GA 320 | Lean in the Legal Profession with Jaclyn Harder

And it just becomes really amazing when people feel involved in the process rather than being told by someone that doesn't necessarily know. And a lot of times managers feel a horrible amount of pressure to have the right answer and they really shouldn't. They should just know how to lead their teams to get to the right answer.

Today I'm excited to welcome Jaclyn Harder to the show. Now, Jacqueline and I were introduced, or I guess led to be introduced by our mutual friend Karen Ross. So, Karen, thank, thank you again for another awesome connection. So Jacqueline actually comes with a really interesting background. She started her career as a legal receptionist and now she's worked her way into a role as a senior manager of operational excellence for a law firm in Atlanta, Georgia. And so what we talk about then on the show is really just her career and her progression and how lean's played an important part in that. And then we really just kind of dive into the whole legal profession and how Lean and continuous improvement can definitely add value for that world. Now, even if you're not in the legal profession, I think anybody that's in a kind of like a service related business or anything like that is going to find a lot of value in today's episode. So links to everything Jaclyn and I talk about can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 320320 again gembapodcast.com and look for episode 320. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Jacqueline, welcome to the show. How are you?

I'm doing well. How are you, Ron?

I'm doing great. Doing great. All right. You know, still we're recording this here at the end of, end of April, so we're still in the heat of battle here with the coronavirus, but everybody's doing as well as possible here and Texas. How about you guys? Where are you at, Jacqueline?

I'm in Georgia, so we reopened earlier than a lot of different states. So I already got my nails and I had to wear my mask through the whole thing and it felt really good. And the women that I worked for were happy to get back to work, but also happy to be safe. And they did their social distancing. So it's been great.

Great. That's awesome. That's awesome. All right, well, hey, I'm really excited to have you on the show. We were chatting a little bit before we hit record that I think we've had a few folks who have kind of worked within the legal profession, but, but not, not many So I think it's going to be really interesting. And I know you also have a really interesting background that I can't wait to and just hear about your career and your progression and what you've learned along the way. But, Jacqueline, I know you listen to the show, and as you know, we like to begin with our guest sharing a quote. So do you have one that you want to share?

I do, and I'm going to cheat because it's my own quote, and it's that we should never be surprised more than once.

Mm, that's a good one. Very appropriate.

Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, that's a pretty. It's a deep quote, though. Like, what does it really mean to you? I mean, obviously, you could take it on a really surface level and think, oh, yeah, duh. But there's probably some deep meaning behind that. So what does that quote really mean to you?

Oh, absolutely. So for me, what it means is that a lot of our anxiety that comes into work day in and day out, especially in the legal field, there is a lot of unpredictability. You can get results that are consistent or results that are completely inconsistent, even though you've submitted the exact same petition. So when we talk about process documentation and including any variations or any alternate flows, what I've always said is that we really should never be reinventing the wheel. And so if we're surprised, we should capture that, because that means it's a variation. And so that really, truly, that unique. What that novel result is should be documented. And so it should never be a surprise again. Now, if there's a change of course, we can't, you know, can't account for everything, but at the very least for the exact kinds of issues that can come up, we should always be documenting those so that we don't ever have to think about what we did or how we resolved it or who took care of it.

Yeah, for sure. Another interesting take on it is, like, we had a. We did a webinar with Sam McPherson a few weeks ago. And, you know, if Sam's a former. I don't know if you know Sam, but he's a former Green Beret. And so he was talking about kind of like in Special Forces, like, how they. How they kind of prepare for a crisis. And obviously, you know, any crisis is different. So it's not necessarily that you're prepared. Prepared for that exact thing, but you know how you're going to react when a thing occurs, right?

Absolutely.

Yeah. So that's really Interesting. Good stuff. So, Jac and let's just kind of jump right in. And I think where I want to start is I just want to hear about your background and really your professional career. Tell us a little bit about how you first maybe got introduced to continuous improvement, but then maybe build in a little bit about your progression and the various roles that you've played over the years.

Oh, absolutely. Thank you. I basically started out in lean in about 2014. At least that's what my certificates say. That's what I remember from our training. And for me it was very novel. Right. So law firms aren't huge on Lean or Six Sigma a lot of times because of metrics. That's what I found out. And so during the training, I recalled my social statistics classes and I remembered the T tables and, you know, the alphas and the N equals how many respondents. And I just, I was excited. And during the class, I think most of my colleagues were a little irritated with me because I kept raising my hand and I'm saying, so does this conn connect with this? And so when we do the Z score and they're just looking at me like I had grown a second head. And so of course, I kind of became the person that was really, really passionate about lean. And so over the course of the next couple of years, we started implementing certain things like Kaizen events. And I would work very closely with legal teams and partners and we would identify a process, we would do the process mapping. And that was so exciting. I also got to build the firm's first Lean tr, which was amazing because I had to put it all together myself. And I was absolutely terrified. And lo and behold, after the half day session that we had with lunch and intros and everything, everyone was just amazed. And so we used that as the basis of the training subsequently, and of course, many iterations later, it was almost perfect, I would say. And so again, just the training, the involvement, the interaction with the teams and everything, it really brought every part of my work, including the legal side plus the Lean and Six Sigma side. And it brought them together so perfectly. And so when I started to think back, I just wrote an article and so I started to think back about my career. And a lot of times during training, actually every time during training, I talk a little bit about how lean in and of itself isn't a really hard concept. A lot of times it's common sense that's been put into a specific toolbox or there are things that we do to arrive at a certain conclusion. And so I was thinking back to my very first job at an office with two attorneys. I was their first receptionist. They actually had nothing put together. They had just graduated from the bar and rented their office. When I first started, there was nothing. So if a file was closed, the attorney I was working for didn't know what to do with it. So I started creating systems. And that was just a necessary evil. I wasn't thinking at all that anything I was doing related to anything that an engineer might do. And so just, you know, over the years that I was there, basically their first and longest employee. So I put together the billing protocols and all of the templates that we used and, you know, the complaints and the interrogatories, which can be 50 pages long. And so when I started to look back, I thought, you know, in almost every single position I've been in in law, there has been lean kind of built into it. But we just don't necessarily talk about that because that's not the framework we work in. So it was just really interesting to look back and to see that really, over the course of my career, this has been a really good fit. Like, it's almost like I was Preparing for about 20 years to really start to understand the fundamentals of how we break these systems. And then of course, I think of Taiichi Ono. He was a systems guy. And, you know, I like to think that because that was almost my first exposure, you know, to the real working world, that I was 18 and that was my first real grown up job. And it was just really amazing to start thinking back about everything that I had done. And that was all really preparing me for my work in operational excellence at Barry Oppelman Enlighten, which is the firm I'm at now.

Mm. Mm. Well, so let's talk about that now. Talk about where you're at now. And, you know, you believe you're. You're. You're a senior manager. Right. Of your operational excellence program.

Right.

Is that correct?

Correct. Correct. So BAL is a corporate immigration firm, and we have Fortune 500 clients. We are, you know, one of the. One of the best firms in the country. And I work for an amazing operations team. So this is the first time that I didn't have a direct manager who was an attorney. And so my direct manager is the CTO or the cio, and he's a mathematician. He's also into robotics and automation, and he's one of the smartest people I've ever met. And so earlier in the year, last year, I was looking for something that I could lead, I wanted to lead a program. I had my own initiatives. Sometimes it was hard to get buy in or to get anyone to even consider some of the things that I was recommending because it didn't necessarily mesh with some of the goals for the firm that I was at. And so I had already worked at BAL, funny enough, from 2009 to 2012 through a series of mergers. So I'm actually back at BAL and because of my cio, cto, Vince Damasio, he's led the firm in this very progressive, dare I say, disruptive kind of way that we are leading our technology and our systems and the development of that technology, the automation and the systems revolving around those. And they wanted to create an OPEX department. And so when I gave them a call and said, listen, I've got this great idea for the firm, what do you think? The managing partner there, Jeremy Fudge and Frida Garcia, they sat down with me, they said, what's your plan? And I said, listen, my idea is to make you the most profitable firm while knowing every single one of our processes. How long things take, how long things should take, how we can use Pareto and all these other useful tools to identify things that law firms don't usually look at. And when they spoke with Vince, Vince was super excited and he thought this is a great compliment to our operations department. So I work with data and analytics and insights. I work with people in the transitions department who onboard and off board clients. There's a professional services arm. So I kind of round that out with opex and I'm there really to try and set up a foundation which, which for me starts with training and a curriculum for, for our folks. And then following up with some playbooks about how people can just practically do their own Kaizen. You know, I, I jokingly say that I want to work myself out of a job because if I can teach people how to fish, then anywhere they go, even if they leave bal, and this is the one thing I love about the firm I work, we don't think about just how it benefits us now. We think about growing our people. And we really appreciate our people understand that when we make things a little bit easier for them and they know what to do and what to expect, that they have a better result. And if they leave the firm, a lot of them go on to law school. This is stuff that they're never going to forget. And it's so applicable to so many things. I mean, Bruce Hamilton in the toast video, right? Whoever thought that that would be one of the best examples of Lean as watching a person make toast. So really my goal is to just get the firm on a foundation where we can start this. This transition, this transformation, if you will, where we'll start to release, collect baseline data, which is something, like I said, is very new to law firms. Develop a lean curriculum where people can specialize if they'd like. So there's like a General Lean 101. I kind of built it like a college college curriculum. And there's, you know, required courses and then there are specialized courses. So if you want to take an A3 course and you want to actually do one, we can have a workshop and really just have people get comfortable with it. Right. Because it's fun to do. Kaizen I don't want it to be stressful for anyone. I want someone to say, hey, let's do this in a couple hours and let's do it and let's see what we can do when we walk out. And so that kind of foundation and progression is what I'm working on right now. And as I mentioned earlier, I am working with a partner on a client project and I'm. This is my first foray into really, you know, guiding my own program for this team. So it's going to start with education, it's going to continue with making sure that our people understand what we're doing. And then we're going to go ahead and do a deep dive. We're going to do value stream mapping, which when I showed them a value stream map, they almost passed out. So don't worry, we start smaller. We could do a process map because we still don't have many metrics and then we can identify what we need from there and just have a continued focus on alignment and prioritization within that. And so it's just been amazing. And I'm so grateful for the opportunity because I think that this is something that every law firm should have. I don't think that this is something that's unique to immigration. I don't think it's unique to manufacturing. I mean, of course we've seen that, right? Lean works everywhere. It works in healthcare, it works in manufacturing, and likewise it should. It should work in legal. I think that one of the last places we ever look is primarily the legal side, but also on the operations side. How long does it take for us to set up a new user? We have our own proprietary systems, we have cloud systems, again, automation, so many things that go on that if we don't have a dialed in Process someone might have a bad experience when they onboard. The goal really is to just, like I said, make sure that we clean up our backyard and the operations group and get those things going. And then also simultaneous working with the legal teams, which is a little bit where my heart is because I processed immigration for about 11 years. So something that's pretty near and dear to me and I like the interaction, get to work with different people from all around the world. And so really, because that's their focus and this is something new, I really think that we're on the cutting edge of something. You know, we. I hope that we can be seen as leaders in this area and hopefully reach out and, you know, as Karen Ross has set up this Women in lean group on LinkedIn that welcomes women that, you know, may or may not have a lot of exposure to lean, but it really would give them a sense of, you know, this really well rounded environment where it's not limited to manufacturing or service or anything like that. And it can really just help you transform your career from moderate to exceptional.

You know, one of the things that we lean thinkers are often say will steal a phrase from my friend Paul Akers, is, you know, fix what bugs you. Right. That's sometimes the best way to apply lean or continuous improvement is just to find things that aren't optimal or bug you in your daily work. So I'm curious, like within the legal profession, like any profession, I'm sure there's many things that that bug folks like. Can you give some examples, some specific examples of where you might see, you know, lean being value added?

Absolutely. So we have a lot of decision points and a lot of review points and approval points. And that starts everything with the legal side all the way through billing. And so oftentimes what we find is that we don't have the documentation. And so what we need to do is we need to get that together.

And what do you mean documentation like from the client internally or both?

Internal? Yeah, usually internal. Because we may not necessarily have all of our processes documented. And so one example is if we get an adverse adjudication, which means that the government didn't necessarily approve our petition, we may add five levels of review to those kinds of petitions moving forward. Because that one instance occurred because it's this, the partner's license might. Every attorney is licensed. If there's any issues, you could lose your license. So there's always a lot of these review points and when anything goes wrong, we tack those on like crazy. And so that's a big Place where we can really look in, into Lean and Six Sigma to help us answer questions like do we really need these review points? And how much is it slowing us down, our lead times and our cycle times? You know, it's really important for us to focus on that. Another issue that we have a lot is email. And everybody struggles with just the volume of email that we get because we have not just our clients, but we also represent the foreign nationals and oftentimes, you know, their lives are deeply affected by immigration. And so, you know, they need to know things as soon as possible. And so email communication, you know, they may send us an email, call us 10 minutes later, and then back in the day they used to fax us something. Now, you know, now they might email. And so we have this, this large amount of communication that, that is not necessarily cohesive from end to end. Right. So we don't necessarily communicate the same way in operations the way that we do in Link. And so that is another big area where we can really improve, is streamlining the communication. One of the things that we talk about in training is that people really don't have time to read the email. So you need to put your action items up towards the top. You need to be clear about a deadline. You need to make that subject line relevant to what it is, especially if you've gone 30 or 40 emails later and the subject has completely changed. So those are some really big, big, you know, big points. The lack of documentation or the perception that the documentation that exists is the actual state.

Have you ever had any experience with twi, like job instruction and things like that?

Not yet.

Yeah, that'd be something that would be really interesting for you guys to explore. You know, just thinking about kind of like the one best way to do things, realizing that there's a lot of variability, right. In your work. And I'm sure each case is, you know, different, but there's probably similarities. Right. And so, you know, really kind of exploring that, that one best way to do, to do a job and then to, you know, it's, it obviously closely relates to standard work as well. It's not, it's not exactly the same, but it's, it's similar. But that, that might be really interesting for you guys to look into job instruction within twi.

Absolutely.

Yeah. So, so, so if someone's listening to this right now, Jacqueline, and they're in the legal profession, not, I don't want to just limit it to the legal profession, but just more of a service oriented business, that's not Manufacturing, you know, they're not producing widgets or anything like that. Not that producing widgets is easy. Sometimes I think we, we flippantly always, oh, if I could only build cars, it would be so easy. You know, okay, you go try to build a car every 60 seconds and get back to me, you know. But it's a different world when you're into service. Kind of front more of a front office environment. What advice do you have for folks who are maybe just starting to think about, especially during this crisis? You know, a lot of times, unfortunately, it takes things like this for people to realize, huh, maybe I should be a little bit more prepared. And maybe we do need to get a little bit more standard work in place and things like that. So what advice do you have for those folks?

I have two pieces of advice, and one is to really don't be afraid to dive into anything. And as you mentioned, I actually just sent out an email as an exercise asking people what frustrates you? You know, don't spend time on this. If you, if you're frustrated by it, you know it immediately and you can tell me all about it. So. So I think that's one of the things. And then the second is to do. Don't be afraid to do, you know, Karen Ross, again, one of my best gurus, one of her quotes is to do first and think later. And I honestly think that sometimes, and I was guilty of this myself early on, is I wanted to have the perfect training session, and there's no such thing. And I knew this, you know, but I wanted to make sure that I wasn't going to disappoint anyone. I wasn't going to leave anything out. And you only learn by doing. And the more we do, the more we learn, you know, and we fail fast, you know, all of those things that we know that we need to do. I think that that's something that people, it's hard, right? You don't want to fail in front of your manager. You don't want to say, oh, this is the first time I've done such and such. But once you do it, then you're comfortable with it, and then when you do it again, you're even more comfortable with it. And next thing you know, you're showing people how to do it, and that's how you master those things. So there's no formal education needed, really, because like I said, lean is a lot of common sense. There's many books that people could pick up. Look at what an A3 is. It's it's. It's so simple. They, you know, people break it down and you can find anything online. Um, so I just really encourage people to figure out, you know, either what drives them nuts or their team members, you know, what. What's a thorn in everyone's side, and just start there and just talk. I guess the one extra thing I would say is don't forget the people who do the work. This is a big issue that I kind of have to explain lot is that people say, well, I'll send a couple of representatives. And I said, okay, I get that, but what happens if I have a question about something pertinent and no one has the answer to that, but we have five people that do that that every day. I said, what would be the point of having this meeting and talking about all of these wonderful things if we're not including everyone in on the team? And so it's giving them an idea that, you know, it may take away from people that are able to do processing right away. You know, you might have, you know, your people in a room, but that the benefit of that is just so much greater and that when you involve people, they learn as well. You create this, like this, this cascade of problem solvers and problem identifiers. And it just becomes really amazing when people feel involved in the process rather than being told by someone that doesn't necessarily know. And a lot of times managers feel a horrible amount of pressure to have the right answer, and they really shouldn't. They should just know how to lead their teams to get to the right answer. That's what I would say. Don't be scared.

I love you. Don't be scared. I love that. That's the whole idea of learning, right? And parallels perfectly to you said about don't worry about having all the answers because no one has all the answers, right? I mean, all we can do is take a step and learn, or make a plan, predict, make a step, learn, right? And just as long as we're always learning, then, you know, good things are going to eventually happen, right? You just got to keep learning. You know, people are probably sick of me hearing me say this now, but I'm a big believer now. And many people's, many folks practicing lean six Sigma, continuous improvement, the reason they struggle is they're trying to solve so many problems. If they just turn it around and say, let's just see if we can learn faster, shorten our learning cycles and learn faster, and the more we do that, then the problems are going to go. They're Going to go away. You know, the problem is, if you will, the lagging indicator. Right. You know, so, yeah, learning is the leading indicator.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

And it makes people. It makes people feel involved. You know, what better thing than to have implemented an idea that someone says, you know, this. This used to irritate me and it doesn't anymore. Thanks for bringing it up and thanks for, you know, helping us get rid of this, you know, pain points. Yeah, it's really great.

Exactly. Beautiful. Jaclyn, what's the best way for folks to connect with you if they want to reach out? Social media website. What do you think?

So I can be reached@jaharderal.com I'm also on LinkedIn and I'm also a member of the women and lean group that's on LinkedIn. Karen Ross had founded that. So those are the best ways to get in touch with.

So folks that are interested in that group that you and Karen and many other folks, they've all been on the podcast, I think now, not all of them. There's a few of you who I'm sure haven't reached out yet. You better reach out. But if folks want to learn more about that, what do they do? Just search it up in LinkedIn or what's the best way?

Yeah, absolutely. You can look me up or you can look up Karen. KarenRoss K A R Y N R O s s on LinkedIn and send her a message and we'll invite you to the group and broaden the female leaders and lean practitioners that we have in our wonderful group.

Yeah, Karen's been on the show a few times, like 100 times. We love Karen.

She's the best.

She is. She's incredible. What we'll do is we'll link to everything that Jacqueline just mentioned up in the show notes for today's episode. And so for that, just go to GembaPodcast.com and then this is gonna be episode 320320. So, yes, we'll link to your LinkedIn, we'll link to the women in Lean group and all that good stuff. So, Jaclyn, thank you so much for coming on. Really, it's been fun chatting with you. Let's do it again sometime and we can pick a different topic and just riff on that for a little while.

Absolutely. Thank you so much, Ron. It was great to meet with you and to have this experience. I really appreciate it.

All right. All right, well, you guys be well out there in Georgia and we'll talk to you again soon.

Same to you. Thank you so much. All right, Bye bye, bye bye.

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