4.1. Goal

The Goal defines the overall theme or purpose of the project or product—the overall outcome your client wants to reach, or you want to reach in your law firm. This could be successfully managing a trial, closing an M&A deal, getting a new contract signed, but also internal projects like implementing a Legal Tech solution in the law firm. It is the first step of the attorney and the client or the attorney and their internal team to get to the individual Items where it is finally defined what needs to be done. If the Goal isn’t clear, the project should not move on. For example, if the Goal differs in the question if the opposing party should be sued over a faulty product, or a contract shall be written for a service provider to fix this product, the stakeholders need to clarify it. That doesn’t mean a Goal or strategy can’t change over the course of a project, but it is vital to always be able to communicate the current Goal so that work can be aligned. The Goal is then broken down to smaller parts: Epics, Items and Tasks, which describe the work that needs to be done to achieve the Goal.

At this point, the detailed to dos and how the work will be done are not defined yet, e.g. if you can settle before a trial, if it has to go to court, or even further to an appeal.

Story

Do we know what we do? And why we do it?

Now comes a phase in which our little team might encounter a few surprises. The expectation certainly is that they know what they’re doing. They do, don’t they? Certainly, in many regards. Their legal and procedural expertise goes without doubt. They manage big litigation effectively. Their Agile methods will neither change nor question that, but there’s something that challenges them more than they’ve expected. And that’s not only doing their work well, but also concisely describing it in advance.

As each project works best with a shared Goal, they convene to recap it in a sentence. That is where our younger colleague Gabriel learns a valuable lesson. He would have set the Goal as: “win the case for the client”, but his more seasoned colleagues warn him that he should not commit to that, as life (and law) brings too many surprises, and they might be liable if they don’t win the case after all, and the Goal was communicated to the client. It is good to strive for that, but the actual committed Goal will account for uncertainties.

Example

After some discussion, our team defines their Goal as follows:

Goal: Achieving a commercially sound and legal outcome based on the circumstances and client’s choices.

Template

The Goal is: ...