Mapping, measuring, and redesigning legal processes before selecting technology — applying Lean, BPR, and Six Sigma methodologies to eliminate waste and build workflows that scale.
The highest-return investment in Legal Operations is getting the process right before selecting the technology. Automate a well-designed process and the gains compound: speed, consistency, and scalability all improve at once. This is why process mapping dramatically improves technology implementation success rates (industry surveys consistently cite process-fit as the leading predictor). Organisations that invest in process design first consistently outperform those that lead with technology selection.
Process mapping must precede technology selection. The discipline is straightforward: before investing a dollar in any tool, whiteboard the current process, identify where value is created and where friction occurs, redesign, and only then determine what technology (if any) is needed.
Process mapping begins with discovery — and discovery begins with humility. The Legal Ops leader who thinks they understand how work actually flows is almost certainly wrong. The documented process (if one exists) describes how work is supposed to flow. The actual process — shaped by workarounds, informal agreements, and years of accumulated exceptions — is often unrecognisable from the documented version.
Step 1: Select the process. Start with the highest-volume, highest-friction process. In most legal departments, this is the contract review and approval workflow. Other common candidates include legal intake (how the business submits requests to legal), matter opening, and regulatory approval.
Step 2: Shadow the process. Follow a real request through the actual workflow from submission to completion. Document every step, every handoff, every wait state, and every decision point. Talk to every person who touches the process — not just the lawyers, but the business requesters, paralegals, assistants, and anyone else involved.
Step 3: Map the “as-is” state. Whiteboard or digitally map the current process using a simple notation: rectangles for activities, diamonds for decisions, arrows for flow direction. Include wait states (the time between handoffs where nothing happens). In most legal processes, the total wait time exceeds the total work time by a factor of 3–5x.
Step 4: Identify the friction points. Mark every point in the process where:
With the as-is map on the wall, apply five redesign principles:
Eliminate. Remove steps that consume resources without creating value. The most common candidates: approval layers that exist for political rather than substantive reasons, duplicative data entry, and review steps where the reviewer consistently approves without changes.
Standardise. Where multiple people perform the same activity in different ways, define a single standard approach. This is especially important for contract review, where different lawyers may apply inconsistent standards to the same clause types.