Karen and David Skinner opened this session with an observation that sets up its whole argument. Innovation is a genuinely hot topic in the legal industry — a Canadian legal innovation forum trended on Twitter for four hours, which, as Karen noted, is unheard of for a roomful of lawyers. But for all the talking, there is not much action. The firms doing real work, genuinely trying things new to the industry, are the exception, and they are the firms Gimbel works with.
The session's core argument is a reordering. Most professional services firms, when they decide to innovate, jump straight to knowledge management systems, legal project management, alternative pricing models, pricing managers, and technology automation. The Skinners argue that the conventional list has it backwards. Without optimized underlying processes, those initiatives often reduce profitability or add complexity, because you cannot manage or price inefficiency effectively. Lean and continuous improvement belong at the bottom of the list as the foundation — the thing that comes first, on top of which the more ambitious innovations can actually work.
The focus throughout is the legal industry, but the Skinners were explicit that the argument generalizes. The same trends and the same fix apply in accounting, finance, architecture, consulting, healthcare administration — any knowledge-based, partnership-structured professional services firm. Mark Graban hosted, and noted at the close that attendees from architecture, healthcare, and other settings would have found the legal examples familiar.
Karen Skinner is co-founder of Gimbel, a Lean practice management advisory firm focused on improving how professional services firms deliver value to clients. She practiced law for more than 20 years in large firms in Canada and overseas, and as a solo practitioner focused on corporate finance, advisory work, corporate governance, and risk management. She is a certified Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, and teaches, writes, and speaks about the practical application of Lean in professional services.
David Skinner is co-founder of Gimbel and brings more than 20 years of legal experience to his work in process improvement and innovation. He spent half his career practicing in large international law firms in Canada, Europe, and the UK, and the other half in senior in-house counsel roles for companies in London and Montreal. He works with law firms and other professional services organizations to rethink how legal services are delivered.
Gimbel had been working with law firms across North America for several years at the time of the webinar, on improving how lawyers deliver legal services — both the legal processes themselves and the business and administrative processes that support them. This was a returning-presenter session; Mark Graban introduced the two as both delightful people and serious practitioners.
The Skinners described the pressure on law firms as a perfect storm.
Technology is developing rapidly, including machine learning and AI applications capable of doing work traditionally done by lawyers. The economic downturn after 2008 exposed serious cracks in the typical law firm business model — productivity, profitability, and realization had been down for years, with 2015 growth the slowest since the recession. That gave clients unprecedented say over how they are charged, and the Skinners' view is that clients are unlikely ever to give that power back, even if conditions improve.
Several broader trends compound it. Globalization means legal work can be done anywhere, 24/7, and firms increasingly use legal process outsourcing — sometimes offshore, sometimes shifting back-office functions to lower-cost domestic jurisdictions. Mergers have created huge global firms that shift work internally across jurisdictions. Commoditization is new and significant in law: routine, repetitive elements of a matter — due diligence, document review, title verification — can be done by anyone, and clients want the best solution at a fair price. Finance and procurement departments are increasingly involved in hiring lawyers, and they are driven by the bottom line. General counsel are disaggregating work, allocating different parts of a transaction to whoever is best placed to deliver the right quality at the right price, rather than bringing everything to one firm. There is excess capacity — the US graduates roughly 20,000 more lawyers a year than there are jobs. And there is do-it-yourself law — "Dr. Google" for legal services, where a will can be had online for next to nothing.
All of this is reshaping the industry and provoking real debate about its future: what law firms should look like, who should own them, who should provide legal services, and how much can be automated. The Skinners noted that Richard Susskind, a thought leader on the future of law, had predicted only about five years remained to reinvent the legal profession.
David framed the opportunity in Lean terms. Clients are asking lawyers, accountants, and other professionals to deliver more service at less cost — better quality, better service, less time, less cost. That is a classic Lean opportunity. There is also a chance to recapture commoditized work lost to lower-cost, more innovative competitors: routine work can be hugely lucrative if a firm optimizes the processes, minimizes waste, and prices it right.
Making a law firm change, Karen said, is like turning an ocean liner. The reasons are structural and cultural.
Lawyers are trained to be careful, prudent, analytical, and precise — trained to hunt for weaknesses and flaws, and to be risk-averse. The very qualities that make excellent lawyers, the Skinners argued, make lawyers terrible innovators. On top of that, the business structure does not foster long-term thinking. The profit-per-partner model and a compensation system that rewards only directly billable work mean inertia is enormous and the incentive to innovate is small.
There is also the partnership structure itself — true of accounting, architecture, engineering, and private medical clinics as much as law. Change in a partnership cannot come from upper management saying so. It requires a phenomenal amount of buy-in and a major attitude adjustment.
The attitude adjustment the Skinners named is a mindset shift: from "no, we can't do that because" to "yes, we could do that if." Professionals shut down new ideas with reflexive objections — we tried that last year, no one would do it that way, you'll never convince me, the partners won't approve the cost. The shift is to stop explaining why something won't work and start figuring out what would make the idea work.
They told a story that made the shift concrete. During a week-long process improvement project at a major law firm, a project team member came up with a solution she was certain the partners would reject. The Skinners encouraged the team to think about how to make her solution work and to leave it on the current-state map on the wall. When the partners came in and saw the map — and saw the waste in the current process — the managing partner signed off on the changes on the spot, then took her Sharpie and signed off on nearly every other "just do it" change the team had suggested.
The Skinners walked through the innovations the legal trade press talks about, in the order firms typically rank them — with "innovation" in quotation marks, because in most other industries none of these would be considered innovative.
Knowledge management comes first: a maintained database of documents, precedents, and communications — the greatest asset of a knowledge profession. It counts as innovation in law because many firms still lack a good system for capturing and sharing best practices.
Project management is next, very popular in the trade press. Using project management on complex matters is still not the norm in law; many lawyers resist it because it demands thinking about work differently. Clients are driving it — they want transparency, to know where things stand and how the firm is tracking to budget. But most lawyers believe they already manage matters well: they don't miss closings or court deadlines. The problem is the projects themselves are not efficient, so lawyers see legal project management — Gantt charts and the rest — as an unnecessary burden.
Pricing is another big one. Billing by the billable hour is the norm, and clients increasingly demand alternatives — flat fees, or blends — because they want to pay for value, not time. This is genuinely hard for professionals raised on the billable hour.
Process improvement sits at the bottom of the conventional list. And here the Skinners delivered their editorial comment: the people who built that list have it completely wrong. Firms should start with process, use Lean to develop a culture of continuous incremental improvement, and let that foundation support the larger innovations. They believed in this so strongly that they were developing a strategic relationship to offer clients an integrated approach combining process, pricing, project management, knowledge management, and AI — built on the Lean foundation.
The Skinners then showed how Lean supports the two innovations "rocking law firms" — project management and pricing.
On project management: many firms jumped on the legal project management bandwagon without looking carefully. They are already reasonably good at delivering on time, if not on an accurate budget. The question clients are really asking is whether the firm can deliver in less time and at less cost — and that requires efficient underlying processes, not just project management discipline. Adding LPM to an unoptimized process gives the client transparency and some comfort on price, but still hands them the same transaction in the same three days for the same $100. The innovative firms understand the potential of bringing project management and process improvement together: they optimize the transaction first — mapping it, eliminating DOWNTIME waste, automating where possible, improving workflow, using technology — and only then turn to project management. Seyfarth Shaw and Thompson Hine were the Skinners' examples — both using Lean and Six Sigma to optimize legal matters, including complex litigation that many lawyers insist cannot be managed efficiently, and bringing in project managers only after the process is optimized, so milestones, phase and task codes, input costs, and fee estimates rest on a realistic foundation.
On pricing: the billable hour gives a partner more money for more hours — no incentive for less time or less cost, and certainly none for removing waste. There is a real movement toward flat fees, and the moment a firm shifts from the billable hour to flat fees, the incentive moves toward efficiency. The Skinners' immigration practice client is an example — an entirely fixed-fee business under downward fee pressure, with commoditized, standardized work and heavy competition from non-traditional providers. Gimbel worked with them to map a typical visa application process, eliminate wasteful steps, create flow rather than push, reallocate work to different resource levels, and automate steps in the workflow. The result: a more efficient process delivering excellent results at significantly lower cost, letting the firm adjust pricing to compete while maintaining margins — and a far better understanding of resource use and actual cost. The Skinners noted that this information is exactly what most law firms lack. Ask the average lawyer their margin on a transaction, and the answer is a shrug.
They were also pointed about pricing managers — an increasingly common hire. A pricing manager typically builds estimates from what similar matters cost in the past, not from real data on the firm's internal cost of executing the matter. Firms that bring in pricing changes without optimizing the underlying transactions typically see profitability fall. Visualizing and optimizing the transactions with Lean is what makes robust pricing models possible.
David's analogy for the status quo: a law firm billing only after the work is done is like American Airlines letting you board a flight from Toledo to Timbuktu and telling you what you owe when you get off the plane. Nobody would agree to that — and clients are finally saying the same about legal bills.
The Skinners' recommended starting point — for law or any professional organization — is the idea that incremental change works.
The complaint they hear most is that there is never enough time, for work or for improvement. They use a simple equation with clients: pressure is a function of workload over available time. When workload rises, so does pressure. There are only two ways to reduce it — reduce the workload, which is unlikely and usually undesirable, or find more time. Lean and incremental change is how professionals find more time.
The math of small change: shave one minute off something done five times a day, and that is five minutes daily, 25 minutes a week, 20 hours over a 48-week year. Multiply across just five people doing the same routine, and that is 100 hours — two and a half weeks a year — freed for something else, all from one minute. The Skinners stressed this is not a total overhaul. It is bite-size, incremental change, and small improvements compound. The goal is for a team to gain two and a half weeks of value-adding, revenue-generating work without anyone putting in more hours — by reducing the non-value-adding tasks that keep professionals from the work they actually like to do and can confidently bill for.
Because the change is incremental, firms have to accept continuous improvement, and small innovations have to be acted on and celebrated.
To build a continuous improvement culture with professionals, Gimbel keeps things very simple. They encountered serious resistance to typical Lean language, so they present it without the Japanese terminology — adapting to a conservative industry rather than insisting on purity.
The key element they focus on is the basic one: adding value and eliminating or reducing waste. Everything else flows from it. Defining value is itself a challenge for professionals, so Gimbel gets them to look at their work from the client's perspective, because the client defines value. For work to be valuable, it has to pass three tests: it moves the matter forward toward the end state, the client wants it and is willing to pay for it, and it is done right the first time. Everything else is waste — waste of time, human, financial, and technological resources the client should not be asked to pay for.
The single greatest challenge is learning to see waste, because to many professionals waste is just normal, just the way things are done. Gimbel's most powerful tool here is the DOWNTIME framework — defects, overproduction, waiting, non-utilized talent, transportation, inventory, motion, extra processing. The mnemonic comes from manufacturing, where any time production is at a standstill, in "downtime," is wasteful. The framework helps professionals recognize that things they consider normal are actually wasteful. Gimbel has gathered examples in every category over years and has clients work in small teams to spot waste in their own work. It works because it is simple — no fancy software, no statistics degree, no special training, usable anywhere right away. All it takes is a critical eye. The Skinners' message: once you learn to spot waste, you never look at your own work, or others' work, the same way.
Gimbel also uses DMAIC — Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control — rather than the more typical PDCA. The Skinners had discussed this choice with Mark Graban. They use DMAIC because the five steps, framed as they frame them, slow people down. Lawyers tend to jump straight to solutions before understanding the problem, so starting with "Define" — defined from the client's perspective — forces a shift in thinking. Starting from "Plan" would lose the client focus and lose the measurement step, and law firms have not traditionally collected much data about how they work beyond billing-related financials. Making measurement its own discrete step lets professionals see the waste much more clearly.
The Skinners laid out the roadmap they follow with clients, applicable to any professional organization.
The critical groundwork is step two: creating the culture that supports incremental change. That depends on developing a core group of people who understand the importance of adding value and identifying, evaluating, and eliminating waste — not only in their professional work but in the business and administrative processes that support it. Gimbel does this through a full-day "Lean Legal" boot camp, then a series of shorter fundamentals workshops to reach a broader group. The goal is to democratize the training — make process improvement understood and accessible to everyone, so more people can participate meaningfully and the idea of continuous improvement spreads through every level.
Only after that do they move to actual projects. In projects, process mapping is one of the most valuable tools, because professionals tend to work in silos and often do not know what happens to a document or matter after they pass it on — so they cannot see the waste. The Skinners showed a corporate services department's map of incorporating a new company, where the goal was to reduce lawyer time, reallocate work to paralegals and corporate clerks, and cut the time and cost — responding to client pressure on routine, repetitive work with a definite price ceiling.
The first pitfall in bringing Lean into professional services is buy-in. There is a perception, especially in law, that the work is bespoke, highly creative, an art that does not contain processes. Gimbel's response: everything that happens outside the lawyer's head — and a great deal of what happens inside it — can be improved. The roadmap is designed to build buy-in along the way: give the core group the essential skills, get them thinking differently, get them to accept there are routine elements to their work and that they already use processes, broken as those may be. Among a naturally skeptical group, Gimbel focuses on the incremental rather than broad change, and often starts on the business and administrative side — opening files, disbursements, expense claims, conflict checks, billing — touching the processes around the lawyers before touching how lawyers practice their art.
The Skinners named the biggest obstacle directly. Of all the problems they encounter, the biggest by far is time. The legal industry is under huge pressure, people are too busy doing to think about what they are doing, and taking time away from anything connected to billing is hard to justify. Improvement projects take time, and implementing even incremental changes takes time and effort — and many firms fall down at exactly this stage.
The root cause is how work is billed. When you are valued only by the time you spend, and more time means more money, you resist anything that reduces your time. Inevitably someone objects to streamlining on the grounds that they will bill fewer hours. It is the elephant in the room.
Gimbel's reframe: they are not asking lawyers to bill less overall, whether on flat fees or hourly rates. They want lawyers to bill more for value and less — or not at all — for time spent correcting errors and on the other waste in knowledge work. Bill less on the work clients do not want to pay for and that ends up written off. Most professionals will agree that every day, in every matter, there are time-consuming things that cannot or should not be billed, things that keep them from work they enjoy and can properly bill for. Process improvement reduces those inevitable write-offs, and optimizing the underlying processes frees time for value-adding work.
Because lawyer compensation is based on billable hours, there is little incentive to spend time on non-billable improvement work. So Gimbel works with firms on creating incentives for improvement and, crucially, on making thinking time mandatory rather than merely encouraged. Their concrete suggestions: dedicate a fixed time — say two hours every week — when a process improvement team does nothing but work on its project; provide hands-on guidance and facilitation; ask teams what roadblocks they have hit and what help they need. For a culture of continuous improvement, the discussion of change has to become routine, part of the fabric of the organization. Daily stand-ups like those common in healthcare may not be possible, but firms should aim for at least a weekly meeting, with innovation on every team meeting's agenda. All of it requires serious management commitment to ensure people are genuinely given — and genuinely take — the time.
The Skinners closed with a client putting the whole roadmap together. Stewart McKelvey is a midsize Canadian firm with offices across four provinces. It created a role most firms have not — a "Practice Innovation Partner" — tasked with building a new service delivery model across the firm. He started with the more commoditized practices, where fee pressure and the push toward flat fees were strongest, using a combination of Lean, Agile, and legal project management to manage matters more efficiently and deliver faster at lower cost to the firm and client while maintaining the firm's known quality.
The firm set up kanban boards for two practice groups, where lawyers meet weekly for stand-ups — itself remarkable in law, where most practice groups rarely have even a weekly meeting. A "war room" holds a large kanban board for managing process improvement and innovation projects. Stewart McKelvey followed the roadmap: a core group of lawyers and administrators trained in basic Lean and Agile tools, the training spread through the firm via videos Gimbel created so more people understand the need for change and feel competent participating, then optimization of legal and business and administrative processes using the kanban boards and other projects. Gimbel spent a recent week there doing process mapping on a back-office process the firm runs 20 or more times a day — very high demand — and saw the firm adapting kanban and scrum, including daily stand-ups, to manage a huge, complicated transaction on a tight timeline, which the lawyers involved loved.
Each project moves Stewart McKelvey closer to the continuous improvement culture it believes will distinguish it from competitors. The firm is building on experience, adding innovations as it goes, and only now starting to layer on the project management piece — Lean and process optimization as the foundation for everything else. The Skinners' closing point: the firm found its own way to adapt and adopt Lean, and if lawyers can do it in an industry bound by tradition and hugely conservative, anyone can.
Two exchanges in the Q&A added useful depth.
Graban asked, drawing a healthcare parallel about getting work done at the right level — nurses doing nurse work, doctors doing doctor work — how shifting work from lawyers to paralegals affects lawyer pay. Karen explained the mechanics. Below partner level, everyone is salaried and billed out to clients at varying rates — a senior lawyer might bill at $400 an hour, a paralegal at $100. Moving work from a salaried lawyer to a salaried paralegal does not change their pay; it changes how much the firm bills, and the client is charged less. That sounds like less firm revenue, but the dynamic is more subtle. Clients increasingly pressure firms not to staff files with very junior lawyers who add little value, and that pressure has driven up write-offs. Every write-off comes directly off a partner's annual revenue pool. So pushing work down to the right level — where clients are willing to pay for it — means better-pleased clients, bills settled with less negotiation, fewer write-offs, and a higher realization rate. A higher realization rate, counterintuitively, raises the partner's overall compensation.
Graban also asked how to handle the pushback that incremental improvement won't make enough of a difference. David's answer worked at two levels. At the macro level: don't start by optimizing an entire process. Use a value stream map — a 30,000-foot view — rather than a detailed process map at first, identify the big blocks of pain and inefficiency in a transaction that might have a thousand steps, and zero in on those, ignoring the rest for now. That is itself incremental — not boiling the ocean. At the basic level, even something as simple as reducing the walk from a desk to the printer from 60 yards to 3 yards has real impact. Karen made it vivid: at one firm, paralegals walked 60 yards to a printer, loaded paper, walked back, printed, and walked back again to collect the document — a 120-yard round trip, made 50 times a day, with other people's documents potentially printing on their special paper in between. Lawyers handed documents off without caring how long the process took. When the firm saw it — 50 times a day, 120 yards, in a transaction type happening 30 to 45 times a month — the business case for a new printer 3 yards away was easy to make, and a drive toward going paperless on that step followed. Karen's point: visualizing waste, even small waste, is one of the most powerful things Gimbel does — and having people physically walk the waste makes it real.
This session is a strategy talk built on the Skinners' consulting practice, and the heart of it — the reordering of the innovation list, the value-and-waste lens, the billing reframe — is method and mindset, not software. But the Skinners named several conditions their approach depends on, and those conditions are what improvement infrastructure exists to support.
The Skinners' central instruction is that continuous incremental improvement has to become a culture, with small innovations acted on and celebrated, and the discussion of change made routine — part of the fabric of the organization. They were specific that this requires dedicated, even mandatory, time for improvement work, and at least weekly meetings with innovation on the agenda. Stewart McKelvey's kanban boards and weekly stand-ups are the visible form of that. A culture of acted-on incremental change depends on the improvement ideas being captured somewhere durable, given an owner, and tracked through to done — otherwise the ideas surfaced in a boot camp or a process mapping session evaporate when the busy week resumes. Infrastructure that holds the improvement work, makes its status visible, and surfaces what is stalled is what keeps incremental improvement from being a one-time event. The Skinners' kanban-board examples are a manual version of exactly that; a platform is the same idea at the scale of a multi-office firm.
Their argument about data points directly at infrastructure. The Skinners said most law firms cannot answer their margin on a transaction — they lack real data on the internal cost of executing a matter, which is why pricing managers fall back on what similar matters cost in the past. Gimbel's whole pricing argument depends on visualizing and optimizing the underlying transaction so a firm understands its real resource use and cost. That understanding has to be captured and kept current as processes change. Infrastructure that tracks improvement work and the time and resources a process actually consumes is what turns "we optimized the visa process" into durable, usable cost data — the basis for the robust pricing models the Skinners advocate.
Their emphasis on spread is an infrastructure point too. The roadmap's critical step is democratizing the training and spreading continuous improvement through every level of the organization — and Stewart McKelvey did this partly with videos so more people understood the need for change. The Skinners noted professionals work in silos and often cannot see what happens to a matter after they hand it off. Making improvement work visible across practice groups and offices — so a fix found in one corporate services department can be seen and adopted by another — is the spread problem, and it is what cross-organizational visibility infrastructure addresses. A firm with offices across four provinces cannot spread improvement on physical boards alone.
And the billing obstacle — the elephant in the room — connects to visibility of value. The Skinners' reframe is to bill more for value and less for waste and write-offs. Making that case to skeptical partners is far easier when the waste is visible and quantified. Karen said it directly: visualizing where the waste is, even small waste, is one of the most powerful things Gimbel does, and quantifying it with basic metrics — how long a step takes, how much rework, how many corrections — is critical to getting teams to look harder for solutions. Infrastructure that captures those metrics and makes the waste and the write-offs visible gives the billing reframe the evidence it needs.
None of this changes the Skinners' message. Lean comes before project management, pricing, and technology. Start incremental. Look at work through the lens of value and waste. Make thinking time mandatory. Those are choices a firm's leadership makes. What infrastructure does is hold the conditions the Skinners named — captured and tracked improvement work, real process cost data, cross-office visibility for spread, and quantified waste — so that the foundation they describe is something a firm builds and keeps, rather than something that fades when the boot camp ends.
Why do Karen and David Skinner say Lean must come before project management, pricing, and technology? Because those initiatives are layered on top of underlying processes, and if the processes are full of waste, the initiatives often reduce profitability or add complexity. You cannot manage or price inefficiency effectively. Adding legal project management to an unoptimized process gives a client transparency but still delivers the same slow, costly transaction. Bringing in a pricing manager without optimizing transactions typically lowers profitability. Lean provides the structure to eliminate waste first, creating a foundation on which project management, pricing reforms, and technology can actually work.
Why is innovation urgent in professional services right now? The Skinners described a perfect storm: rapidly advancing technology and AI capable of doing knowledge work; a business model exposed as fragile after 2008, with productivity and profitability down; clients holding unprecedented power over fees; commoditization of routine work; globalization and outsourcing; finance and procurement departments driving hiring decisions; general counsel disaggregating work to whoever is best placed; excess capacity (the US graduates far more lawyers than there are jobs); and do-it-yourself online services. Legacy business models can no longer be relied on.
Why are law firms so hard to change? Two reasons. Culturally, lawyers are trained to be careful, analytical, precise, and risk-averse — to hunt for flaws — and the Skinners argued those exact qualities make lawyers poor innovators. Structurally, the profit-per-partner model and a compensation system that rewards only directly billable work create enormous inertia and little incentive to innovate. And the partnership structure — shared by accounting, architecture, engineering, and medical clinics — means change cannot come from management decree; it requires broad buy-in and a major mindset shift from "no, we can't because" to "yes, we could if."
What is the "innovation first" problem? Many firms jump straight to knowledge management systems, legal project management, alternative fee arrangements, pricing managers, and technology automation — the conventional innovation list. The Skinners argue this list is in the wrong order. Without optimized processes underneath, these initiatives reduce profitability or add complexity. Process improvement, which sits at the bottom of the conventional list, should come first.
How does Lean make project management more powerful? Most firms adopt legal project management without examining their underlying processes. They already deliver reasonably on time; the question clients are really asking is whether the firm can deliver in less time at less cost. Project management alone gives transparency but not more value — the same transaction in the same time for the same price. The innovative firms (the Skinners cited Seyfarth Shaw and Thompson Hine) optimize the transaction first using Lean and Six Sigma — mapping it, eliminating DOWNTIME waste, automating, improving flow — and only then bring in project managers, so milestones, codes, costs, and fee estimates rest on a realistic, optimized foundation.
How does Lean connect to pricing? The billable hour rewards more time with more money, creating no incentive to reduce time or waste. As firms move to flat fees, the incentive shifts to efficiency. But most firms don't know their real internal cost of executing a matter — pricing managers estimate from what past matters cost, not from actual cost data. Firms that change pricing without optimizing the underlying transactions typically see profitability fall. Visualizing and optimizing transactions with Lean gives a firm genuine understanding of resource use and cost, which is what makes robust pricing models possible.
Why does incremental change work, and how do you answer "it won't make enough difference"? The math compounds. Shave one minute off a task done five times a day, and that is 20 hours a year per person; across five people, 100 hours — two and a half weeks — freed for value-adding work, with no one working more hours. The Skinners answer the skepticism two ways: at a macro level, don't try to optimize an entire thousand-step process at once — use a value stream map to find the big blocks of pain and zero in on those; and at a basic level, small changes (the Skinners' example: moving a printer from a 60-yard walk to 3 yards, when paralegals made that trip 50 times a day) add up fast into obvious business cases.
What is the DOWNTIME framework? Lean's framework for categorizing the eight wastes: Defects, Overproduction, Waiting, Non-utilized talent, Transportation, Inventory, Motion, and Extra processing. The mnemonic comes from manufacturing, where production at a standstill ("downtime") is wasteful. The Skinners use it because it helps professionals recognize that things they consider normal are actually waste, and because it is simple — no software, statistics, or special training required, usable immediately with just a critical eye.
Why does Gimbel use DMAIC instead of PDCA? Gimbel uses DMAIC — Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control — because its five steps slow professionals down. Lawyers tend to jump straight to solutions before understanding the problem; starting with "Define," framed from the client's perspective, forces the shift to client-focused thinking. Starting from "Plan" (in PDCA) would lose that client focus and lose the explicit measurement step — important because law firms traditionally collect little data about how they work. Making measurement its own discrete step lets professionals see waste more clearly.
How do you define value in professional services work? Gimbel teaches professionals to look at their work from the client's perspective, because the client defines value. For work to be valuable, it must pass three tests: it moves the matter forward toward the end state, the client wants it and is willing to pay for it, and it is done right the first time. Everything else is waste — waste of time and of human, financial, and technological resources that the client should not be asked to pay for. The hardest part is learning to see waste, because to many professionals it just looks normal.
What is the "elephant in the room" with billing? That when professionals are valued by the time they spend, and more time means more money, they resist anything that reduces their time. Someone will inevitably object to streamlining because they will bill fewer hours. Gimbel's reframe: they are not asking lawyers to bill less overall, but to bill more for value and less — or not at all — for time spent correcting errors and other waste, the work clients don't want to pay for and that gets written off anyway. Reducing write-offs and freeing time for value-adding work is the goal.
How do you make time for improvement work in a billing-driven firm? Because billable-hour compensation gives little incentive for non-billable improvement work, Gimbel advises making thinking time mandatory, not merely encouraged. Concrete steps: dedicate a fixed time (such as two hours every week) when a process improvement team does nothing but work on its project; provide hands-on guidance and facilitation; ask teams about roadblocks and what help they need; and hold at least weekly meetings with innovation on the agenda. All of it requires serious management commitment to ensure people are genuinely given the time and genuinely take it.
What did Stewart McKelvey do? The midsize Canadian firm created a "Practice Innovation Partner" role to build a new service delivery model, starting with its more commoditized practices under fee pressure. It used a combination of Lean, Agile, and legal project management; set up kanban boards and weekly stand-ups for practice groups (rare in law); trained a core group and spread the training through videos; and optimized legal and business processes before layering on project management. The firm built Lean and process optimization as the foundation for all its other innovations — the Skinners' point being that if a tradition-bound law firm can do it, any professional services organization can.
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