Law is still a service business but we are at the beginning to experience much more productization in law, including the legal tech startups and ongoing innovation efforts within the traditional provider ecosystem. Thus, particularly as applied to the productization in law, implementing lessons from the discipline of user centered design will prove to be particularly useful. One of the complexity mitigation strategies on the point would be Lean / Six Sigma For (Legal) Process which says that law is in real need of a rigorous focus upon implementation / service delivery. There is a need to have legal experts who are able to deliver a higher quality, lower cost, and more consistent service offering to clients across the economic spectrum, from the Fortune 500 General Counsel all the way down to the low income individual seeking access to justice. Particularly for the most complex of problems, this requires some level of professional skill in system redesign / reengineering. Applying to process improvement methods such as, lean and/or six sigma have brought significant increases in both efficiency and quality in a wide variety of fields. Here in law-law-land, however, there has been very little in the way of serious work in this direction (aside from a few notable exceptions). As we discussed in our lessons by having taken many examples into consideration, such as the report from Clifford Change that is about ‘’almost any task that has a beginning, a middle and an end can be construed as a process, including the practice of law.” Legal processes can be recursively decomposed into a series of sub-processes down to some base layer / primitives. After such processes are mapped, they can be streamlined by some combination of reengineering and waste removal (muda). While law is not automobile manufacturing, the applications of these ideas has reached far beyond manufacturing to medicine, accounting, financial services.
