GA 342 | Lean, Law, and Automation with Andrew Shapiro-Zysk

I think for the legal teams I was working with at the time, it was like, hey, it's not broken. We don't want to fix it. One thing I've learned in this job is once you can start to show people the value that comes from operating in a lean fashion, the more they see the benefits for them, they're going to buy in more and more.

Today I'm excited to welcome Andy Shapiro Zisk to the show. Now, Andy is a colleague of Jacqueline Harder and Danny Bradford, who I've had on in previous years episodes. Now, Andy, Danny, and Jacqueline all work for a law firm called Barry Appleman and Lyden, or BAL as they go. And so basically, Andy's job is the senior manager for reporting and analytics. And so his team is actually working to just really streamline and automate many of the various systems and reports and things that the law firm needs to service clients. And as you're going to hear, they're using Lean in a big way to really streamline the way that they're going about this work, and then are also using different Lean principles, like some of the various ways to make sure that they're serving their customers as well as they can. And so just another example of how Lean thinking truly knows no boundaries. And it really is. It's officially infiltrated, I think, every industry in the entire world. So really fun episode to just to hear a different take on how these, these, these trusted tools that we all know so well work anywhere. Now, show notes for this episode, which will include links to everything Andy and I talk about, can be found over@gemba podcast.com just look for episode 342 again, gembapodcast.com and look for episode 342. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. Andy, welcome to the show. How are you?

I'm well, Ron. Thanks again for having me on the show.

Yeah, well, our mutual friend Jacqueline Harder, who was previously on the podcast, introduced us, so I'm excited to have you on. And it's always interesting hearing from folks in different industries talking about the way that they're using continuous improvement and using Lean. And so I'll let you kind of introduce yourself here in a second and a little bit more about about your company. But, Andy, I know you've listened to the show before. We kind of get rolling. We like our guests to share a quote. So do you have one that you want to open up with?

Sure. One quote that speaks to me with respect to Lean principles is one by Steve Jobs, which is if you define the problem correctly, you almost have the solution. So to me, that's all about what are we trying to solve, is taking a step back and looking at the problem in a holistic fashion.

Yes.

And then I'll set us up for success.

So good. So good. You know, we. We do a lot of coaching here at Gemba Academy in our various certification programs, and we spend a lot of time when we're in that kind of project selection phase and writing a good. I tell people, and I mean it at the bottom of my heart, you know, fixing. Fixing issues is actually the easy part, you know, but. But, you know, deeply understanding the problem, quantifying the problem with facts and data and different things, that's what's hard, you know. So, yeah, such a great quote. All right, well, Andy, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, Tell us about your background, how you first got introduced to continuous improvement, and then tell us what you're up to these days over at Barry Appleman and Leiden, or bal, I guess, as you guys go by.

Yeah, yeah, I'd love to. I found that my career path has been, I think, like a lot of people, a little circuitous. I originally went to law school. You know, went to law school, took and passed the bar exam. You know, this was. Was almost 20 years ago. And I just happened to graduate during the height of the recession in 08 and had a hard time initially, you know, finding a job, as many new law school graduates did at the time. And I threw out initially what was initially a temporary contract position. I sort of fell in the whole world of data analytics, reporting and within the law, the legal industry. I was working at the time at in house council for a large national company. And the VP I was working for said, hey, we got this project. We're going to start doing online matter management and E billing. And we need somebody to be the project lead from the business on that. And then once we got that off and running, it was like, hey, we need somebody to manage it. We need somebody to do the reporting. So I started doing that for a number of years, which is something. I never went to school for it. And actually prior to that, prior to going to law school, I had worked for eight years at a small boutique immigration law firm in Buffalo, New York, where I'm originally from. And so about, I don't know, about seven years ago, I saw a job posting to work for an immigration law firm doing reporting. And I was like, hey, this is great. I have eight years of experience doing one Six years of experience doing the other. And, you know, after a few other job changes, ended up at Barry Upperman Leiden at bal. Now, I've been at BAL for, I think, going on three years now, and I'm the senior manager of reporting and Data analytics. I have a team of about 10 business intelligence professionals spread out across a number of our different offices, primarily our Dallas office, while I'm based in Boston.

Got it, got it. So I'm curious, your formal education, what kind of lawyer were you originally planning to be?

I was actually looking at immigration law. So the fact that I'm now in the immigration law sphere but not practicing, but been supporting the attorneys who do that work, supporting them with the data, with the analysis that they need to do their jobs better, I still get a lot of. I get a lot of satisfaction out of that because I'm still industry that, you know, I care about a lot.

Now, be honest, do you ever find yourself saying, come on, man, this is what you should do, you know, to the lawyer?

You know, I used to think that many, many years ago, but I've sort of moved past that now, and I'm very happy doing what I'm doing. So I feel like I found the sweet spot where I was meant to be.

Well, I gotta imagine having that background, though, that formal education's gotta be helpful, you know, even on your analytics side. Right. Because you at least understand what's going on over there. Right.

So definitely. And, you know, sort of speaking to Lean, one of the things that, you know, one of. One of. I believe one of the eight ways is, you know, under. Under utilizing your talent. Right, sure. One of the things. One of the things I do with my team members when they join me. Most of the people who join my team don't have a legal background, don't know anything about immigration law. You know, they went to school for computer science. You know, they've done coding. All this stuff that I didn't do, I've learned all that stuff on the job. And one of the things that me and the manager who's under me, that we really stressed with our team is we really want you to learn this stuff. Right. You're going to do your job better and do it faster and do it more efficient if you understand the subject matter. Right. So, you know, the firm offers all these introductory trainings on, you know, what all the different visa categories are, what the different immigration processes are. And I also hold sort of teachable, I call them teachable moments. Once a month, we have our team monthly meeting And I sort of also have open office hours where, hey, if you want to learn something, if you want to learn about the H1B visa process, if you want to learn about how the green card process works, I'm happy to sit down, take an hour and walk you through it. Right? Because I think they're going to. And I actually, I think I just really enjoy the teaching part of it and sharing that knowledge. But I think it also really helps them do their job better because they're not going to waste time going back. So if an attorney reaches out to our team and says, oh, I want a report to help me analyze what types of jobs our clients are putting their H1B employees into, right. If my person has to take time to be like, well, can you explain to me what you mean by H1B visa and what are the different things I should think about? And they get that. They already know what to look for. Right. So that's something that I really tried to stress. That education piece.

Got it, got it. So I definitely want to jump into how you guys are using Lean, maybe even starting with how you were introduced to Lean, but before then. So you're the senior manager of reporting and analytics. So what, what, what do you do? Like, what's that look like on a day to day basis?

Sure. I mean, as a whole, I can sort of get to get to my specific role in a second, but as a whole, our function, like I said, we have a team of 10. We support, you know, save for a few other teams within the firm, like our finance group and maybe our HR group who have some of their own internal reporting resources. Pretty much everything else comes to my team. That's both our, you know, our customers are both our internal customers. Our colleagues as well as our clients that, you know, have engaged the firm and we provide, you know, all sorts of data reporting and analytics. We look at, you know, we do scheduled reporting. We do, that's where we might deliver a report or an analysis on a, you know, every Monday or once a month or every quarter, ad hoc reporting, that's where someone will reach out to my team and say, hey, I want to know this, I want to know this. You know, and we work on it as well as we support all of our self serve options within COBALT, which is BAL's proprietary case management software. So we have, within that tool embedded, we have both tabular reporting that anybody can run, as well as we now have interactive dashboards. So everything we pull in there could be case data, it could be billing data, sla compliance data surveys. We have surveys we know use, NPS surveys, billing forecasts, like, a whole bunch of stuff. Pretty much anything that people are putting into Cobalt or pretty much, we have access to it.

Got it, Got it. Okay, so let's talk Lean. How were you introduced to it?

So introduced to Lean. It's going back to what you said earlier. Jacqueline. I consider Jacqueline not only a colleague, but a friend. She's great. She's our firm senior manager of Operational Excellence. When she joined the firm. She joined the firm after I did, and right off the bat, put together a Lean course, wanted to introduce Lean concepts. And, you know, when I had my Lean meeting with her and just in other conversations we've had together, I had all these light bulbs going off because I was like, we're already doing this. Right. I was doing lean and didn't know I was doing lean. Like, I didn't. I didn't really. I think I've gone through most of my career, like, practicing lean. Yeah. But not ever knowing it as a concept. Right. It's sort of. I've been introduced to that, you know, as a concept. Yeah. Yeah. That's how I got introduced to it. And then now when you sort of focus more on it as a concept, you can, I think, even focus your efforts even more, because now you have that structure, you know, that framework within the work.

Well, the thing that I'm gathering just from talking, you know, with you and Jaclyn is you don't necessarily have a Lean program per se. It just seems to be sort of how many of you are doing your daily work. Is that a fair assessment?

Yeah, that is a fair assessment. Vince Damasio, who's our cio, he's really sort of developed this culture within the firm, especially when it comes to our ops teams who do the support, you know, do the support work for our legal teams. A lot of it is about how can we use automation more. You know, we've developed a number of bots who take a lot of the manual work out, you know, take care of those repeatable tasks that waste time. You know, move fast, fail fast, keep going. And so, you know, bringing Jacqueline on, who then sort of helped, you know, spread the. Spread the love of Lean throughout. Throughout our organization, has been really helpful. And I think we're, you know, looking at it again through a Lean, Lean. Lean lens, I think, more frequently, even though we've been doing it, you know.

Yeah. So, I mean, in most organizations, and I'm sure BAL is not exempt from this, but in most Organizations, when you're introducing something like, like Lean or any sort of something different, there's, there's, there can be and usually is some, some form of resistance or, you know, because change is hard. Right. I mean, did you guys run into any of that early on? I mean, you know, I don't ask you to call out, oh, yeah, Jim, you know, he was a real, you know.

You know. Yeah.

What do you think?

You know, I personally, I haven't seen it. And again, I think it's because, maybe because my team, my personal fiefdom, I've sort of always tried to work in this faster way, but I think within our organization, within our ops group, and I haven't really seen that, but again, maybe there were some of those growing pains before I came on board. I think maybe they've already gone through those growing pains by the time I came on board two and a half years ago. But one thing I will say in terms of that pushback, one of the stories I wanted to share with you about how, because I think in terms of Lean principles and Lean activities, I see that within my team, how my team operates, but also how we help through what we do, how we help our colleagues and help our firm be lean on a broader basis. Right. How we're sharing that lean throughout the firm. And one story that I always bring up to people when I'm trying to sort of sell reporting and sell the value of data analytics is when I first started working at a law firm doing the job I'm doing now, the firm, it wasn't bal, it was a prior firm where I came on board and everybody was doing everything on spreadsheets, right? They were, you know, they weren't putting stuff into a database. They were just had. They were passing spreadsheets around on computers, constantly reinventing the wheel. There was tons of over processing, tons of redundant work. And I was like, why are you guys doing this? You know, like, this doesn't make any sense. And they're like, well, this is the way we've always done it. Yeah. And I think for the legal teams I was working with at the time was like, hey, it's not broken. We don't want to fix it. But one thing I've learned in this job is once you can start to show people the value that comes from operating in a lean fashion, the more they see the benefits for them, they're going to buy in more and more. Right. And so it sort of came to the point where I'm like telling people, like, hey, if we do it this way, you're going to be less busy, you're going to be more efficient. Right. We don't have to hire as much headcount because you're not like having people do all this manual work. And then some of my victories I feel like were after a few years at that firm, everybody in my office was like, hey, we got a problem. Can we use reporting?

Yeah.

Can we automate this in some way? There has to be some other way we can do this. And some of the people who pushed back initially were my biggest converts to be like. And then that was a feedback loop where it was like, hey. To all their employees. It was like, hey, make sure you're putting this in the database because I want my report to be accurate. And so it just strengthened itself once they bought in. So I think that's one way you overcome some of that pushback.

Got it. So you've mentioned automating several times now. So one of the questions that I like to ask folks that are working sort of in your type of a world is how do you ensure that you don't automate waste?

Good question. I think it's. It's also that quote I brought up at the outset. Right. You have to define the problem first. So you look at your process, you walk through the process that's currently happening before you automate it, and you say, okay, where's the waste in the current process? If we're going to automate this and take out all these manual steps and resteps and re verification that's happening, let's not bake that waste into the automated process. Right, Right. I'm sure that happens. But also at the same time, you just can't set a process and just forget about it either. Right. You have to come back to and see how you can make it better. And you know, one thing that I've been very proud of in our team, and it wasn't anything that I developed, it was something that, sure, as the head of the function, I drove it, but it was actually people on my team who had these ideas of how we can make things better. And I championed them to do that and we did it. And when I first joined bal, the team that I now, that I now supervise had been sort of tossed around a little bit. They were trying to find the right home and we settled in a great space now and they were doing so. When I talked about the scheduled reporting before, this would be like where a legal team or a client would say, hey, I want that list of all my Active projects, you know, send that to me every Monday. And what was happening is we had it coded like in SQL, SQL. And what was happening is there are certain people on the team who's pretty much full job, full time job was just every day looking at the list of scheduled reports they had to run, format, attach to an email, send the email out to the person. As you can imagine, sure, it might take 10, 15 minutes per report, but if you have hundreds of reports, you're wasting a lot of time. And I'm like, why are we doing this right? What can we do to make this better? What can we do to make it much more efficient? Python, which is another coding language we've been able to now for all of our scheduled reporting, which now numbers over, I don't know, it's over 300 reports. We basically build the report, we build it with SQL, put it into Python. We have a whole homegrown automation system we've developed using Python. And basically every day we click a button and it runs all the reports, it opens that, it runs the report formats, it attaches it to an email, sends the email. And we also, I know this is also another lean principle is measuring your results, right? Measuring, you know, where we were, where we are now, what do we, what have we achieved and what have we saved? And every single day I the system, we also built this into the automation. I get an email every day that tells me, okay, as of this date, you've cumulatively, since you set up this automation process, this is how many reports have been sent out automated and how much time that saved and we've sent out. I think when I put together some of my notes for today's call, we had been over 12,000 reports that have been sent out via automation. I mean, that's that. And it saved, I added it up, it's about over a year's worth of work in terms of hours. Yeah. And so that's something that we developed. So since I've been on board that, like I said, I've been very proud of. And right now we're actually, because we also use okrs and we're actually spending this quarter looking to see how we can make it even better. Right. How can we optimize it even further? Where is some of the waste? Even though it's automated, even though we're sending all this stuff out, there's probably better ways to do it even better. How can it be faster? How can we take some of the little additional steps we have in there where we set them up? So that's one thing we're focused on right now.

Yeah. You know, you speaking about automation, I actually use this software called. It's Text Expander is the name of the software and the email that you got when we were preparing for the podcast, you know, where it's got all the instructions and how to schedule it and all that kind of stuff. Like I used to, back in the day, I would kind of sort of like type that up, you know, and I was like, oh my gosh, this is crazy. I said the same thing every time. So now I just hit like semicolon P for that's my shortcut on my key keyboard and boom, that whole text is populated in there, you know, and I get an email every month saying, oh, you saved this much time typing. But I use it for several other things. You know, it's simple little automation hacks. And I know you guys are doing way more than that, but I think folks, just general. Anyone, any one of us who have to do things, you know, maybe you have to type a similar type of email or. I know I used to use like different email signatures was another hack I had. I had like eight different signatures and they all said different things. Right. And. And had a message in the body of the email as well. So just little things like that where you can just save a tremendous amount of time when you've got to do repetitive tasks like that.

Yeah, and I really encourage your listeners too. I mean, there's so many different tools out there now. I mean, if you Google Automation, right? There's tons of different. Some of them open source, some not open source, but tons of tools out there to help you automate things you're doing. You know, whether it's you work for a. You work for a nonprofit and you're using Zoom and you're using Eventbrite, Right. There's things that help you automate the communication between those two applications. And, you know, so like I said, we're doing a lot with Python. Python's really a great coding tool for automation. But I know there's other. We have. We actually have an RPA group within the firm, Robotic Process Automation Group, whose sole focus is just that let's develop bots, let's develop these automated processes to, you know, automate as much as possible within the firm?

Yeah, no, for sure. Now, do you guys get into any experience like, like integrating different pieces of software together as part of the automation or. You know what I mean? Or is it basically just kind of writing scripts for certain tasks?

No, I Believe. I mean, again, I'm probably not the. I don't want to speak too much to this because it's out of my purview a little bit, but I know from talking to my colleagues, I know, like Danny Bradford, who I believe was on the podcast with you.

Yeah.

He's in charge of our professional.

Yeah, now I remember. It was. I remember. I couldn't remember if it was with your company. I've talked to so many people. But no, I do remember that now. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And he's in charge of our APIs.

That's right, that's right, that's right, that's right.

So that plays a big part in a lot of our efforts as well. Yeah.

Good stuff. So maybe share, just as we kind of approach the end here, maybe share some more examples of how your team is operating with Lean. Maybe some case studies or some success stories or even some, you know, some. Some things that didn't work out and what you learned from that.

Sure. Within our team, aside from the automation piece, we also are very big on SOPs, standard operating procedures. We're always looking at our processes and when we develop an sop, we take the time to sit the team down and say, okay, how are you doing this? How are you doing this? Let's decide, let's ensure that we're all doing it the same way. Let's ensure that we're doing it the best way possible, and let's ensure that moving forward, you're all doing it this way. So we're churning out SOPs at least once a month, and we store them in a shared drive where they can't get, put them in PDFs. Nobody can mess with them unless we decide to. We're doing that just to reduce errors, reduce rework, make sure they're following the best practices. Sometimes we will find that using SQL, you may find that there's two or three different ways to get the data you want. There's one way that's much more efficient and we want to make sure everybody's using that type of way of doing it. SOPS is one. We also have internal SLAs within our team to manage our inventory, and we make it a point to really communicate those on a regular basis and have pretty strict adherence to them. So we're measuring that. Are we getting our. So basically, what happens if somebody wants a report or an analysis or whatever it might be for my team? They have to send an email to. We have like a bal. We have like a hashtag system like, you Email hashtag reporting. And what it does is it automatically creates a ticket in our, in our ticketing system and automatically then gets emailed to my team manager and then we can assign the things out. But you know, we have a very strict turnaround time on the tickets to come into us that we, these are all, you know, our own internal SLAs we've set up. And so we monitor those quite closely and when they're missed, we want to know why. And so that's something that we do to manage our inventory because our inventory can get quite large sometimes. And then like I said, we've also developed a culture of learning so that we don't underutilize our employees. I would say right now, in any given quarter, I have at least two team members out of my team of 10 who are in some type of further training to grow as a professional. Whether it's advanced coding skills, whether it's training on a new type of business intelligence tool that we haven't yet introduced at bal. But we want to, and I want to make sure that I have some of those SMEs on my team and I always tell them like, hey, I budget training dollars every year, use them. Right. Yeah. We want to ensure that no matter where you go after bal, you're going to leave BAL a better person than when you came to bal. Yeah. And so that training piece is really, really, really important to me.

Got it.

One thing I can tell you in terms of another story, another anecdote is around, I'll just say tasks. Basically we do have self service reports. So in our case management, within our Cobalt, our proprietary case management tool, there are things called tasks. And this is like for the legal and the paralegals, like, hey, on this case by this date, you should send out application forms for signature, you should file the case with the government. Right. And all that's built into the system to ensure the cases are moving along as quickly as they should be. And what teams were doing in the past is they would either go into cobol, look at their cases individually, look up all their tasks, or they could use one of the task reports that my team developed, self serve, go and run it and see all their tasks. But then we sort of took that a step further recently and we've pretty much taken the human element out of all that running and reviewing. So what we do now is we actually run reports, we've written code that will say, okay, for a particular client team, manage their certain client account, look at all the tasks they have upcoming within the next, I can't remember, it's one or two weeks and the report will automatically run it just for that person. Automatically attached to an email and automatically send it to that person. So this is way of keeping. So people don't have to take time to go run a report, they don't have to take time to go and look through other cases. They open their email, they open an attachment and boom, they're all your priority tasks you need to work on. And it's, you know, it's individually sent to each person. So a team manager is taking time to cut it up in Excel and email it manually out to everybody. So that's something we've recently done too, that I think is a really good example of how we've been able to introduce more of a lean concept.

Nice. So what are your thoughts then over the next year or so? So for what would you like to see happen? Or how would you like to see your team take the next step with continuous improvement with lean?

Yeah, the one thing we're focused on right now as we go into this quarter and next year is we want to lessen the. I don't want, I hate to use the word burden because I think reporting is never a burden. It's great. But to reduce the amount of reporting that our legal teams have to do themselves. So even though we have self service reporting, through speaking with our internal customers, we found that they may run some of those self service reports, but then they're taking time to do additional things to those reports. Right. There may be adding a pivot and then they're breaking it up and sharing it with other people within their team or, you know, they're escalating certain things to their managers. And we want to get to the point where we can take even more of that off of their plate so that they can focus on doing legal work and not taking time focused on reporting. So it's sort of more of this idea of like, okay, how can we automate more reporting? How can we help to focus them on the stuff that's the most important things they need to be getting out of reporting. So whether that's creating more dashboards that bring data right up to their eyes in a very summarized fashion very quickly, or whether that's doing more automated emailing of stuff they need to work on. So that's, you know, that's one area that we really want to dive deeper into so that the firm can operate leaner. Right. They don't, you know, you don't want people working Overtime or having to hire more people just because people are taking, you know, an hour or two out of their week to run reports. So that's something that we're moving to do and are very excited about. We've already had two different focus groups and again, defining the problem. Right. So we brought together a number of our different legal team, managers, attorneys, and said, okay, what are some of the things you do on a regular basis once you get a report from us that maybe we don't know you're doing, but we should know you're doing so we can make it better and optimize it and make it leaner? And so we've had a number of those meetings already and are moving in that direction. Got it.

Got it.

Yeah.

I was just actually looking up on our podcast page. So, yeah, Danny came On in episode 334, the benefits of system integration. Yeah, that was a good one. And then, yeah, Jacqueline was episode 320. I think you're the third one, or. I hope I'm not missing someone.

I think I. I think I'm the third. I think I'm the third.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel bad for.

For.

I. I remember Danny's episode, but I couldn't remember if he honestly was with Bal or not. I didn't want to say anything. So, yeah, give Danny a shout out. So, yeah, well, good stuff. Well, hey, Andy, if folks want to connect with you, maybe to. To learn more or just disconnect with you, what's the best way?

I would say two ways. I'm on LinkedIn, obviously, under my name, Andrew Shapiro Zisk. Also, they can always feel free to drop me an email. It's ashapirozysk. That's a S H A P I R O Z Y S K at B A L global dot com. And that's. Those are the best ways to get a hold of me.

Okay. Yeah.

And we'll put it up. Dal loves the Gemba Academy. What can I say? Maybe there'll be a fourth person soon. There you go.

There you go. Well, no, it was funny, actually. I think. I don't know if it's asked for Jacqueline or somebody. Somebody put on LinkedIn. Hey, is anybody, like, doing anything with Lean in the legal industry? And I'm like, why, yes. I sent him a link to Jacqueline's podcast. So, yeah, it's fantastic. Well, keep up the great work and thanks for coming. Coming on.

We'll.

We'll put everything. The links to your. Your social medias and all that kind of stuff in your email and our in the show notes. So this will be episode 342. So that's GembaPodcast.com look for episode 342 and we'll link to everything that Andy and I talked about. So again, thanks again, Andy for, for coming on. Keep up the great work and, and keep on, keep on automating.

Thank you so much, Ron. Will do.

All right, take care. Bye bye.

Take care. Bye bye.

Thanks for listening. Whether you've been on the continuous improvement journey for many years or perhaps you're just getting started, Gemba Academy is here to support you. And while we're best known for our more than 1500 Lean and Six Sigma teaching and virtual tour videos, we also have a team of experienced Lean and Six Sigma practitioners available for one on one coaching as well as a variety of Lean and Six Sigma certification options. To learn more and to schedule a demo, head on over to gembaacademy.com.