Today we’re talking about a way to find the bottlenecks in your legal matter or process. But before we get to that, I want to let you know that next Wednesday, March 25, we’re going to be doing a live interview with Michele Allinote of Journey Law about the virtual review service she’s developed for WILLS, and how she’s automated the intake systems in her firm. That’ll be live in the LeanLegal Community Facebook group at 2 p.m. Eastern.

Want to watch this tip instead? 

Last week was Karen’s monthly writing tip—this time on editing.

What’s a bottleneck?

A bottleneck occurs in your practice wherever or whenever you don’t have enough capacity at a given point to handle the flow of work. The problem is, when everyone is working hard, beavering away in their silos, it can be very hard to figure out where the bottleneck is.

You may not notice until you miss a deadline, or your matter takes much longer to complete than you think it should. By then, it’s too late. You need a proactive way to address your resource constraints, either preventing them in the first place or fixing them as soon as they appear. You can’t do that unless you can see them.

A matter management board is a great way to spot bottlenecks. If you follow us regularly, you know we’re great believers in using boards to manage legal and business processes.

Matter Management Boards give you an instant visual picture of how work moves through your practice, so you can stay on top of matters and keep files on time and on budget.

They also let you see, immediately, how work DOESN’T move through your practice. They show you the bottlenecks.

When you’re using a board, you visually move tasks or files through the columns that represent the phases of your matter. When tasks or files stall in a given column, you can SEE it. That column fills up with cards. Your bottleneck will become instantly apparent.

Here, it’s Due Diligence. Then, you can concentrate your efforts on that column. Why is work stalling? What’s the actual constraint? Is it time? People? Equipment? Do you have enough people to handle the work? Could you automate some aspect there, or streamline the work, so that the people you have can do more in less time or with less effort? Is there something about the process at that point that just isn’t working?

There are lots of reasons why work may stall at a given point in your legal process, but until you find out where the work is stalling, you can’t address the problem. A matter management board will help. Find out how to create one with our All-in-One Guide or join one of our Matter Management Masterclasses. You’ll find links down below.

And that’s it for this week’s tip. Join us next week for more on building a profitable and productive law practice.

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Thanks a lot everybody! See you next week.