One of Europe's biggest law groups, employing 4700 lawyers in 37 countries - CMS Legal - uses Consideration.

They use it to identify opportunities to improve. Ideas and solutions proposed by staff are shared and evaluated. Time is saved, processes improved, costs reduced. Client satisfaction and loyalty is maximised.

The size of your firm is not important to Consideration. What is important is that you provide a channel, a way for people with new ideas and process improvement thoughts to be heard and analysed.

Consideration enables you to focus on key business or costs areas. It's where minds meet to share ideas about services offered,

the market for them and how things might need to change. It is intuitive, elegant and needs minimal management.

Lean and the Law

Lean is a comprehensive strategy for innovative law firms to eliminate waste and improve the flow of work through a Practice or within administrative tasks. Lean separates “value adding” from “non-value adding” work, using well-known business and process management tools. The Lean law firm address improvement opportunities; it thinks always about customer service; it cuts costs and becomes thereby more competitive. Lean can be the foundation for legal project management and enabling a clearer view on what a given task or process actually costs in time and resources.

The biggest advantage to this structured approach to process improvement is simple. By following DMAIC, you can overcome the urge to jump right to a solution without understanding the root cause or even having a plan.

Every time you set out to improve a process in your practice, use DMAIC and approach it like this:

Define: what does the client want or need

Measure: how do we work now to get that result

Analyze: why do we do it that way?

Improve: how can we do it better?

Control: is our new process delivering what the client wants and are we following it?