Podcast Ep #113: Building a Practice That Lasts: Kanban, Credibility, and the Long Game with Jordan Couch

When Palace Law went paperless over a decade ago, they didn't just have to figure out what software to use. They had to contend with what happens to a workflow and work signals that were built entirely around physical files. Way back then, the firm and its leadership discovered Kanban boards, and full disclosure, I was part of those early conversations.

This week, I caught up with Jordan Couch, the attorney who's taken the lead in designing and running that system ever since. Jordan and I actually have a lot in common, and I think you'll enjoy our discussion around Kanban for lawyers, his new book, and the importance of having hard conversations with real people in real time to get to better results.

You're listening to The Agile Attorney Podcast, powered by GreenLine. I'm John Grant, and it is my mission to help legal professionals of all kinds build practices that are profitable, sustainable, and scalable for themselves and the communities they serve. Ready to become a more Agile Attorney? Let's go.

A quick note. If you're new to this podcast or if you just want a thorough grounding in what it actually means to run an Agile law practice, I recently wrapped up an 11-episode arc that I'm calling my Agile Attorney 101 series, which conveniently starts with episode 101 in my podcast feed. It covers everything from what it means to have an Agile mindset to practical considerations like making work visible and managing capacity to the strategic importance of designing roadmaps for your clients and your team that encourage everyone to do their best work. I've had some really good feedback about the series, and episode 108 really resonated with people, so you don't want to miss that one. But I encourage you to start with episode 101 in your favorite player and listen all the way through.

All right, welcome back, everyone. I am excited this week to welcome a lawyer that I've known for, I mean, a decade or more at this point. We'll have to figure this out, but Jordan Couch. And Jordan is a lawyer in Washington state, just to the north of where I sit. And we've had a lot in common over the years, including some bar service and a passion for Kanban boards and all the rest. So, Jordan, thanks for coming on The Agile Attorney Podcast.

Jordan Couch: Thanks for having me. You forgot fly fishing as, you know, a common hobby we have as well.

John: That's right. Yeah, well, we just figured out recently that a river that I grew up fishing with my dad and cousin and brother and know very well is a river that Jordan grew up next to, so.

Jordan: And that river will remain nameless.

John: I think that's probably the best. In classic fly fisherman habit, I think that's the right thing to do. Well, Jordan, thanks for coming on. Tell me a little bit about yourself and where you are in your practice today.

Jordan: I'm one of the partners at Palace Law, built out of Tacoma, Washington. We are a worker's compensation and personal injury firm. Our mission is justice for the injured in every community, and we take that seriously. As part of that, I've also have gotten involved in bar leadership. I serve on the Board of Governors for the Washington State Bar Association right now, really kind of spent a lot of my work focused on access to justice and expanding, you know, people's entrance and opportunities to get involved in legal services.

John: Yeah. And aside from the fact that I served on the Board of Governors here in Oregon, I think one of the things that you and I have in common is a drive and a desire and almost an imperative to sort of change the mental model of what legal service looks like in this day and age and how we can better use the tools of our craft and our trade and our profession to be able to broadly serve the needs of society and not just the people that can afford it to pay for the now, what I see something about there's a some lawyer charging like $6,000 an hour now. I feel like we just crossed a thousand, so I don't know how we got there. And maybe I'm remembering wrong, but, you know, whatever. It's a whole different economy when we're talking about that echelon.

Jordan: Yeah, I think I heard the same thing, and I think you and I share this. And I, you know, I also wrote a book, 411 Tips for Solo and Small Firm Lawyers, that I'm sure we'll talk about. But one of my tips in there is leadership is an obligation. And it comes from a Benjamin Cardozo quote that membership in the bar is a privilege burdened with conditions. You and I are both, I think, firm believers in that. Like the need to step up and lead is one of the conditions. The need to expand access to the things that we have is one of our conditions of this opportunity we have as lawyers.

John: Absolutely. So are you saying with great power comes great responsibility? Is that I mean–

Jordan: Exactly. But also great opportunity.

John: And I say that half joking, but I think it's true. And I don't know how great our power is at times, but we do have power. And just by nature of our familiarity and ability to navigate the complexities of the legal system.

Well, let me start by going back to, I think, probably when you and I first met and knew each other a little bit. You are a Kanban user. And I think this is after I worked with Patrick Palace, and I think you were working for him at that point, too, and came up to Tacoma and spent a day with y'all configuring a Trello board that you had set up, or you and Patrick had set up or others in the office had set up. And I just kind of love to get your insider view as someone that's been using this tool and sort of this methodology for coming on close to a decade, I think.

Jordan: Yeah, actually a little more than a decade now. When I came into Palace Law, they were starting to transition from having, you know, physical files to being a completely digital, completely cloud based operation. And one of the first big questions we had to answer is your workflow as a lawyer was built on files. Like big physical files that were coming through your office and moving through and papers in various stacks and, you know, your in going, your out going mailboxes. And one of the big questions we had to answer right away was if we take away all of this paper, if we take away all of these physical things, what happens to our workflow that is entirely built around those things?

And that's where Kanban came in as this opportunity to say like, okay, we can take a an ethereal workflow and make it seem physical or make it in fact be physical. You know, we started with the whiteboards with sticky notes because we wanted some kind of training of ourselves of an element of physicality. Now, that doesn't work when you've got files that have 3,000 pages in them. So we quickly transitioned out of that. But it was a good starting point for us to get the concept down, build from that, and then we were able to transition our entire workflow into that kind of ethereal digital realm using that aspect of Kanban.

John: And so it's the same thing as I talk about with almost everyone, right? A card represents a matter, a chunk of work. The columns represent phases of the workflow. Is that how you have it set up for different practice areas?

Jordan: Absolutely. I would say we have different areas with people's teams, so like our intake team has their own for their workflow of intake, right, that can be connected to our workflow of actually working on a case. We have a workflow that tracks all of our cases through the process of a worker's compensation claim, a personal injury claim. But then we also have just kind of our daily workflow and where that appears. And all these things are connected. But for the day to day person, right, that, you know, that like, oh, I'm not thinking about where my case is on the broad two year scale of a case every day. Sometimes you're just thinking about what do I need to do today? And so we have a separate board for that.

And it's funny when I train new people actually, we use a tool called Trello. And one of the newer features they have is being able to color code your columns. And I like that because when I'm training new people, I have seven, eight, nine columns now, something like that in my like Trello board instead of your three of to do, doing, done, as it started out. But what I do is I pull up a color coded picture of, you know, yellow sticky notes, orange sticky notes, green sticky notes to show the columns to people and I teach them that. And then I go to their board and I say, okay, yeah, you see eight, nine columns here. Let me color code them for you. Because all you're doing is diversifying types of tasks within that column, right? And so it's the same thing and it kind of helps translate that. So even though it seems more complicated, it really is, you know, my day to day workflow is just what do I need to do, what am I working on, what's done. It's that simple.

John: And the color lets you do it across different domains basically of activity.

Jordan: Exactly. Yeah, different domains of activity, different types of things, things that have to be tracked for malpractice insurance reasons versus things that are kind of more throwaway tasks or my bar activities, that kind of stuff.

John: Yeah, and I think you found, which is, you know, I found and and a lot of my clients find to take two steps back, right? Part of what you're doing, and it's interesting because I sometimes say that a Kanban board is a tool that allows you to process knowledge work like someone might process it on a factory floor, right? It's a visual fiction that allows you to sort of sit up those workflow stages. And in your case, there almost was a literal factory floor in terms of the paper files moving through a process. I'm sure it wasn't quite like, okay, right, there's a cutting station and a welding station and a painting station. But along those lines, it was on that spectrum at least.

Jordan: Yeah, I mean there were file cabinets that had all the files for every client, right? And a selection of those files would come up for the week for me to work on, and they would be brought up to my office, set on a table. I would move them from one table to the ones I was working on today, to another table. Once they were done, they'd go down at the end of the week into a file with new dates marked on them. Like there was a very real assembly line element to that physicality of files in an office.

John: Love it. Yeah. So that makes sense. The thing that I find is that these visual signals just wind up being so intuitive for people once you understand like what the key is. Once you know how to decode it, what might look chaotic of having, oh, I've got these different colors or different cards of different colors and and everything else. Like once your brain unlocks how the system is working, you can get a tremendous amount of information about what's going on in your work life just at a
glance.

Jordan: Yeah, and we did some things early on to make it easier for our team to understand as we brought them along. So for instance, the, you know, client files were blue. So it was like big blue accordion folders. And anything that we had that had like deadlines, statute of limitations, whatever else, had a red stamp on it. So when we transition to those two the digital version, the file review cards are blue and the statute limitations deadline cards are red, right? Like it just had that visual representation of just transferring these things over.

John: Love it. And so the other thing, and this isn't a deposition, so I can ask a question that I don't know the answer to. Let me put it that way. But I hear from a lot of the teams that I've worked with over time that once they have a system in place, that it really makes bringing new people on board onto the team much smoother and that there's more of a process for doing that. Is that something you are finding as well?

Jordan: Absolutely. And it's easier to track and to share and to kind of let them see, you know, when I'm training someone, they can see my workflow. Their workflow matches it. I can duplicate my workflow so I'm monitoring what they're doing. Like it just becomes so easy to kind of be aware of everything that's happening across platforms and see visually where things are going right and where things are going wrong.

John: Oh, that's interesting because it sounds to me like part of it is you're giving people context as well that you maybe wouldn't get if you're just dealing with a list of tasks or with a bunch of emails that come in and say, hey, I need you to do these 10 things.

Jordan: Yeah, absolutely. They have context. They have, you know, there's a workflow to it. It's not just a task. It is part of a system and they get to see that system.

John: I love it. Okay, well, so high level endorsement of the Kanban method. I take just the slightest bit of credit for like maybe making Patrick aware of some of these Kanban board tools, but y'all have run with it. So I haven't had visibility in at least 10 years, it sounds like, because I couldn't even remember how long it was. But it's great and and I love to hear six dose stories around that. Tell me about your book.

Jordan: Yeah, so this started as a project for the Solo and Small Practice section of the Washington State Bar when I was chairing that section. Again, bar leadership just runs through me for the entire decade of my practice. And then it jumped from there as I was working on this, just kind of an idea of like, hey, tips for new lawyers, something we can give away to people. And then it became bigger and bigger and I had more to say and I had more to say. And finally it became, okay, I'm going to do 501 tips for solo and small firm lawyers. And then around 400, I was tired and I was like, I'm running out of things to say. And so suddenly, you know, I I think one of my tips in my book is don't bite off more than you can chew, like manage yourself. And so I got to 411 and my wife said, oh, is that because you're giving them the 411? And I said, no, but it is now.

John: Yes, love it. A backronym almost.

Jordan: Yeah, exactly. And the book was really I wanted to just spread it around to give people access to information that I've gathered over 10 years and gathered from mentors that I've had and make it easier for people to kind of learn things that I learned the hard way in a lot of ways.

John: Yeah. I'm sure there's an intentionality around it, right? There are definitely some very practical, tactical blocking and tackling type things about how what you need to do to be compliant with these certain things. But that's not the overarching theme I get. The overarching theme I get is this is a profession. We do have this responsibility as you talked about. And also this tremendous opportunity to sort of affect change in the world, but we have to do it intentionally and wisely.

One frankly that I had it cracked open to before jumping on this call is number 179 and I think you should remember exactly what the title is from that. I'm kidding. But it says your credibility is your most valuable asset. And, you know, that's a piece of information I feel like never get stale and could never get given often enough. I think it's so important in the heat of the battle, the heat of the stress around maybe owning a practice, certainly the stress around getting a particular result for a client.

We're always tempted and and almost in society, right? We're in this place where we're tempted to engage in a certain form of short termism in order to achieve a short term result. But most of us are hoping to have a legal career that is somewhere between 30 and 50 years probably. And I think for someone that is still, I think, relatively early in your career, you've obviously internalized a lot of that and given a lot of thought to why that's important.

Jordan: Yeah, you know, it's even one I remember vividly training an associate at one point in time and having this conversation because you mentioned like, you know, in advocating for your client, right? When you're working with one client, that's their world. That is everything to them, and you really want to give it your all. And the temptation can be to do what it takes there. And what I had to kind of teach this associate was like, look, that is true and that is a good mindset to have. But you have to remember that your career is not this client.

And in fact, this client might depend on you doing something that stretches your credibility a little bit. But every client you have right now and every client you're going to have for the rest of your career depends on you not doing that. Yes, it might not be the thing that this client wants, the thing that this client feels like they need, but you have to not just think about one client, you have to think about all of your clients. And if you maintain your credibility, that protects all of them.

John: Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I give a lot and I talk a lot and I guess one of my pet peeves in the profession is the extent to which people still talk about a duty of zealous advocacy. And I think being zealous is important to a point, but for those that don't know, right, the actual duty of zealous advocacy is something that has not existed in rules and regulations for, I think coming up on 25 years now, right? It was something that was part of the ABA model rules. I think maybe that predated the thing that is now the rules of professional conduct. But I think what people found is that a duty of zealous advocacy turned people into zealots. And that wasn't always the most attractive thing. And it was replaced with duties of diligence and competence, which to me, those are much healthier pursuits in terms of achieving an outcome for the client, doing good work for the system, but not giving yourself over to whatever it takes to succeed in a particular matter.

Jordan: Yeah, I think that's really key too because, yeah, zealous is just a word that can be misinterpreted, right? And like, I have had the clients who asked me like, why are you not kicking and screaming and yelling at this person? And it's because that's not going to help you. And I still ran into the attorneys who think that being rude is going to help them win their cases. And it doesn't. It's just annoying. Like it's just more annoying to be in a room with them when I have to be and it doesn't help anything.

John: Yeah. I've had interesting conversations more than once. And as you know, right, and you're in a litigation type practice and so I think it maybe is more true for you than maybe in transactional postures, but there's a certain amount of things that attorneys sometimes feel like they have to do almost as a form of client theater to show the client that I'm working on your behalf. And the attorneys who are really good at it are also good at sign posting for opposing counsel when that's what they're doing.

Jordan: I had an attorney one time send me a a long letter and I was getting ready to call him just to say like, what are you, what? And then he called me and he says, hey, I sent you a letter earlier. Look at the CC list before you talk to me about it.

John: There you go. Yes.

Jordan: Okay, gotcha.

John: And then the other thing, and frankly on the same or the opposite page of the credibility is your most valuable asset article, you've got a section that says Bar Associations Matter. So tell me a little bit about that. I mean, I think that's something you and I share having both served on Boards of Governors and given a lot of service to our respective bar associations.

Jordan: And not just served but seen what happens in those rooms, right? Like I have so many lawyers who have opinions, care about these things, but they don't show up to be involved in the conversations, right? There are some attorneys who are very annoyed about some of the access to justice work being done in Washington right now. Almost to a T, none of them were in the room when we were having these conversations or sending in comments or participating in these conversations. And, you know, these things affect all of us, right? Like, you know, you'll have a lot of fun as I say as well. Like I've made lifelong friends through this work because we're working on things together.

And bar associations dictate how lawyers are going to behave on the local level because they're training to be part of a community. On the state level, they set the regulation that defines what the practice of law is, that defines how people are accessing legal services. And on the national level, it kind of sets larger policy things like at every level, it is affecting you whether you're involved or not. It's not just how much your dues are, which is what we hear all the time, right? But so few lawyers, I think, invest in this. And I had, you know, years before I was on the Board of Governors, there was a conversation about adding members of the public to the board in Washington. And I had some lawyers say, if members of public care, like why aren't they showing up here? Basically they don't deserve to be here because they don't care enough to show up.

So I did a survey and sent it out to every lawyer list serve I had saying, have you ever attended a Board of Governors meeting? If not, why not? And I got back to the Board of Governors meeting after that and I started reading these responses and I said, you asked me why the public has to be here if they don't care. I started reading answers from lawyers saying, it doesn't matter, nobody cares. Why would I show up to this? What's the point? It doesn't matter. I just pay my dues. They don't do anything anyway. And I got through a long list of these and I finally said, so if the public doesn't have a right to be here, what gives us the right to be here?

If we want to be part of this profession, we have to show up for it and we have to participate in the conversations because these things matter. You are serving people. This is a service industry. That is the point of it. And I think that's another tip I have in here is like no one cares about lawyers. It's not about you. People think like, oh, I have this grand profession. I'm important. No one cares about you. No consumer cares about lawyers. No consumer wants a lawyer. It's the old analogy of the Black and Decker drill. They don't sell drills, they sell holes in walls, right? If anyone can solve their problem without calling a lawyer, 100% of the time they will because they don't want lawyers or courts or justice. They don't yeah, I mean we talk about access to justice. People don't want justice. They want their problem solved.

John: Yes. And sometimes they have a sense of justice. Yeah, I mean it's, I often tell my consulting clients that you have to realize that in order for a client to even get to your web page or get so far as to call you on the phone, their particular problem has to have gotten so bad in their life that they're willing to overcome their fear and their distaste for working with lawyers, whether they have it personal experience or not, right? Culturally, the world is almost predisposed against us right up until they need us.

Jordan: Yeah, because why would they, right? Like, why would you want to spend money? I mean, it's like for the most part, no one wants cars either, right? Like they want to get from one place to another and there are systems in place. And lawyers have the unique opportunity of having built the system that everyone has to get access to. And so we control that system, which I think increases the importance of our being invested in making that system accessible to people because we built it, we designed it, we control it, we have exclusive, monopolistic rights to it. That's our duty to give everyone access to it and to make sure it's available.

Yeah, I got involved because, you know, while I was in law school, I was a first generation in law school and people helped me. No one is a self-made man. That's not a thing. It doesn't exist. Like you are in a construct, a society, and people helped me. And so basically as soon as I got out, I decided I wanted to kind of get involved and give back because I owed it to, you know, the next generation. And so I got involved with the young lawyers in Washington and, you know, also that's just a way to make friends in the law. And through that, I started to see opportunities and, you know, show up and, you know, it's amazing.

There's almost a vacuum of leadership in bar associations where if you show up and are interested, you just get sucked into it and you can do more and more and you can have an influence on things. I am now a columnist for an ABA magazine because I got a fellowship that someone told me to apply for. I went to a meeting for their magazine editor and said, oh, I have an article that could be added to your magazine that I wrote, if you're interested. And that was about social media. So next thing I know, I'm a social media columnist for this magazine for the ABA because I showed up and just like was interested.

You know, on the bar licensure stuff, Washington is looking at alternative pathways to licensure beyond the bar exam and it's because I had never thought about the bar exam. I'm a good test taker. Like I was one of those lucky people. But as the pandemic hit and we were looking at problems, I started doing a little research and suddenly I have read every single study ever done on the bar exam and its effectiveness and it's, you know, demographic impacts.

And so now I've become the expert in the room and now I'm invited to be on a Supreme Court Task force and I'm writing proposals for how we can create alternatives to this. It's wild that if you just show up and you're a little bit interested, you will just get sucked in and you'll have the opportunity to pursue things that you're interested in. Like that's the cool thing is if you have an interest or a passion for something, you'll probably find an opportunity to do it if you show up and offer. It's funny, two the tips I have in the book and I can't remember the numbers that well out of 411, but I'm–

John: I'm only joking about that.

Jordan: Stand by what you believe in, but be open to being wrong as two separate things because it's important to stand up and say, this is what I think is right and push that and push that. And even if people say no, like push them on that until they can prove you wrong. And when they can prove you wrong, though, step back. When I was early doing bar exam work, I would have conversations and I would tell people like, look, I'm absolutely open to talking to you about this and I bet I can convince anyone in one beer sitting at a bar that the bar exam is not necessary. And I was successful on all of those. But on the pilot project on entity regulation in Washington, we're looking at creating, you know, new delivery legal service models. I will have to admit, I had a different proposal that I was working on for a few years before this one came out. This one's better than mine. It just is.

John: Well, not knowing the difference, but just in the abstract, that is the thing that happens. And even when I say the the proposals from the futures task force that got implemented, most of them did not get implemented cut and paste out of the task force report. They went through a vetting process and a discussion process and, you know, again here in Oregon, that led us to license para professionals right at the time that Washington was stepping away from them, but that's a whole another drama. It led us to these alternative pathways, it led us to some RPC changes.

And I think more than anything, ultimately, one of the things and it wasn't directly out of the task force, but we changed the mission of the Oregon State Bar while I was on the Board of Governors. And we had a mission that had been part of the bar for a very long time and I I don't have it in front of me, but it was something to the effect of to promote the science of jurisprudence, which the look on your face, which listeners can't see is like, okay, what does that mean? And I this actually, I think wound up being an effective tool. I would say, yeah, that comes from the same era as the science of frenology. So take it with a grain of salt, right?

We thought of everything as a science for a while as society. But we now have a very clear mission that is to promote the public interest and support justice in Oregon. And that promoting of the public interest is interesting because there are two prongs now to our mission. One of them is public protection and one of them is access to legal services. And those are things that are often in tension with each other. And I think that tension is healthy.

Jordan: It sounds like you copied from Washington because our mission begins with to serve the public and the members. And people do talk about those as conflicting things, but I like to remind people, and it's a tip in the book, a rising tide raises all ships. If we're serving the members in the public really well, we're serving both together because what is the job of our member lawyers? To serve the public.

John: Right. I will say that the rising tide line always reminds me of a good family friend who used to say something related to that, except it was, if you get to thinking you're doing really well out there in the world, take a look around and make sure it's not just the tide coming in. Don't get too full of yourself. It may just be that you're writing the right wave.

Jordan, aside from, of course, have your book, and I will say, I think your book is a great thing to just have around a law office and not as something that anyone would ever read cover to cover, but just I find myself, I've had it upstairs in my kitchen because I work out of my home and just for the last few weeks as I go by, I kind of flip it open and read a few entries and it is full of sound and salient advice. So, obviously, I will say, pick up a copy of this book, but aside from that, any thoughts or tips that you would have for what is largely a small and mid-sized law firm audience in terms of how they are navigating this modern world of law practice?

Jordan: Yeah, you know, we've made it through an entire podcast without talking about AI, but I think one thing that is I think about a lot these days is I know lawyers are worried about that. It's interesting. I think the lawyers on the cutting edge are the ones most worried about that. But I think the reality that I like to remind myself is our role is not just the keepers of information. We are not the people with a lock box access to West Law. That's not the job we have. That's not the job we want. If we remind ourselves, you know, and keep thinking about ourselves as a service industry, as our job is service, as our goal is service, there is always room for that.

Restaurants exist even though we can cook at home, right? Like people will come to you because they want help because they want someone who can do it better than they can do it. And that role isn't going to go away. So I think the more as lawyers we can always remind ourselves that the job is service and service to as many people as possible. Or at least service to the, I should say the demographic you want.

I was speaking at like a growth summit late last year and I opened by asking everyone what growth meant and they all said like more clients and I thought, great, okay. And then I was talking about some of my tips on like how they can do that and really focus on expanding their marketplace. One lawyer in the room said, well, you know, that kind of, you know, one call hiring is not really working for me because I'm asking clients to put down a $20,000 retainer. And I just said, okay, so more clients isn't your opportunity there because you are not a consumer industry, you are fashion. You are high fashion and that's okay, but you have to think differently because growth for you is not going to be more clients, it's going to be becoming higher fashion.

And so whatever your industry is, like recognize like what your service is and focus on just doubling down on that. Your service is not access to West Law. Your service is not billable hours. Your service is whatever you are providing to your clients. And if you are not thinking about that, then you might be chasing like, I want more clients, but you have a retainer model that prohibits that. Think about what it is you are, what is your offering, and who you want to be serving and how, and really just like narrow that in as much as possible to think about what your future is because there will always be a role for that. McDonald's exists and Nobu exists, right? Like restaurants are here, service is here to cover lots of different spectrums. You just have to know what you are.

John: I started my career in the high-tech industry and part of a very cool disruptive innovation story. And one of the things that was taught to me and really repeated over and over again is fall in love with the problem, not your solution. And I think that's really apropos of this new AI era, but also every technology shift that we've ever had in legal, right? The problem set is fairly constant. The tools and the opportunities and the methods and the ways of communicating and all the rest, yes, those things change. But at the end of the day, we're still providing important, meaningful, and impactful work to people that need it. And again, I think you're spot on. I care less and less about AI the longer we are into the AI era, not because it's not useful, it is, but because I don't think it's actually quite the game changer in terms of what people can do today to be able to scale their impact as opposed to just grow their business.

Jordan: 100% agree with you on that. People still want services, people still need access to that. There's always room to move. You just have to be watching where the market is going and make sure you're focused on what you want your role to be in that, not just stumbling into it, but moving and finding and maneuvering it and be a leaf on the wind, right? Go with the flow and just kind of see where it leads you.

John: I think there's a role for as many people as are willing to do that work of figuring out where they're needed. I don't think the demand for lawyers is going anywhere anytime soon. Great. Well, Jordan, thank you so much for coming on, and I look forward to seeing you at the next A to J conference or nerdy bar thing.

Jordan: I'm sure it'll be soon.

John: All right.

A quick note about my software tool, Greenline. What you heard from Jordan at the top of the episode is a huge part of why Greenline exists. The modern digital law practice just doesn't have the physical visible cues that historically made legal workflows run well. Now I hear over and over from lawyers and paralegals that the task lists in your practice management system or the crazy spread of email threads or team messages just don't cut it. We've designed Greenline to make your workflow, your commitments, and your capacity visible. So your team always knows what's in flight, what's next, and what needs their attention. If you'd like to see more about how Greenline can work for your practice, head on over to greenline.legal and look for the book a demo button. I'd love to show you how it works.

Okay, there is a lot that I could highlight to wrap up that conversation. If you know me at all, you'll know that I'm tempted to call out Palace Law's use of Kanban boards for managing their hugely successful and growing practice. And there, I just did it. But if I had to pull one key takeaway from this episode, it's Jordan's point about guarding your credibility. Your career is not defined by your work for any one client or any one matter, and every matter you have right now and every matter you are ever going to have depends on you not losing sight of your professionalism and your principles. That's not a new idea, but I think it's a useful reminder in this era when we hear over and over again about people delegating their professionalism to artificial intelligence with not so great results. So be sure to look for that and other sage advice in Jordan's book, 411 Tips for Solo and Small Firm Lawyers, and there's a link in the show notes.

If you haven't already checked out my Agile Attorney 101 podcast series, you're not going to want to miss that. Start with episode 101 and work your way through. It is the most complete picture I've ever put together of what it actually means to build an Agile law practice. And if you have listened to it and found it useful, please share it with a friend or colleague.

​​​​​​​As always, this podcast gets production support from the fantastic team at Digital Freedom Productions and our theme music is “Hello” by Lunareh. Thanks for listening and I will catch you again next week.