1.5. How to use this workbook
Last updated
Last updated
We advise working through this workbook topic by topic in the presented order and strongly encourage you to use the templates and apply them to your own organization and projects.
While many of the steps can be implemented using digital technology, we will not discuss software or tools. In our experience, the tool should follow your specific needs, and we thus recommend to first work with a very simple setup to experiment with the application and only then introduce one of the many digital tools.
At the end of each chapter, you can see how the story of our case study progresses, and we provide you with a filled-out version of the template for our story and its example case. Using a case with a law firm, client and counterparty helps to show the different people that might be involved, though in practice the project might just involve the attorney and the client or be an internal law-firm project.
Many of the tools revolve around multiple team members, but they can also be useful for a solo attorney. They might help to clarify the processes in the law firm, get to know the client better and, in some cases, the attorney might also be on the client’s team in a project. In any case, we believe Kanban (Chapter 5) to be a great tool to organise your work, from one person to many.
When trying these things out within a larger law firm you might want to start with just one team or one practice group. In that case, try to make sure that the group of people who want to try something new have enough autonomy within the organisation to freely decide how they want to organise themselves. It is wise to have formal authority on board as well. Just be aware that establishing new ways of working in one area might be a source of friction with the rest of the organisation.
The templates build on each other following the course of the story, but you can also use them independently to gain more insight into a specific topic—for example establishing (one or more) law-firm-wide Definition(s) of Done (Chapter 4.8), to have consistent quality.
Each template can be filled out in this book directly or accessed through the respective QR code and filled out digitally or printed out. An overview of all templates, as well as FAQ and further information can be found here:
