How to 'delete' work in a busy legal team

Most of us spend our time on two things:

1. dealing with the ‘business-as-usual’ that comes into our inbox

2. when we have time: looking into ways to improve things, e.g. buy more tech, thinking about expanding our team (and getting budget for that!) etc.

I personally enjoy number two more than number one.

I’ve written before about how to ensure any new ideas attack the ‘bottleneck’, to make sure there’s a big impact.

However, the mistake I make is that my way of ‘improving’ things, is usually to add tasks, processes, technology etc.

But even if I aim these new ideas at the bottleneck, it’ll be hard to deliver on them if we don’t create space first.

So this post is about the step that should come before: to remove, before we add.

The Eisenhower Matrix

So how can we go about this? I like the Eisenhower Matrix.

As general and then president, Dwight D. Eisenhower used a framework to visually divide tasks into four buckets, based on their importance and urgency:

“What is important is rarely urgent, and what is urgent is rarely important.” - Eisenhower

It’s quite obvious we should first stop doing tasks that aren’t important and aren’t urgent.

However, once we’ve covered those we should look at tasks that aren’t important yet are urgent: why are we doing these, what’s the root cause? This is usually the biggest opportunity area.

How to go about it

To get started I recommend asking your team to gather data for a week. Ask them to have a notepad on their desk and simply tally every time they do anything.

Tip: standardise the buckets across your team before starting the tallying. Makes it easier to group later.

This will give you a long list of everything that your team does.

After that week, spend 1 hour with your team grouping tasks on sticky notes and sticking them on the Eisenhower Matrix. In person you can do this on a whiteboard, online I’d recommend using Miro.

You’ll usually find that there’s often not much in the important/not-urgent box (those tasks often don’t get done unfortunately!). Most legal teams are perpetually stuck on the ‘urgent’ tasks.

Then pick the highest frequency tasks in the “not-important” boxes, and think creatively how you can stop doing them. For example:

• Can we stop doing or shorten Red-Amber-Green reports for lower risk contracts (I wrote about that here)?

• Can we reduce time spent on NDAs by moving to Bonterms.com or OneNDA?

• If we are spending a lot of time in internal team meetings, can we scrap some of those and replace with 5 min written updates in Slack/Teams?

Be courageous

In a world that equates busyness with importance, choosing to subtract rather than add will feel like a bit of a radical act. There’ll always be reasons to just keep things as they are (the status quo is sticky!), so be prepared for it to require a bit of force, courage and conviction to push through.

When there’s debate, it’s better to default to saying: ‘why don’t we stop doing it for 4 weeks as an experiment, and then see if it created problems’.

In my experience you’ll rarely need to add the task back!

Thanks for being here,

Daniel

CEO at Lexoo
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