In yesterday’s Platforum9 Session, Mo Zain Ajaz, founder of Lex360 and former General Counsel at National Grid, shared valuable insights on applying lean principles to legal service delivery. Drawing from his extensive experience in both in-house and consulting roles, Ajaz offered a practical framework for creating more efficient legal operations while eliminating waste.
What is a Lean Legal Enterprise?
As the legal profession undergoes significant transformation—with AI reshaping workflows, client expectations evolving, and alternative service providers disrupting traditional models—legal teams increasingly need to rethink their service delivery frameworks.
“Legal functions face increasing demand outstripping capacity, law firms struggle to demonstrate value, and competition is intensifying,” Ajaz explained. “We all need to look at how we deliver our services and how our enterprise is being run.”
Lean Enterprise, a methodology originally developed in manufacturing at companies like Toyota and Ford, focuses on maximising value by minimising waste through process optimisation. The core principle is elegantly simple: “providing exceptional value at the lowest possible cost by eliminating waste.”
The Five Principles of Lean Legal Enterprise
Ajaz outlined five fundamental principles that underpin the lean approach:
- Define value from the customer’s perspective: Understanding what clients truly want and are willing to pay for is crucial. Ajaz used the analogy of toast preparation: “If a customer doesn’t want burnt toast and you’re giving them burnt toast, you’re spending three minutes extra burning that toast—a cost to you that the customer isn’t willing to pay for.”
- Understand the process: Map all steps in your workflows, including both value-adding and non-value-adding activities. For contracting, this means examining the entire lifecycle from request through review, delivery, execution, storage, and retrieval.
- Make the process flow: Remove unnecessary steps and bottlenecks that interrupt smooth operations. Ajaz emphasised the importance of preventing premature work: “Engineers hadn’t finished their work. Surveyors were sending instructions to lawyers. Lawyers were drafting documents in advance of the surveyors getting approval from engineers.”
- Produce at the pull of the customer: Create services and outputs based on actual demand rather than available capacity. This prevents “inventory” of unnecessary work products.
- Pursue continuous improvement: Foster an environment where team members are encouraged to identify problems and develop creative solutions. This is where design thinking principles become particularly valuable.
Identifying and Eliminating Waste
A central concept in lean thinking is the identification of waste, which Ajaz categorised using three Japanese terms:
- Muri (オーバーバーデン): Overburdening people or systems
- Mura (不均一さ): Unevenness, fluctuations, and variation in workloads
- Muda (廃棄物): General waste, including processing things twice, incorrect sequencing, or premature work
Using a vivid logistics analogy, Ajaz explained how proper distribution of work (pallets on trucks) reflects efficient process design. The goal is to avoid both overburdening individual resources and maintaining unnecessary excess capacity.
Real-World Success: The “Process House” Project
To illustrate lean principles in action, Ajaz shared a case study from his time at National Grid involving contaminated land remediation and sales:
“We as the legal team were at the end of the chain. Our job was to review all contracts and reports, ensure the sell-clean policies were adhered to, and we had a five-day SLA to turn everything around,” he explained. “When we got those documents, nine out of ten were faulty in some way—a sign-off hadn’t happened, a document was missing, or lawyers had drafted something in advance of getting full instructions.”
The solution involved bringing together all stakeholders—engineers, surveyors, lawyers, commercial teams, and finance—to map the entire process. The team created a checklist that traveled with documentation, ensuring each step was properly completed before moving to the next phase.
“By getting the people in the room and designing the outcome using principles of identifying the problem statement, looking for causes, developing options, and defining results, we created a process that was simple in its visual form but tremendously effective,” Ajaz noted.
Why Legal Teams Struggle with Process Optimisation
When asked why legal organisations often fail to invest time in upfront process design, Ajaz identified a critical issue: siloed thinking.
“People believe they own part of the work stream and not the whole work stream,” he observed. “If the sales director is only looking after their line and the finance director is looking after their line, then the legal team doesn’t have the end-to-end connected piece.”
The solution involves elevating responsibility: “If leaders looked at level-one processes—the core processes that touch every function—and mapped those out, accountability at the board level would be for the entire process, not just a single work stream.”
Technology’s Role in Lean Legal Operations
While technology can enable process efficiency, Ajaz cautioned against implementing tools without understanding the underlying workflows:
“If you put a poor process in a technology, you’ll never get what customers want,” he warned. “I’ve implemented all the big technologies for clients, and what I thought as a legal ops person the technology was doing for me isn’t what everybody wants it to do.”
This disconnect often leads to what Ajaz calls “zombie technology”—tools that fail to deliver value because they weren’t designed with a deep understanding of user needs and process realities.
Where Law Firms Waste the Most
In a particularly candid moment, Ajaz flipped the question about waste in law firms: “Law firms get paid for their waste, so where’s the motivation to eliminate it?”
However, he noted that competitive pressures and increasingly sophisticated buyers are forcing firms to reconsider this model. Common areas of waste in law firms include:
- Non-value-adding activities in onboarding and conflict checks
- Responding to RFPs they’re unlikely to win
- Unnecessary client meetings
- Conducting research without first asking clients what they want
- Write-offs that could be prevented through better process design
Creating a Culture of Continuous Improvement
Ajaz emphasised that organisational culture plays a crucial role in enabling lean transformation. He suggested that leaders incorporate improvement into performance expectations: “I always liked the idea of doing your job and improving your job. If you had an annual performance target of improving your job and demonstrated how you did it, that’s where quality improvement and process optimisation would come in.”
Conclusion: The Future of Legal Service Delivery
As client expectations evolve and technological capabilities expand, legal organisations that adopt lean principles stand to gain significant competitive advantages. By focusing on value creation, eliminating waste, understanding end-to-end processes, and fostering a culture of continuous improvement, legal teams can deliver more effective services at lower costs.
Ajaz’s prescription is clear: legal leaders must look beyond traditional apprenticeship models and siloed thinking to create truly efficient enterprises. With the additional pressures of AI and increasingly sophisticated buyers, the transformation toward lean legal operations is becoming not just advantageous but essential for sustainable success.
