In an AmLaw Daily interview several months ago, Seyfarth’s chairman, Steve Poor, attributed the firm’s performance to its clear-eyed recognition of fundamental flaws in the large-firm economic model and the anticipation of what might happen to that model should the rising revenue waters recede.  Poor stated, “Everyone loves rate-insensitive work,” he says. “But we realized several years ago: That model is fundamentally flawed. We realized a day like [the downturn] would come.”  Armed with that realization, the firm redoubled its efforts to provide more cost-effective services. 

At last week’s “Controlling Legal Costs” conference at Manhattan’s Harvard Club, Seyfarth stole the show with a stunning presentation by Boston-based partner Lisa Damon about the depths of its dedication to process improvement and cost-cutting through Lean Six Sigma methodologies.

Six Sigma process management, for those of you who haven’t encountered it, is a management philosophy that rigorously defines and measures and refines a business’s core processes and maps them back reiteratively to that business’s conceptualization of “success.”  As Damon put it, this type of thinking has traditionally been “anathema” to lawyers.  Lawyers have not been interested in process-based efficiencies, she noted, because we have made so much money from inefficiency.  The more inefficient a process is; the longer it takes.  The longer it takes; the more hours we bill the clients.  The more hours we bill the client; the more money we make…up to the point when the client fires us.

Probably true…but Seyfarth is through the looking glass now.  As part of their Lean Six Sigma implementation, their internal Green Belt teams precisely map out each discrete step in their standard processes (say, for example, filing a single-plaintiff employment lawsuit in New York) and then rigorously work to eliminate any unnecessary steps while smoothing the necessary ones.   Then they constantly re-examine and refine those process maps.

How is this working for the firm?  Damon reports unprecedented cost savings and sharp increases in customer satisfaction.  And the firm’s overall numbers show how economic robustness and resilence can grow from a focus on efficiency.

Now…if they added a little document automation platform into the mix, I wonder how much further they could go?

Full article here.

For example, according to the partner, German representations tend to be very terse: “the seller represents that he or she has no knowledge of any material environmental liability on the premises” rather than, “the seller, and those persons named on Schedule F attached hereto each jointly but not severally covenant, represent, and warrant that they have no knowledge of any material environmental liability on or emanating from the premises, where “knowledge” means not only the actual knowledge of the party making such covenant, representation, or warrant, but also the imputed knowledge of such facts and circumstances which would said party would have perceived if they had undertaken a reasonable investigation of those premises no less frequently than annually, and where “material” shall mean “likely to result in total costs of investigation, remediation, or adjudication in excess of fifty thousand dollars ($50,000) USD.”

All in all, an interesting way to force efficiencies into contract drafting.  Increase the pain and expense associated with long-windedness and you tend to get more conciseness.  Maybe if we installed a device here that would jolt our correspondents with 5,000 volts when they exceeded 300 words per bleaf, we could achieve the same effect.

Kurz ist nett (“concise is nice”).