different products or services each in relatively small quantities. In a job shop, different products require different routings among stations. The operational challenge of a job shop is to keep work flowing quickly through the system while maintaining high utilization of the work stations (a lawyer is regarded as staffing a work station for this purpose). Most law firms are “job shops” they use general purpose resources (multi-skilled attorneys) and are highly flexible (able to respond to a variety of highly nuanced client matters).
Resources
Hopp, Wallace and Mark Spearman. Factory Physics (New York: Irwin McGraw-Hill, 1995).
Taylor, Frederick Winslow. The Principles of Scientific Management (New York, NY: Harper & Brothers, 1911).
http://www.factoryphysics.com (Factory Physics)
http://www.iienet2.org (Institute of Industrial Engineers)
http://www.apics.org (American Production and Inventory Control Society)