Podcast Ep #47: How Kanban Creates Capacity Liquidity in Your Law Firm with Richard Hoare

Richard: When we realized the reason we wanted to do this is because we wanted to put 100% of our energy and resources into the one area where we felt we could make the biggest and most tangible impact on the music community as a whole. Realized that on the artists’ side, there’s dozens of incredible artist lawyers on the side that we’re doing, which is really focused on trying to improve the entire flow of paperwork across the music ecosystem.

We seem to be the only people in the UK really focused on those very niche set of problems. There again this is where we just find ourselves going deeper and deeper into a niche. But the more we do that, and I’m talking to you and what I would say, I’m sure you’d be the first to admit, is a very niche podcast. The more you hone in on that niche in a counterintuitive way, the greater the opportunities become.

You are listening to The Agile Attorney Podcast powered by Agile Attorney Consulting. I’m your host, John Grant, and I have made it my mission to help legal professionals of all kinds build practices that are profitable, sustainable and scalable for themselves and the communities they serve. And it’s hard for me to think of a legal professional that embodies all three of those endeavors more than my guest on today’s podcast.

I’m really excited to bring you an interview and case study from one of my clients, Richard Hoare of Hoare Associates. And there is so much to glean from the work that Rich and his team have done, and I’m honored to have been able to play a part in their evolution. Hoare Associates is one of the coolest law practices I’ve ever come across.

They are an alternative legal services provider in England, which, for those of you who aren’t legal regulation nerds like I am, is a structure enabled by the 2007 Legal Services Act of England and Wales that allows non-lawyer investment in certain regulated legal services businesses. But that’s not the cool part. The cool part is that they are involved in empowering the music recordings and performances of some of the biggest artists in the UK and around the world.

And I’m not at liberty to discuss their client list, but I guarantee these are people and bands that you know and probably love. And Rich and his team handle the contracting for one of the oldest and best-known music festivals in the world. There is so much to learn from Rich and his team. For one, they have adopted a true four-day work week. Literally everyone in their office gets three days off every week. Not the same three days for everyone. They still do work for their clients five days a week. But everyone is working on a four-day schedule.

They also are a remote first team. They do have some co-working space in their hometown of Frome, but several members of the firm live and work in far-flung parts of the UK, and some of them move about on a pretty regular basis. All of which means they’ve had to be really intentional about building systems, building tools, and building culture that works for their kind of non-standard working arrangements and boy, does it work.

But the biggest thing for me is learning how Rich and his team have evolved from being something of a labor arbitrage play. Like a lot of small firms, they started by offering a faster and less expensive approach to handling all of the little contracts that are required inside of the music industry. But as they got better at their work, and every bit as importantly, their workflows, they have evolved into being something of an expert systems provider that doesn’t just handle the work better, they make their clients and their clients’ businesses better and smarter overall.

Now, before I get to the interview, I do want to take a quick minute to tout the workshop that I delivered over the summer to Rich and his team. One of the things I love about working with legal teams is that they are full of smart people who are usually working incredibly hard. But they can be so darned busy and getting pulled in so many different directions that the people on the team, and especially the team’s leadership, are often feeling totally stressed out.

They’re worried about things falling through the cracks, and they’re generally just frustrated that things aren’t working as well as they feel like they could be or should be. And that’s why I developed a workshop specifically for legal teams where I teach principles, practices, and tools that help the entire team make an immediate impact on your practice’s profitability and sustainability. And it sets you up to start pursuing some scalability if that’s what you’re interested in.

But most importantly, I love how good the workshop is at getting team members aligned around the goals and objectives of your practice. And helping make sure everyone is moving in the same direction around achieving those goals. And I call this thing a STATIK workshop, which you may have heard me talk about in other episodes. It’s spelled S-T-A-T-I-K, and it stands for the systems thinking approach to implementing Kanban.

That’s a mouthful, but the important thing is that very soon after the workshop, if not immediately after, you’re going to feel like a weight has been lifted off your chest. And that you have time to breathe and think and pursue the law practice that you’ve always had the desire to build but you’ve probably been too much a victim of your own success to actually find the time to get there.

If this sounds like something that would be useful or interesting to you and your team, I encourage you to go to agileattorney.com, hit the Work with Me button, and look for the link to book a discovery call. But frankly, you can just fill out the contact form on my site or even just shoot me an email at john.grant@agileattorney.com. Put something like ‘Let’s talk workshop’ in the subject line, and I’ll get back to you to schedule a time to talk. You won’t regret it. Alright, on to my interview with Rich.



John: Richard Hoare, welcome to The Agile Attorney podcast.

Richard: Great to be here, John.

John: So, let’s start by just getting a little bit about you and your background. And I guess I’ll start by saying you have kind of one of the objectively coolest law practices I’ve ever come across. Because you get to literally work with rock stars and pop stars and music producers and folks that are on the vanguard of a lot of things that I like, and I think a lot of things that a lot of people like. But how did you come to this area of practice to begin with, and then eventually how did you come to have your own practice inside this area of practice?

Richard: It’s a great question, and it’s great to be reminded that it is to the outside world is an exciting and dynamic area of practice. When you’re looking at contracts all day every day, it can sometimes alter that perspective over time, and I do consider myself incredibly lucky to be able to work in an area which I’m genuinely passionate about. So going back to where that passion started, I can pinpoint it exactly pretty much the same age as my youngest son is now, 10 years old.

A new kid moved to the village where I grew up, and he was into music and particularly into electronic music and synthesizers. And he said, “Come with me, I’m going to buy a new keyboard.” And went round to an older kid’s house and he was selling this little Casio keyboard. And he played the theme tune from the Beverly Hills Cop, Axel F. by Harold Faltermeyer, played this on his little keyboard, and it was the coolest thing I had ever seen. And I thought, this is what I want to be involved in, in some way or another.

That friend has gone on to be an incredibly successful DJ and producer, very well known on both sides of the Atlantic, in an outfit called Above and Beyond. And he got me into music really early days, and so my school years were very much, it was music first and the legal bit came in later. I kind of didn’t know what I wanted to do when I left school and defaulted to a law degree. I think lots of lawyers are in the same position. Well, they thought it was a good, reliable career to get into year one of a law degree, fantastic.

Year two, much less interesting topics, gone were contract and criminal and tort and all the fun sort of well-known cases, and in came land law and European Union law and all sorts of less interesting things. I’m very fortunate in that at about the same time, I had a girlfriend whose godmother, I think, worked in this incredible area of this Mecca of music and law. She worked for the management company who managed Elton John, and so she had this incredible insight into that world.

And it was an aha moment for me, realizing that I could combine my studies, which were going okay, with my passion, which was still music, I was still in bands and everything at the time. Until that point, I hadn't realized those two things could coexist. So, I went into a third year on my degree course, was actually a year’s work experience. And I got to do that working at RCA Records, dealing with lots of boring kinds of catalog and sample clearance stuff.

But in relation, dealing with stuff to do with the rights in the Elvis catalog, which I went on to write my dissertation on and from that point on, it was really straightforward, actually. Now, I think, perceived wisdom at the time was to just be a generalist, not to cut off too many options or whatever. But I found the opposite to be true in that the more I focused on a niche or a niche, as my American friends would say, the more I focused on that niche, the simpler things became in a way.

There were only a handful of firms who I had to write application letters to, and so those applications could be super focused, and one thing led to another. I ended up working at the oldest and best music law firm in London and I was there for 10 or 12 years as a trainee and associate partner and a consultant. Sorry, it’s all very …

John: No, it’s good. So I’ll interpolate a little bit and so you learned the ropes under probably more or less the epitome of what the conventional wisdom, the standard practice was for music and licensing law.

Richard: Absolutely. One of these incredibly highly regarded firms with a team of just extraordinary practitioners, all very different styles, very different practices within the practice. And just trying to pick up elements of best practice from them and learning how they kind of created value in their deals. And in the process, getting to work alongside some of my musical heroes and be part of that story.

John: That definitely makes it fun. So then let me fast forward you then to what I kind of think of as your Jerry Maguire moment, which I’m a pure Gen Xer, so these movies can be seminal. I mean, at some point you kind of started to get that infomercial, there has to be a better way, feeling about how you were conducting your life in the law. Is that a fair summation?

Richard: Yeah, and I think absolutely. I was probably in a similar place to lots of lawyers in their 30s where you feel like you’ve worked super hard, and you’ve achieved a lot and made lots of progress, but you’ve also made lots of mistakes along the way probably. And those first 10 years, I think are [crosstalk] for lots of people working in a very challenging discipline. And I’d definitely kind of fallen out of love with what I was doing, I think.

I was very much more towards like anyone would be, focusing on career progression and the metrics by which that is one [inaudible] and thinking about hours and billing and all the rest of it. And how do I square that with family life? It coincided with my son being born and my wife’s father passed away at a similar time. Irrelevant details in some ways. But I think it’s incredibly important from a personal perspective, is the direction of travel with what I’m doing here, does that mesh with my values long term?

John: Yeah. And there’s something about, and I’m sure it’s pretty similar in the UK as it is here in the States, where I think people get swept up in scoring points in the game of law firm or working inside of the law practice. And it can be consuming because it is a pretty well-established game and there are certain paths to success inside of that universe. And if that’s what you’re focused on. The game of law firm doesn’t especially care about the game of personal life, or sometimes even the game of client experience or client satisfaction.

It’s about maximizing inside of the construct of the big law practice. And obviously that came to be more and more at odds with where you were sort of heading personally or wanted to be heading personally.

Richard: Absolutely. And there was 100% a way to reconcile those objectives. But for me, I think where I was at with everything was that most of my personal practice at that time within the firm that I worked with was very much focused on weird electronic music, which had huge value to me on a personal and creative level. But was never going to kind of put me at the top of the billings table. So, it’s kind of, well, where do I go with this? Do I try to scale that enormously?

So, I’m just having to deal with thousands of those types of transactions to kind of bring it up to a whole or do I dilute that and try and go for mainstream clients who may have more commercial opportunities? And for me, I just felt there probably wasn’t a way in which those two things sat neatly with each other. And so there was [inaudible] coincided with having children and us moving outside of London and me feeling really quite kind of stuck with where I was.

I’m sure there might be people listening who started writing a resignation letter, the motivation for that started in one place, which was just, I need to get out here. This is not good for me or for my health or anything else. And actually, as I had that letter in draft and went through the various iterations of it and this is great advice for anyone using who’s in a similar situation about getting your thoughts down on paper.

Is that as you start to kind of go through your reasoning and talking about things we’ve just been talking about, about alignment of values and all the rest of it and direction of travel. Then actually it goes from becoming a rant and why I want to get out of here to, well, no, of course, this is what makes sense and doesn’t only make sense for me, but it makes sense for the firm who probably had all sorts of concerns about this guy whose heart wasn’t in it. And the people who are coming up behind me in their careers and thinking, well, there’s this guy in the way.

So, I feel like having made that decision, all of the things seemed to find their right place.

John: Yeah, okay. And I love that, and I don’t want to drill too far on it, but there’s a book that I really love called Writing to Learn by a guy named William Zinsser. He was a writing professor, I think at Princeton or something, something fancy and it’s a little bit of an older book. I think it’s from the 1980s or 90s, but the core sort of idea from that book is that you don’t write because you need to express something you know. You write to discover what you actually need to know.

And there’s something about the process of long form writing and I’ll just do a quick tangent as a cautionary tale of outsourcing your written product to generative AI. Because the whole point is to wrestle with it and to sort of struggle and clarify in your own mind what’s going on.

Richard: Totally. I could not agree more with that sentiment in relation to that. And over the lockdowns, my friend Andrew and I wrote a book about negotiation as well and it was a very similar experience. I thought I knew what I was trying to say when I went into writing that book. By the end of it, it just crystallizes all of these unfinished chains of thought that roam around in our minds.

John: Yeah, I love that. Well, and then the other thing that I think is interesting about it, and this is something that I run into a lot with people that have gone out on their own, especially from larger practices. And it doesn’t even have to be large practices. I know a lot of people that started as an associate in a two or three attorney firm. It doesn’t have to be big, but there’s an interesting pivot that happens where I think the initial impetus is to get away from something.

There’s something here that I don’t like, but you eventually come to realize that that’s not enough. We have to be moving towards something bigger, better, more fulfilling, better for the world, whatever it happens to be. So, tell me a little bit about within the context of music contract law and the work that you’re doing, what was the better way that you came up with that you eventually said, “I alone need to go forge this path in order to bring this better way into the world?”

Richard: Well, I would love to say that it was all kind of a preformed idea that this is what I could achieve. But it was very much kind of stitching the parachute together as you’re jumping out of the airplane kind of thing. So, the reality was leaving to do exactly what I’d been doing previously, but on a much smaller scale effectively with these artists. And my aspiration at that point was to try to be able to offer something approaching the phenomenal level of service and/or advice that the very best artists were getting, but for some of these much more bedroom based producers and artists.

And I felt that under my own time, I would be able to do something like that. That was how it started. What happened in practice was slightly different in that I think one or two of the record producers who I worked with started having a very high volume, not necessarily super high value transactions, but a very high volume of paperwork to look at. So, contrast how some of your favorite albums of the past that had been made, Nirvana had one producer and one mixer on Nevermind, I think, to how current albums get made.

If you look at a recent record by Dua Lipa or Ed Sheeran or someone like that, you look at the credits and there will be dozens and dozens of contributors to that record, whether they make the beat, they produce the record, they’ve done vocal production, there’s a sample in there. There’s just dozens and dozens of these, what we call third party contributor agreements.

And so, I was looking at this from the perspective of one of the producers who I worked with who had become very successful and produced a series of number ones in the UK, and he was suddenly hugely in demand. And there was suddenly, when previously I’d run lots of deals, not in series, but the distinction between running things in series and in parallel, but it used to be the case that I’d work on some things. But now I was in a situation where it was just me and there were a ton of things running in parallel all ostensibly with high priority, but perhaps not super high value.

John: Right. Okay. So, then that’s going to get me a little bit, I think, into pivoting into sort of your growth story and how you eventually found me. But because I think what you’re describing is the early phases of a form of overwhelm that I think is really common. Whatever niche people find or whatever demand they have, I say frequently that there is in fact a shortage of good lawyers in the world.

I think there’s a shortage of lawyers in the world overall, and there’s certainly a shortage of good lawyers. And once you demonstrate your ability to practice your craft in a way that is useful for your clients, they want more of it. And you were fortunate enough to catch on with someone who caught on with the world. So, tell me how you started this transition of, okay, I’m overwhelmed. I need to either bring in more help or improve my systems or do all these things to try to basically deliver more of this work that I’m in demand for.

Richard: Precisely. So, I think we’ve probably discussed this previously at some point, but you’re going to love this aspect. And this all happened 10 years ago, bearing in mind. And you and I only started talking about it, doing this slightly more, doing it properly, much more recently than that. So, you can see there’s some gaps to fill in, in the middle.

But effectively, so I worked down here in Somerset and just an hour and a half outside of London, but quite rural compared to the city, a fantastic town. It’s a former market town just outside of Bath in the UK. And is very forward to thinking, very ahead of the curve in terms of having co-working spaces with super-fast broadband. And it encouraged this, what we now take for granted is very sort of flexible working. So, I worked in a fantastic co-working space when I first came down here and I shared the space with all sorts of incredible people, designers and crucially web developers.

A very good friend of mine was a web developer and I would see him at lunch or at the pub after work and he’d see me sort of tearing my hair out and going, “What are you doing with all of this? And how do you deal with this type of work?” And I go, “Well, the same as every lawyer does. Well, I just have a completely overwhelmed email inbox, and I tend to try and focus on the thing that I’m being screamed at most loudly for on any given day. Obviously, surely, that’s how it’s done, right?”

And he said, “Well, look, there’s some other ways you could think about doing it.” And just kind of sowed this seed in my mind of Lean or Agile or Kanban based work, any kind of visual representation of work. I got myself a Trello account and it kind of coincided with employee number one in my work as well, Ridley, who’s with me still. He’s my kind of right-hand man, Ridley and Sophie, employees one and two still. And what became very apparent is that despite me thinking I was phenomenally good at what I did, of course, and that’s why we’re so busy.

What became really obvious was that my way of working was not explicitly obvious to my colleagues. And so, this coincided with stuff that we’d talk about, and that you talk about a lot on the podcast, which is about making work visible, making policies explicit. And I think doing that in the early stages when there were only three of us kind of set the tone for where we find ourselves now. And makes a lot of the development of more nuanced ways of doing that much more accessible because we sort of started out doing it that way.

So, my friend Henry, you introduced some of these concepts and Russell as well actually, separately kind of introduced at the same time these ideas. I did some reading around Kanban at the time and kind of got what I thought was a good working idea of how those things could help with what we were doing. And really it did work, straight off the bat and we found that we went from being very overwhelmed and not turning things around quickly to just turning stuff around quicker than anyone else could with the producer clients who I mentioned.

That led to a phone call from one of the record labels saying, “Hey, we’ve noticed you doing this work really efficiently for this producer. Have you thought about doing something similar for a label?” And it’s not something we had done. We would look at it. So that’s a relationship that started probably eight/nine years ago and is still very strong. And I think since then we’ve always tried to balance what we were doing with artists, with what we were doing for music businesses.

And what we found is what these systems and what we’ve been working on with you have enabled us to do is to become very well-known and proficient at handling very high volumes of paperwork. And that really lends itself more, I think, to working for music businesses than it does for working for artists. And so now the work we do for artists is incredibly limited and really only applies to those artists for whom there are very high volumes of work. And most of what we do now is for record labels, music festivals, industry bodies, publishers, all of those things.

And in my mind, again, this is where writing things down definitely helps because when we wrote to our artist clients at the start of this year to say that this is where we were going to be putting our energies. Spelled out on the page when we realized the reason we wanted to do this is because we wanted to put 100% of our energy and resources into the one area where we felt we could make the biggest and most tangible impact on the music community as a whole.

We realized that on the artist side, there’s dozens of incredible artist lawyers on the side that we’re doing, which is really focused on trying to improve the entire flow of paperwork across the music ecosystem. We seem to be the only people in the UK who are really focused on those very, very niche set of problems. So again, this is where we just find ourselves going deeper and deeper into a niche.

But the more we do that, and I’m talking to you on what I would say, I’m sure you’d be the first to admit it is a very niche podcast. The more you hone in on that niche in a counterintuitive way, the greater the opportunities become.

John: Great. Okay. So, I actually want to unpack a little bit because I think you just bounced over the top of a lot of really good things, and I want to unpack that. Let’s take a quick break. And then when we come back, I’m going to come back to sort of that first Trello board and your first employees. And I want to talk a little bit more about your evolution from that to, we want to change the entire industry, which is kind of where you’ve wound up, which is great. So, look for that in just a minute.

Alright, we’re back, I’m with Richard Hoare. Richard is the owner of the Hoare Law Firm. He’s got a practice in Frome. Am I saying it correctly? I know I’m bad with..

Richard: Tempted to call it Frome, but yeah.

John: Yes, right, Frome, England, a very niche law practice that is focused now on the needs of record labels but started out working with producers and things. I want to come back to this place where you were, where you’re now a victim of your own success. You’ve launched your practice. You are doing good work. You’ve been working with one producer who sort of takes off and you realize that you need to scale. It’s not enough to just be able for you to buckle down and work harder.

You have to start working smarter, different, whatever. And you’ve had this sort of convergence of concepts where obviously you need more human power on your team, which is where you brought these folks on. But also, the challenge is then of not being able to just work the way your natural inclination wants to work. You have to actually figure out how to communicate and coordinate.

And I think there’s a lot of conventional wisdom in law practice that once you reach that point where you reach, that you of course have to start delegating work. And you can either delegate it internally to members that you hire or externally, etc. But that delegation actually has a whole other world of complication and cost. And eventually you do actually become bigger than the sum of the parts, but you don’t start there.

So, you have this Trello board and you’re managing work visually. And one of the things that you sort of skipped over the top of a little bit in the first part is with this visual management system, you are now able to deliver your work product to the same quality, but faster. And faster becomes this sort of very desirable unfair advantage for your clients where they like this. And eventually you catch the eye of not just your clients, but some of the counterparties that you’re working with in the contract world.

Tell me about how your conversion to a visual system, a Kanban board using Trello sort of led to that increased speed or velocity of the work.

Richard: It’s really interesting because I think precisely it is what was so wrong with the previous system. That’s where we start. The idea of just working off an inbox or a to-do list, but we’ve never really any insight on any given day as to where everything is at any one moment or where to begin. So, you may begin the week with just, where do I start, what can I possibly do today that’s going to have the most impact on getting through what we need to do?

And me on a good day, I might be able to have a reckoning of what that would be in the back of my mind. But unless I communicated that incredibly clearly to my small team at the time, it wouldn’t be obvious. And so, it became really clear really quickly and it was a guardrail as well against my own inherent disorganization, which I think lots of lawyers suffer with. They probably wouldn’t characterize it as that, but I think lots of us are just inherently not phenomenally well organized. And I don’t feel that the key to that is having a really great sort of personal productivity plan.

I feel the key to that is everyday environmental changes. So that if I come into work in the morning, the first thing that I see is going to give me some indication of what I need to do next. If a piece of work comes in, then it forces me away from default or knee jerk responses to things. And so, by building an environment, a visual environment in which to work, we’re able to start subtly altering our behaviors because our behaviors are dictated by the environment that we find ourselves in.

John: Yeah, so it’s the transition from more of an ad hoc approach to more of a systems driven approach is part of what I’m hearing. And I think in particular, and I’ve seen this over and over again with various law practices, there’s something about this visual construct. A Kanban board, I often say, is a visual fiction that allows your brain to process legal work in a more structured, a more pattern driven way.

And even if intellectually, you know that there’s a flow to the work. When your only tool for managing the work is text based, again, either in your inbox or in your to-do list or whatever it happens to be, your brain doesn’t quite wrap itself around the entirety of the process as easily as when you’ve got the actual stages of the work delineated in these visual columns of the Kanban board.

Richard: Totally. And I think, again, the inbox is the enemy. We have different approaches on inbox. We work out of little shared inboxes now so very often clients will set us up with a specific inbox that we manage for them, legal at such and such an entity. It’s really interesting, when you approach inboxes from that angle, and this is my personal inbox that I’m going to just habitually dopamine check every two minutes and get totally overwhelmed if there’s above a certain number of items in there.

The way we focus inboxes now is precisely that, it’s an in-tray. It’s a funnel to intake new matters. And so, we’ll jump on calls collectively, two or three of us in a small team in the business now and we’ll look at those inboxes and triage them very quickly. Pick things up, work out where those items need to sit in the context of the Kanban board and the process as a whole. And I think your personal inbox as a sole practitioner or in a small team can be so debilitating on a daily level, because you can set up complex labeling systems and all the rest of it.

But generally speaking, if you go away for a few days and you come back and your inbox is full, as some described it as someone else’s to-do list, basically. All of these items, they all have exactly the same weighting, lines are the same size, you’ve got no context as to what any of those emails mean. And so, we spend an awful lot of time trying to spend an awful lot less time in our inboxes and trying to use those really as a delivery method for getting the information that we need into the place where it needs to be actioned.

John: Yeah, so it’s the transition from using the inbox and your email as a workflow management tool, which is very terrible at, into a communications tool, which is what it was meant for. And the workflow is now living somewhere else, and you have a system for that, that has undergone its own evolution. But that evolution would be impossible inside of the tool that is email because it’s just not up to the task.

Richard: Absolutely. There are all sorts of tools that are available to do that. And lots of our clients work with different tools, on Monday or they’ve got a very sophisticated use of the AirTech table. And we’ve kind of worked with Trello all the way through. And I know that there are other tools that you talk about on the show. And we’ll probably end up working with different software at different points in the future. So really, I think what’s been amazing working with you is really focusing on, and I’ve nicked this because there was a conference in Cornwall last year.

I saw that their strapline, I think that was an Agile conference somewhere in the UK. And the strapline was methodology, not technology or something like that. So, the focus is on the principles and then it’s which technological tools do you use to use those principles most effectively.

John: Yeah. And I will fully admit, and I’m not shy about saying that Trello is not my out of the chute preferred tool. I do think it is sort of the obvious first choice for a lot of people because it just is very accessible for getting started. My complaints about it have to do with sort of evolutionary, very technical things that at least initially Trello wasn’t great at. Now Trello has gotten better partly because of all the universe of add-ons and power-ups and things that are available to it.

But what I will say is that your implementation of Trello is far and away the most sophisticated I’ve ever seen. So, you’re using Trello extremely effectively. Again, I think in our work together, we’ve still identified a few places where I was like, “If we were in a different tool, we could do this a little differently.” But to your point, none of it rises to the level of the headache and amount of just sheer time and effort it would take to replace Trello because for the most part Trello is actually working very well for you and your team.

Richard: Yeah. You speak to a professional photographer and ask them what the best camera to use is and they’ll say, “Well, it’s the one in your phone. It’s the one you’re going to use all the time.” And so, Trello is something that we’ve worked on over the years and crucially, there’s 11 of us in the team now and everyone has a kind of a working knowledge of that. And so, I feel like we can harness that and that allows us to do a lot more when we’re all speaking the same language.

John: Absolutely. Okay, so speaking of speaking the same language, I do want to come back to one other thing you mentioned. Because there’s an interesting transition that I think needs to happen when you transition from that sort of sole chief cook and bottle washer in your law practice into more of a coordinator, manager role. And it’s this phenomenon where I will sometimes joke that the unspoken item on any job description for someone that was in your place before you hired your first team members.

And that unspoken requirement is, must have ESP, must be a mind reader. Because it’s not normal or natural for most people to be good documenters of their thought process or even their actual processes. So, tell me a little bit about the evolution into, okay, I can’t just think a thought and have it come to life. I have to communicate and coordinate with these folks on my team in order to have this collective effort move us towards the goal that we’re trying to accomplish.

Richard: So, this is constant and ongoing, I would say, and as is the nature of lots of these working practices that you discuss on the podcast. And so there was an early stage of just me and a couple of people who were working on these things together at the outset, developing a kind of, we weren’t great. And it’s only recently when we’ve started chatting to you about some of these things in more detail, we weren’t great at being super explicit on things and there may be benefits to that.

But what we were keen on doing was establishing rules of the road, really, in terms of common sense and common practice. And again, it’s not completely explicit now, but the simple rules of the road, when we would say you’d never have, unless there’s a really, really important reason for it, you’d never have more than one person on a Trello card on a work item at one time. Because the idea is that it’s sat in a list and actually it is one person’s responsibility.

And then it may move to someone else’s responsibility, or we may decide to have a synchronous chat on a video call to work through some stuff together. But when it’s on that Trello board, it’ll be clear at a glance, who’s responsible for that thing. It was things like that. It was, beyond that, really just courtesy type rules that make an enormous difference in practice. So, what we’re always talking about is leaving the card as you would wish to find it.

So, lots of the guys that work, we have never worked in a traditional firm with traditional paper files. I’m sure a few firms still work in that way. But the way I learned 20 years ago was that when you pick up that file and you open page one of that file, you should kind of see exactly where you are on it. And you should have all the relevant information that you need at your fingertips, who you’re taking instructions from, relevant phone numbers, all the rest of it. It should be right there when you open the file.

And I would get shouted at if I didn’t have the most recent email on top or whatever as a young trainee. And so that’s something that we try to do on all of our Trello cards. Just means that anyone who picks something up, it’s going to just be very obvious to anyone picking up whether that’s the next person in the chain, or whether it’s someone who’s watching stuff whilst you’re on holiday or you’re off. We run a four-day week, so people are routinely picking up other people’s work so we’re not working in a silo.

And it’s just that kind of general courtesy, but that has an incredibly practical knock on. It will take me literally one minute to write a status update on the card that says this is where we’re at. But I know if I pick that card up and I didn’t have all the background, it would take me a lot more than one minute to read back through the correspondence and get to where we’re going. So, there’s a very kind of just practical time efficiency in working in that way.

I think it might be really obvious to lots of people listening to this, but I think we keep coming back to it and just trying to build in those overarching principles. But as I say, it’s not been until a lot more recently that we got into looking at making policies and ways of working. Especially as we grow, and people are coming to this with no background or context as to what we’re doing. Kind of developing that, this is how things are done around here and developing the sort of secret sauce as it were.

John: Yeah. Well, and I want to hit a quick tangent because I think there’s something about your people that is really fascinating and the way that you’ve recruited. And having spent a few days with your team and been fortunate enough to do that, you have recruited and hired some very passionate music people.

The folks on your team really care about music in general and want to be, I think, close to the things that you are close to. But have a great reverence for the work that you’re doing, even though, as you sort of said at the top of the show, it’s not the sexiest part of the music industry by a long stretch. But I think that’s interesting in that you haven’t recruited necessarily for the most legal knowledge or time and experience in the legal industry.

You’re teaching people that have a passion for the end product and giving them the information they need in order to play the important role that you all play in producing the music that all the rest of us love to hear.

Richard: Couldn’t agree with that anymore and it’s great to hear that you met the team briefly and it’s so good that that comes across when you meet them. I’d like to think that it does. But they are phenomenal individuals, but an unbelievable team and I think that’s the key to it. I only came across this idea very recently. Someone introduced me to this notion of the ideal team player, Patrick Lencioni, he’s written lots of business books. But the idea that there’s three aspects of an amazing team player are that they are humble.

John: Yeah. They’re not hiding behind anything.

Richard: But they are humbling that they’re considering the team before themselves in lots and lots of instances. They’re hungry, not in the sense of blind ambition, but in the sense that they always want to be doing more better. They just want to grow effectively. And then the final one is, I think they just because it’s smart, but it’s more than that. It’s kind of people smart.

It’s not EQ or emotional intelligence per se, but it’s just the sense of, well, if I put my hand up and say this in the group, is that going to really tread on the toes of someone else? Or they can pick up on where people are struggling with capacity. And when someone introduced that concept to me very recently, and I saw those sort of three circles on the Venn diagram. All of the team are just so strong in each of those areas and that’s not been a conscious recruiting decision.

But I think we maybe got lucky at the outset, but then it’s self-fulfilling that those people want more people like that and so I think that’s incredibly important. And to use the principles that we’ve been working on together effectively. I would say when I talk to lawyers in private practice, they’re like, “How can I use some of this stuff?” I say, again, “Listen to John’s podcast, it’s a good starting point.”

But I’ve already warned people that if you’re looking to do that on your own, in an organization, there’s a limit to what you can achieve with these systems as a personal productivity tool. If you really want to see the benefits, you want to feel the work flowing through your business, then it needs to be a team undertaking. And people really need to commit to the idea that there’s all sorts of ways of doing this work.

The important thing is you pick one that you’re all going to feel comfortable with or you pick a mix of processes that you’re going to feel comfortable with. And you really commit to constantly improving those processes collectively.

John: Yeah. Well, my experience with you and with your team, I mean, number one, part of what you’ve described as culture, you through a little bit of trial and error to be sure, I mean, we all do that. And I think your, again, initial folks on your team were very intentional about having respect for each other. And I think when I come back to Lean and Agile and Kanban and all these methods, respect for people is one of the core threads.

And I think it's common, I use the term a lot in the podcast, but it’s a common anti-pattern that a lot of lawyers have. That when things aren’t going like they think they should be going inside of their firm, inside of their team, they will often say, “Well, I clearly have the wrong people.” And I’m not saying that that’s not impossible. I mean, there can be the wrong people, but I think that being really intentional about using the people you have, I mean, it’s not to reduce people to machines like Trello, but it’s a little bit like you said before.

There’s a lot that you can do with the team that you have. And if you’re sort of constantly trying to say, “Well, I need to replace this human as if it were a widget and replace it with something better.” I mean, that’s a little bit of a fool’s errand.

Richard: Exactly. And we’re just so fortunate in that we have this extraordinary diverse and incredibly respectful of, I think the lockdown really helped with that kind of mutual respect idea and people really getting in a window. The guy on the BBC clip who’s the kind of the sacrifice [inaudible]. Remember the guy and his family kind of stormed in, in the middle of a video call.

John: Yeah, the daughter came through, yes.

Richard: And everyone was like, “Oh my God, what’s happening?" But I feel that did everyone a huge favor in realizing that we’re not just this sort of automata in a work environment. Everyone had this stuff going on called life outside of what they do. And that was a period of growth for us in the business and personally recognizing and respecting that people had those things going on in their lives. The younger team realizing that people who had family, that was challenging. The people with family realizing that being in a shared house in your 20s is challenging to do this work as well.

And I think just having a mutual understanding and respect to those things has been actually really, really helpful.

John: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so I want to fast forward again. So, you’ve built this team. You’ve developed these Trello boards. You’ve eventually come to this place where not only did you have a niche practice, but then you re-niched your practice, and said, “Okay, I’m going to take it even further down this one road.” To the exclusion of work that I used to do, maybe the work that helped make you successful to begin with. You kind of wound up jettisoning that or at least a large chunk of that work.

I kind of want to take you back to the session we did this summer. And for the audience, by the time this episode comes out, I will have had another episode where I talk about these workshops that I do. I call it a STATIK workshop that is an acronym for the systems thinking approach to implementing Kanban, which is a mouthful and none of that is especially important. But I do think that even though you had studied Kanban, you were using Kanban based systems.

But you were gracious enough to invite me to come and spend some time with your team over a couple of days in person in the UK, which turned into just an absolutely fabulous summer trip for me, so thank you. But tell me about how that workshop in particular sort of changed or focused your and your team’s perspective on the work that you were doing and where things have started to go since there. But let’s talk about the transformation a little bit of that workshop.

Richard: Okay. And I’m glad this is just an audio podcast, so people won’t see you blushing John because this is going to be very highly complementary. Spoiler alert.

John: I’m not fishing for compliments by the way.

Richard: So, we undertook an exercise at the start of this year where we said the practice is changing and we’re going to be focusing on one particular type of work. It’s an opportunity for us to look at the Kanban boards that we do have and to kind of strip things back to basics. And that’s what we did at the start of this year. This is before we met you, me and the team got together and we said, “Right.” We looked at the Kanban boards and this is a theme that anyone who tries to implement these processes will be familiar with.

It’s just the very natural process of entropy that happens over time where there’s a tendency for everything to become more complicated, complex and chaotic over time, completely inevitable. And as long as you recognize that, there’s absolutely no shame in it. So, we really went back to basics, and we said, “What is the bare minimum that we need to implement in order to make these boards incredibly straightforward to use and incredibly consistent with a consistency of language and terminology that we use across each client?”

I think there had been a tendency we drifted into this sort of, we were working more in silos and that was proving to be complicated. So, we made this transition to a four-day week, we are having to help each other out a lot more so how can we limit the friction on that? So, we did that exercise at the start of this year, and we all patted ourselves on the back and said, “Great work. Well done.”

And then over a few months following that we realized that we’d built a system that was incredibly straightforward. And actually, when we occasionally will share our boards with clients, and it was a very clear minimal process for those clients to get their head around when they saw it. The reality was because we’d focused very much on simplification and stripping things back and we’d kind of forgotten about Kanban or anything I’d read about Kanban eight years ago and we got into an overwhelm in that situation.

We used a lot of automation in the system in order to get things moving through it we thought. But really what, and this was absolutely a pivotal thing that came up in our sessions is that when we talked about how automation is great. But automation should be able to push things into the in-tray at the side of your desk. But that automation should never be pushing stuff onto my desk in front of me so the pile of work that I have to do today becomes as unwieldy as that inbox that I had previously.

All we’d done by a very roundabout way is we’d just kind of created another version of the inbox that we wanted to avoid in the past. And so maybe you can talk about some of the key things that we discussed on our workshop. But before we got into any of that, the one thing that I really wanted to get across especially with the new guys in the team is just this shared vernacular and language and terminology that we would be using collectively to talk about and really embedding some of these principles.

So that a certain amount we can do in structured sessions with you. But as everyone knows all of this, so much of the work happens on an ongoing basis. And so, the only way we stand a chance of being able to do that is by really embodying some of these principles and all having a common language where we can discuss them together and develop things over time. So, in those sessions you were, and anyone who works with John may have the same experience.

But you, John, is able to take a look at what we’re doing and then incredibly non-judgmentally introduce areas for focus and attention but in a way which allows us to go on that journey of discovery together rather than you saying, “Do it like this, do it like that.” And I think a couple are taking more responsibility for rolling out some of these improvements to what we’re doing on our Kanban boards.

We’re trying to take the same approach really with the rest of the team and not impose stuff upon them. But ask questions about what they’re treating the rest of the team as clients and asking what they need these processes to do. And challenging that, thinking about, is that really what you need to do? And making sure it’s a very collaborative and consensual process and no one feels there’s just a whole additional tier of administration that’s being imposed on them.

John: Right. Yeah. So, a few things that I can reflect on. I mean number one, I think for me the primary value of the workshops that I do with teams is to give the team a common language. The frustrations are all there. The successes are all there and actually a big part of the first day of the workshop is actually sort of daylighting those things and making sure that everyone’s on the same page as far as what are the things that are going well and what are the challenges that we’re bumping up against.

But then using, and I happen to use the Kanban method and I think it works really well in law practice. But the method itself is not as important as sort of having the shared understanding of where are we now, where do we hope to be? What are not just tools and practices but what are the actual core principles that we’re going to rely on in order to help get us there? And I think one of the ones that I know we talked about and that I talk about is this idea of managed evolutionary change.

And I think maybe one of the things that you fell into at the beginning of the year is you engaged in a little bit of a wholesale change. And out of a certain frustration, which is totally normal, this isn’t working, we’ve got to do something. And you did something big, and you threw a little bit of the baby out with the bathwater when you did it and that’s again not unusual. But I think at least what I have observed in my limited interactions with you all since that workshop is that you’re being much more intentional about evolutionary change.

And one of the other things and again, I think this is a cultural thing that you have embodied anyway. But I think maybe even stronger since our workshop is this idea of encouraging acts of leadership at all levels. And really making sure that people have the understanding of the systemic whole but then the permission. And the autonomy to suggest improvements and to actually lead in the areas that are sort of part of their personal domain within the larger whole.

As opposed to relying on a single leader or a single management committee to sort of be the brain trust that is designing the whole system from on high. It’s a lot more organic. I think the way that the changes are happening now is more from the ground up than it is from the top down.

Richard: I hope so and also instilling the idea that it’s much more akin to working in a garden than it is to building a house. Although my house sometimes feels like it never finished and back to the starting. But it is this idea of constant care and tending to what you’re doing with the processes and the systems rather than at the extreme end. And I think this is a trap people fall into in all sorts of organizations is thinking there is a system or there’s a piece of software and I just need to find out what that is and switch it on. All our problems are behind us and it’s really not like that.

So, I think the systems thinking approach that is the ST in your workshop acronym is a fantastic foundation for that. Because it gets people thinking about this idea that everything works as part of an evolving whole in a process. And it’s a very natural way to work when you think about it like that.

John: Yeah. Well, and it ties back a little bit to your comment about automations. And again, I’m not shy about saying I think automations are overrated. I think they have an inherent appeal that doesn’t always bear fruit at a systems level. And again, one of the things that we will talk about sometimes in my workshops, I can’t remember if we touched on it in yours. But this idea of trying to avoid local optimums, which is to say optimizing a single part of the system without regard to the impact of the whole system.

And as you alluded to a minute ago, when you automate things, you can speed up parts of your system but in ways that will just lead to overwhelming another part of your system. And it doesn’t actually deliver the work product to your client any better or faster or smoother or understandably or anything else. It kind of moves the burden to another part of the practice.

And I think part of what I’ve seen in the evolution of your Kanban boards is a much more balanced approach to the work overall and really focusing on how are we going to get work to this end delivery point of completed work for our clients. As opposed to, how are we going to optimize individual parts inside of the practice.

Richard: I completely agree with that. I think the change in my attitude to automation, I think where I now see the benefits to it, are there are two aspects to what automation can improve. The obvious one that I think people lean into is that this is a time saving thing for me. Yes, there’s an aspect of that but that’s linked in with what you said previously. Is it just pushes it into another part of the system where there will inherently be more delays and has it really saved you any time?

I think for me, the other way in which automation helps is that it means that things will naturally be done in the same way each time. So, it is the consistency aspect to what automation brings which I think is where I now see the real benefits to it. And we can talk about just simple automations on Trello or whether there’s other ways in which we deploy technology in the future. What it means is that the work product can be of an incrementally consistently higher quality and if there’s time savings that come along with that, great, but those aren’t the primary driver.

John: Right. So, it’s focusing on improving quality and understanding what those quality standards are. And again, to your point one of the things that automation does well is consistency. Ideally if you have built your automation around an established quality standard that you know is working then the automation can help your team apply that quality more consistently through the process.

It gets a little bit to one of the other things that I think we talked about, and I often talk about in these sessions is that we’re not actually optimizing for speed, we’re optimizing for predictability and predictable will trump fast. Fast can be dangerous. I distinctly remember a camp counselor when I was young uttering the phrase, “Speed doesn’t kill, it’s the rapid deceleration that causes problems.” But it is, speed can be problematic if it’s just slamming into roadblocks somewhere else in your workflow, but consistency, predictability.

And it comes to this overall notion that I talk about in my mission statement and at the top of the podcast that we’re trying to build practices that are sustainable, and they need to be sustainable for everybody. They need to be sustainable for you as the law firm owner. They need to be sustainable for your team. And they need to be sustainable for your clients. And well, let me put it this way, one of the things that you have actually solved for is speed.

You caught the attention of these record companies, the labels in terms of your ability to do the work faster, but I think it is the predictability that got you there, the ability to do it in a consistent way. And ultimately, I think that has become your unfair advantage against maybe the larger better resourced law firms in London and elsewhere that you’re now competing with for this business. But you are largely outcompeting because of your ability to deliver the work in better ways. Is that fair?

Richard: Precisely. And we talked before about this idea of, what is it you said, that the two things that legal professionals are expected to, you can boil it down to two.

John: Yeah, mitigating risk and navigating complexity.

Richard: Precisely, okay. So, risk we’ll leave for the time being. But the navigating complexity thing is 100% that. So, it’s not just the speed aspect of it, but the idea that if something enters at this point there’s a process that it will go through regardless of what the complexity of that process might be. They don’t want to know that. They want to input here, output there. And so, what we’re able to do, I think, with these systems is regardless of the variation and complexity that exists in the middle, that the client has the reassurance that there is consistently this input and output.

And if we’re looking to improve things over time, then yes, we’d love to see the overall cycle turnaround time of things, the average of that, we’d love to see that decrease over time and be seen to be improving in that way. But first and foremost, it’s ensuring that there’s this consistent and predictable instruction comes in here, output comes out there.

John: Yeah. Alright, so I know we’ve been going and hopefully you’ve got a minute more. Because there’s one other thing that you talked about earlier before we started recording that I want to make sure that you touch on because I think it’s really a great concept. And I hadn’t thought of it this way before.

And to set the stage for it, in order to deliver work predictably, in order to deliver work in this consistent sort of way. I think one of the things I know we talked about in the workshop and that you’ve focused on a lot since that is the idea that you can’t be utilizing the resources on your team at 100% all of the time because that creates fragility. And it creates potential point source failures. It creates overwhelm and it creates all these problems.

And so, one of the concepts that I talk about on the podcast all the time and talked about with you and your team is this honest reckoning with capacity. And then once you are clear about what your actual capacity is then you have to be a lot more intentional about how you deploy that capacity. Tell me a little bit about how that has borne out with you and your team since our summer time workshop.

Richard: This is a great way to wrap up probably because it touches on so much that we’ve already talked about in terms of empowering the team to implement processes. So, this end of the process, so very specifically we’ve talked about the workflow generally and each client has an increasingly sophisticated Kanban board. But internally we have a day stand up meeting at 10:30 every morning, by the time you’ve kind of got stuff together but not so late in the day that the day’s not already nearly finished.

So, we have this daily stand up and this is learning from other guests you’ve had on your show and different variations of it. But our daily stand up now tends to be rapid but gets everyone to think about what their priorities for the day, well firstly, whether they hit their priority from yesterday. We’re trying to be as specific as possible about what that priority is. It may be one particular transaction or it may be one category of works or a number of things in a particular Kanban list that people need to get through. So, we’re talking about specific priorities.

We are then looking at what our capacity feels like subjectively. Because there is objectively what your capacity is like and then but your capacity on a day that your cat is really ill may be very different to what your capacity is when you’re feeling just 100%, all the rest of it. So, it’s a subjective thing and it encourages us all to be very honest about that. And then what we’re doing collectively is working out who can help where. Where bottlenecks are within any system.

And ensuring that we maintain some slack in the system and enough interoperability between the team for people to be able to say, “Well, look we can see you’ve got hard deadlines this week on this thing. And we need to get members of the team who are underutilized over here to help out.” And the impression I get is that people are really, I’m enjoying it and I think other people are enjoying jumping in to share the load when other people have got lots of more time critical pressures.

We were working on all the music for a very big TV series recently and there was an unusual capacity in position on one or two of the team members. So, what we saw was everyone else kind of pitch in and help where they could. And so that’s been a huge change, so hats off to some of your team members but really hats off to the team. All of those changes had come about with very minimal input from me. [Inaudible] the rest of the team who are responsible for more of the ops and the wellbeing of the team as a whole, looking and that and going, “Is there a better way we can do this and that we can help everyone collectively manage their capacity?”

John: Yeah. Well, and I love it and again, having had a glimpse at your Kanban board sort of recently. Conceptually one of the things we talk about with Kanban boards and this Agile world is that the board should be an information radiator. And you talked about it a little bit in terms of that when you open up a card you should be able to very quickly get yourself up to speed about what’s going on with that particular either matter or a case or a set of tasks that that card represents.

But what I love about where your board has evolved based on what I’ve seen is that it is also now radiating information about your team and the individual members of your team. And allowing you to coordinate in a certain way and you’ve come up with a term for this that I hadn’t thought of before. But in order to be predictable, in order to be consistent, in order to be intentional about your capacity you have to manage your capacity for a certain thing and I’ll let you talk about what that thing is.

Richard: Well, I haven’t had a chance to register this in the trademark office before our call.

John: I’m going to fully steal it.

Richard: The phrase that we’ve come up for is capacity liquidity. This idea that you have this honest reckoning with capacity and you have to build in slack into the system. But we also need to ensure that any slack there is, is able to be utilized and redeployed rapidly depending on what’s going on. I think we’ve been incredibly fortunate in what we do. Some of the work that we do is for incredibly successful, probably one of the best music festivals in the world.

And what that means is that there’s an incredibly intense period in the months running up to that where my capacity, and other guys who work with me on that client in particular, our capacity is really stretched during that period. And so I need to ensure that anything else I might be working on that there’s enough slack in the system to redeploy and to have people pick things up over there.

And so, something we’ve got quite good at through that, also going down to a four day week 18 months ago was hugely important. Because we effectively took a load of the slack out of the system but in doing so had to shield an amount of time each day for what we do. And the reality is, that’s meant hiring more people and it’s not meant hiring, necessarily hiring more fee earners.

It’s meant reinvesting in incredible people who are going to be phenomenal at doing all those other things and helping us safeguard that capacity. Which I think again, on a kind of legacy law firm view of things is very undervalued potentially because those are not seen as profit drivers and they’re just seen as pure overhead and I think we view it very differently.

John: Yeah. Well, being overcapacity is a great way to hit your billable hours targets. It’s not a great way to build a sustainable life or even a sustainable business. But it does meet that specific objective of winning at the game of law firm that I talked about at the beginning of the show. And just to reflect back and I’ll sum up for a minute and then I’ll let you sum up.

But I love this idea of capacity liquidity and some of the things that you do intentionally to ensure that you are able to deploy your capacity as needed in an agile way, lower case a, agile. Number one, having this sort of common source of information that is the Kanban board. So, everyone is capable of seeing when they need to what the status and what the progress of any one piece of work is including what was recently done and what is yet to be done. And I think that the information radiator element of the Kanban board is really helpful for that.

Number two, I think this idea and you touched on it, we didn’t drill down but of making policies explicit. And being really intentional and taking steps to document the things and the ways of working and even the ways of interacting with each other, the ways of interacting with your clients. You’ve created through these not heavy policies, it’s not do this then do this then do this.

But it’s really sort of some principles and some high level purpose statements and then some best practices or some things to consider in order to implement those principles as you go through in your policy. Sort of the way that you express your policies inside of the firm.

Richard: And technologies is helping enormously with that already and we’re building a lot of our kind of our firm’s Wiki of how we do things. One of my colleagues, Jen is doing some incredible work building that into a really usable framework that everyone has access to internally on Notion and using AI tools to ensure that we’re able to do things more consistently. But again, it’s not like we felt we needed to get AI to do a certain thing. It was like, well, this is a thing we need to do and which tools are going to be best suited to helping us deliver those things.

John: Yeah. Well, and even then they are allowed to evolve organically, the things that you’re creating in Notion and some of the policies as you’re creating them. We know it’s a first pass and we know that it’s going to get you some progress but it’s not going to be perfect. And I think part of capacity liquidity is preserving part of your capacity to be able to do these sort of on the business things as opposed to being constantly inside of the client delivery work.

Richard: Yeah, it’s been a huge lesson for me. It’s taken me a long time to do more and more work on the business rather than in the business. What’s it called, the producer manager dilemma, is a constant thing that I contend with but it’s something that I see the value in and so try to instill in the rest of the team as well so that they safeguard some of their capacity. And I think they’re genuinely, really good at it for having the time to work on those other aspects of the business that benefit all of us.

John: Yeah. Well, let me flip it over to you. So, what would be your advice to a law firm owner or a legal team manager who, I assume if someone’s listening to this podcast, they’re at least dipping their toes in the water of using Agile or Kanban based systems are lean concepts or whatever. Maybe they’ve even been doing it for a while like you had on your own. Based on where you are now in your journey with both your law practice and using these tools and systems to sort of empower your law practice, what would be your guidance to a leader that is trying to improve their own systems and teams and practices?

Richard: I think the thing that we did at the outset and the thing that we’ve been doing in the last year or so. And the thing that we didn’t do so well in the intervening period to an extent was to approach these aspects of the business wholeheartedly. So, I think you can pay lip service to these things. There’s an explainer video on our website from 10 years ago that says we employ Kanban methodology and we did to an extent but not in a really meaningful way.

And I think if this is something that you are looking at seriously, listening to The Agile Attorney podcast I really would encourage people to really do it with full commitment not then half-ass it as some people might say. Because as with anything, it’s what you put in, you get out. And I think the leverage that we’ve seen of putting, frontloading some effort into some of these systems now versus the results that we’re seeing in terms of the team dynamic and the performance at work and client satisfaction and all the rest of it. It really is really disproportionate, the amount that you put in versus what you get out.

So really commit to the process and enjoy it. I think the great thing about Trello and some of these other systems is they do foster a degree of experimentation and playfulness in what you’re doing. And when you’re looking at contracts all day every day, it’s coming right back to where we started. That even if you’re doing something in a thing that you’re more passionate about than anything in the world. The nature of contracts where you’re looking to crystallize and formalize positions is that it does have the ability to stagnate and suck the joy out of even the most exciting subject matter.

And so, if you inject a degree of playfulness and experimentation into the processes that you’re using to approach the work then I think that helps keep things fresh, keep the team motivated and just keep it interesting.

John: Yeah. And I love that you used the word wholeheartedly. Because I think a big part of what I see from you and your team and other clients too that uses this method but you really embody it well is that your hearts are in it. And your hearts are in it both for the end product that you’re producing for your clients. And your hearts are in it in terms of your work together as a team. We’re lawyers, we’re smart, we're logical and there has to be a lot of very logical pieces to it.

But you embrace the humanity of the work as well in a way that I think has proven to be exceptionally effective as you build and grow your team and the work that you do.

Richard: Thank you, john. I really appreciate that. The other thing that we focus on and we take it incredibly seriously when we’re doing it is playful but we really take it seriously whilst we’re doing it. But what we also take really seriously is that when you clock off and when you’re on holiday you are off. You then need to go and employ that same degree of rigor to your family life and everything else you’re doing without having to worry about everything you’ve been doing at work.

Because all those things will be where you left them or ideally more advanced along the Kanban board when you return after your week’s holiday. But it’s not saying make Kanban your life and work to the exclusion of all else. It’s about giving it your absolute all in the hours that you allocate in your week to do that work. That you’ve got time to go climb some rock faces or go fishing or spend time with your family, all the things that are pretty much more important.

John: Love it, love it. Well, Richard, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and sharing your story. And yeah I’m excited to see where you and your team continue to grow with this stuff.

Richard: Thank you, John, for all your help and for having me on the podcast.

John: Great.

Alright, there was a lot in that interview but here are a few of my key takeaways from our conversation. First, when implementing process improvements, focus on evolution rather than revolution. Small iterative changes are going to lead to better long term results than wholesale transformations. I really like how Rich and his team have embodied the principle of start with what you do now.

Second, visual management systems like Kanban boards and really however you’re working, work best when your whole team shares both the language and the understanding of why you’re using them. It’s not just about the tools, it's about creating a shared way of working which is partly why I think the workshop I did with Rich and his team was so impactful.

Number three, sustainable growth requires what Rich calls capacity liquidity. The ability to flexibly deploy your team’s resources while maintaining a certain amount of slack in the system. That means being intentional about your capacity and how you use it.

Fourth, when building your team, look beyond just skills and experience. Richard’s team thrives because everyone shares a genuine passion for music and the industry they serve. And that sense of purpose helps carry them through the more challenging or stressful aspects of their work.

And finally, remember that improving your systems isn’t just about efficiency, it’s about creating a practice that is profitable and sustainable for everyone involved, you, your team and your clients. That’s it for this week’s episode. As always please share this podcast with your colleagues who might benefit from a more Agile approach to their legal practice. And of course, I welcome your feedback, your questions or requests for topics to cover.

You can email me any time at john.grant@agileattorney.com or reach out through the contact form on my website. This podcast is produced by the fantastic team at Digital Freedom Productions and the theme music is the song Hello by Lunareh. Thanks for listening and I’ll catch you again next week.