Leadership In Law Podcast

S02E90 Building a Lean, Agile Law Firm with Christopher Anderson

• Marilyn Jenkins • Season 2 • Episode 90

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Christopher Anderson believes great leadership starts with communication. It's this core principle that guides his revolutionary approach to law firm management through Lean Agile methodology - a system that transforms traditional hierarchical legal practices into nimble, self-organizing teams.

Drawing from his fascinating journey from astrophysics student to legal tech innovator, Christopher shares how his experience working with companies like LexisNexis and running his own law firm led him to integrate business principles from outside the legal industry. His approach is refreshingly practical: he tests every strategy in his own firm before sharing it with clients, ensuring he's "eating his own dog food" rather than offering untested theories.

The heart of Christopher's methodology is the daily scrum - a focused 15-minute meeting where team members report their progress, plans, and obstacles. Unlike traditional management where issues cascade slowly through hierarchical channels, scrums bring immediate solutions by connecting the right people at the right time. These small, self-organizing "pods" (limited to the size that could be fed with two pizzas) create both intimacy and efficiency.

What truly sets this approach apart is its focus on delivering value incrementally throughout a case rather than just at completion. By "shipping the smallest things" continuously, clients see progress earlier, misalignments are identified when pivots are less expensive, and satisfaction improves dramatically. As Christopher explains, "These are not just project management tools - they're communication tools," designed to ensure everyone stays informed without excessive documentation.

For law firm owners struggling with workflow inefficiencies, team communication gaps, or client satisfaction challenges, Christopher's insights offer a compelling alternative to traditional management approaches. His integration of concepts from Traction, The E-Myth Revisited, and Patrick Lencioni's work creates a comprehensive framework that's tailored specifically for legal practices.

Reach Christopher here: 

https://sunnysidelaw.com
https://www.newleaf.family
https://www.facebook.com/NewLeafFamily?mibextid=LQQJ4d&rdid=GLp69uaEoeBnFYW4
https://www.instagram.com/newleaf.family/?igsh=MW0yemdrbG13OWQ3aw%3D%3D
https://www.tiktok.com/@newleaffamilylaw?_t=8lTGrCtk0ct&_r=1
https://www.youtube.com/@newleaffamily9298
https://www.linkedin.com/company/new-leaf-family/posts/?feedView=all

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Leadership in Law podcast with host Marilyn Jenkins. Cut through the noise, get actionable insights and inspiring stories delivered straight to your ears your ultimate podcast for navigating the ever-changing world of law firm ownership. In each episode, we dive deep into the critical topics that matter most to you, from unlocking explosive growth to building a thriving team. We connect you with successful firm leaders and industry experts who share their proven strategies and hard-won wisdom. So, whether you're a seasoned leader or just starting your journey as a law firm owner, the Leadership in Law podcast is here to equip you with the knowledge and tools you need to build a successful and fulfilling legal practice.

Speaker 2:

Welcome to another episode of the Leadership in Law podcast. I'm your host, marilyn Jenkins. Please join me in welcoming my guest, christopher Anderson, to the show today. Christopher is an attorney writer, thought leader and relentless advocate, obsessed with helping lawyers to have more successful law firms so they can lead the lives they imagine when they're dedicated to pursue this honorable calling. Christopher is a law firm business guru who works with lawyers owning law firms from startups to eight-figure powerhouses in the United States and internationally to transform their legal practices into businesses that serve them and their clients. Christopher has worked with companies from startups to the likes of LexisNexis, reallegal and Lawcom. He is the host of the long-running and highly respected podcast, the Unbillable Hour. Christopher teaches lawyers to succeed in their own terms. I'm excited to have you here, christopher, welcome.

Speaker 3:

Thank you, thanks so much. I picked up the word relentless in there because I love that, because in a sense it's true, but I really appreciate being on the podcast and looking forward to our conversation.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely. I'm excited. I love hearing all the things you're doing. You're running a firm and you're coaching and doing all of this and it's just exciting to hear that.

Speaker 3:

Tell us a bit about your leadership journey. Yeah, I mean, it's funny because most journeys have a beginning. I don't think there, at least, was an intentional one. As far as a leadership journey is concerned, I thought I'd go and practice law and just be as good a lawyer as I could be, but the fact of the matter is that from the beginning it took a somewhat unusual path.

Speaker 3:

I was an astrophysics major going into college. I'm very science adjacent now, but I came to education with a science perspective and so when I made this shift, I always remember I talked to a professor at my university his name is TJ Lowy and I was getting frustrated with third year differential calculus and some of the other things in that I was studying string theory and things like that and he started talking to me about like, because I took one of his classes and he's like you know, maybe you should rethink where your focus is and so we ended up in political science, ended up in law school, but you know, the science part of it always stuck with me and I was always a big fan of technology. I think that's where the journey begins, because out of law school I got recruited by a group that was building software to help mass tort lawyers manage the massive amounts of data that they had to deal with. And so we're talking, you know, mid to late nineties, and so I helped this team do that. And then I helped bring that software to these law firms to some adjusting firms and to others, and got involved with the law from the very, very beginning, from a business perspective, right.

Speaker 3:

So this is very much analytical, very much managing data and helping clients using that data, so that when that was done, I was starting to get a little frustrated because I went to law school. Right, I was like in law school I did moot court, I did mock trial. I like my father's an actor, I like being on stage, and I was like, you know, this is all well and good, but I'm behind the scenes, you know, dealing with large data sets and implementations, and so I wanted to go out there and practice. So I did. I'll tell you a funny story about that. I mean, you went to the DA's office in New York City and they didn't have computers.

Speaker 2:

I mean, we're talking, this is 1995.

Speaker 3:

They didn't have computers, wow, okay. And in 96, to write a motion, it had a big binder and you'd take out a piece of paper and in the binder you'd find the piece of the clauses you wanted for your motion and you'd write down a piece of paper A1, b7, d8, c5, and then you'd hand it to the typing pool and then they'd come back and give you a thing and then you'd edit it with your hands. So there'd be three or four iterations back and forth and I was like this can't be. So finally I just bought a computer and I don't know if you know, but DAs in New York City in the mid nineties wasn't a big salary, right. So it was actually a big and computers weren't cheap. It was a big, hairy deal. I bought a computer and one day the DA so there's 435 assistant DAs in this office but the elected official, the DA, walks by my office. I see him walk by, I'm like oh, rob. And then he like takes three steps back, he pokes his head and he's like what's that on your desk? And I'm like it's a computer, sir. He's like where did you get that? Like I bought it. He's like no, and I thought I was in trouble. He's like, can you get your money back? And I was like I think I can. It's only had it for a month or two. And he's like, cause we're buying you one? And like, and so he bought me a computer and I got a leadership role in the office of trying to bring technology to help the ADAs be more efficient. And that really was the start of it, and then it's sort of been that way the whole time.

Speaker 3:

So I've practiced law, brought technology and business ideas into the practice of law all the time, and then I've gone back to industry, like you mentioned in your intro.

Speaker 3:

You know I went to LexisNexis to build software with their business of law software division and then went back to practice and then went, ran a business that helped other lawyers grow their firms, as I, you know, incorporated more business ideas and then went back to practice because I I constantly have the need to eat my own dog food, and so I feel like, in order to be truly credible because, let's face it, there's a lot of so-called law firm gurus out there who run big businesses and help lawyers, I think, be successful, but a lot of them haven't actually built their own law firm ever. Some of them have, a lot of them haven't, and for me I just I get imposter syndrome too easily and so I've got to go out and do it, and then I can talk to people and say well, and also like having my own firm is very helpful because I can take my ideas. Not all of them are successful, right, but so I fail them on mine, on my business, and then when I bring things to my clients they're tried and true.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, you can say it does. I mean there's so many coaches out there that you can tell have never done what they're coaching and it's just ridiculous. I do appreciate that you are eating your own dog food. You're testing your theories out before you take them to your clients, and I just find it exciting to know that you learned business, were in a different direction and still worked with the law before you opened your own firm. And then just the way that you're growing and when we're talking about the way you also work with your people and test out theories, is it leaning on that, the lean agile methodology? Is that what you're working out for your clients?

Speaker 3:

A lot of the time. Yes, I try to mix like I'm a reader, I love reading and I love bringing different business ideas to law that weren't created for law. So you know, I read Geno Wick and I bring ideas from Traction. I read Michael Gerber and bring ideas from the E-Myth Revisited, by the way, like not E-Myth Attorney, just E-Myth Revisited. I read Patrick Lencioni and bring ideas from his five dysfunctions of a team and the six working geniuses, et cetera, et cetera, like I'm reading all the time, constantly trying to incorporate these new ideas, new business ideas or at least new to me business ideas, and integrate them into the stuff that I've learned.

Speaker 3:

Lean and Agile or Lean Agile are things I've actually. Lean and agile or lean agile are things that actually started to learn. Those at LexisNexis, you know, I mentioned I was at the business of software division and I actually, when I got hired there, I knew nothing about product management, which is what the role I was brought into is to manage a product. But what was cool was they had also a new guy brought in on the development side and also a product X person, a woman, who was also brought in the development side, and all these people were brought at the same time and they were very focused on lean. And so I like ate that up and and because the rest of the company was the opposite of lean in the software development is waterfall, which is, you know, the traditional way people think about things.

Speaker 3:

You make a plan and the plan has 155 steps and you work the plan right. The whole team is organized as top down. The management tells the middle management what to do, middle management tells the individual contributors what to do. That's how the business was run, and lean is not that way at all. And so I read and read and read about that and also about lean startup methodology, which I combined those two concepts into what I thought could really be helpful for law firms, and so it's become a big part of what I do. Lean is a huge part of how I run my businesses and it's also how I encourage, a lot of the time, if it works for them, other firms. People are very resistant sometimes to it, so sometimes I've kind of eased them in to lean concepts.

Speaker 2:

Can you give us an example of a lean concept in a law firm?

Speaker 3:

Yeah. So law firms tend to run very waterfall, and so a lawyer gets an engagement. The engagement has a beginning, middle and end, and they form a strategy for the whole thing, and then they might have some associates that they give discrete tasks to. In Lean, the goal is established first when do we want to end? What's the end idea today? Now that end can change and then what are the steps necessary to get there? And those steps are kind of like writing them all down into a set of cards and then throwing those cards up against a wall.

Speaker 3:

Okay, in their own way, they can pick up the things they're going to be good at or that they're interested in, and move the project along without a top-down management of who's going to do what. There's a methodology with that called Kanban, which actually, so you move the tasks along the path from beginning to stuck to finished and the whole project starts to take shape, and that's only possible if the team self-organizes constantly. So, rather than in waterfall, there's usually a lot of documentation. Here's what we're going to do and all these things, and here's all the steps and the detailed instructions of how to do it.

Speaker 2:

As processes.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, project management's very hands-on With lean. There's very little of that and the team basically self-organizes and you get together every day and for 15 minutes these are called by some people stand-ups, some people call them scrum, which is part of Lean Agile and you come together and report what did I do since the last scrum, what am I planning to do, what am I actually planning to accomplish by the next one and what are my stocks?

Speaker 2:

Now would we have these conversations per like, say, case or project.

Speaker 3:

So, for instance, in the law firm context, the scrums are focused on individuals. So, like paralegal would come to scrum and say, okay, since last Scrum on the Jones case, I completed motion X. On the Smith case, I conducted this research and I sent out these subpoenas. On the Adams case, I did this and on the Ziegler case I did that. Today I'm planning on the Adams case to do this and I'm stuck because I can't finish this motion until I get back the research from Jim. As to this thing that I'm more worried about, great, that's your stuck, jim. Oh, I gave that to Alice yesterday. I'm done, alice, I don't see it. So then we'll take that one to the side. We'll say, okay, we're going to talk about that in just a second, we can solve that in 30 seconds. And then boom, and we'll take that one to the side. We'll say, okay, we're going to talk about that in just a second, we can solve that in 30 seconds. And then boom, and we'll go through. Everybody else makes their reports and then we solve the stucks all in 15 minutes. The maximum scrum team is usually about eight people. So in my business, for instance, we've got simultaneously, I think, seven scrums going on at one time. And then, if there are stucks as there occasionally are, that involve other scrum teams, we ask them to come to the after scrum, which we actually call the scrum of scrums, so that we can get them unstuck. But scrum is all about unstucking the team, and so compare that to a traditionally managed firm.

Speaker 3:

Alice, how's that motion coming? Oh, I'm waiting on Jim. He owes me some stuff. All right, thanks, alice. Jim Alice says she's waiting on Jim. He owes me some stuff. All right, thanks, alice. Jim Alice says she's waiting on you. Oh, no, no, no, I gave that to her yesterday. Oh, can you tell me where she can find it? Okay, great, alice, jim says he got that to you yesterday and you can find it here. Oh, let me look. Okay, so I've now wasted. I've had three conversations and maybe I've fixed it, maybe I haven't, but in a scrum environment, everybody's there, there's no hiding and it's not top down, and in fact, the role of scrum master, the person who is asking the questions, is saying okay, alice, what did you do Then, jim?

Speaker 3:

That's not a leader in the business. Well, it is a leader, but it's not a top-down type of leader. So, for instance, in my law firm. Scrums are typically run by paralegals, and they could be run by anybody. Legal assistants can run scrums, lawyers can run scrums it doesn't actually matter. The role of scrum master is not a role of power, it's just a role of questioning, and so everybody's trained. So when a scrum begins, some people like doing it, and so they'll traditionally run it. But if that person's not in or whatever, somebody else can pick it up and the scrum just moves.

Speaker 2:

Okay, but the point is to make sure that people are processing through what they need to do and the stocks get handled very quickly, so you are more efficient than the waterfall.

Speaker 3:

Exactly and things are moving forward. And then leadership management, the lawyers, the partners if they have concerns like that a case isn't moving, or whatever like they'll, they can raise them in Scrum, or you know, they'll just see it happening, right, because they'll or they'll say, hey, how come nobody's picking up this, this task, those, those questions can be asked in Scrum, but typically the team what my experience is? The team moves things along on their own and they use they use project management tools that are amenable to Scrum. So, like my teams, we've chosen Asana as our tool. Asana has a great Kanban board feature and gives great visibility to everybody. There are others, like Trello, basecamp, monday Motion.

Speaker 2:

We use ClickUp. There's so many of them.

Speaker 3:

Great one, yeah, but you know I'm very tool agnostic, because the tool is just a place to communicate, and to me that's if I had to sum everything that we've been talking about up so far is that all of this is about communication. It's about the entire team knowing what's going on without there having to be formal communication channels, and so it's just, you know, communicating in real time using tools that offer the team maximum visibility, so everybody knows what's happening at all times.

Speaker 2:

And to kind of step back to traction. It sounds like right butts in the right seats, You've got A players all around.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it's very much right butts in the right seats, but again in a much less top-down way. People self-organize, self-choose their seats. So you know, somebody who really enjoys doing financial disclosures will pick up the financial disclosures. And I don't have to as a manager, I don't have to think well who would be good for this task. The people just organize and then you notice some things don't get picked up or you see oh, I've got a hole in the team. Nobody really seems to like doing a proofreading and so maybe I'll look for hiring someone who likes proofreading a little bit better.

Speaker 2:

So you said that your team has you have like seven scrums running at the same time. So do you work in like a pod fashion when it comes to working your cases?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so the notion of scrum when I learned it was that Scrum teams should be no larger than you could feed with two pizzas, so a two-pizza team.

Speaker 2:

I like that.

Speaker 3:

And other management, even waterfall-type management. You'll see throughout the literature that having more than eight direct reports is counterproductive, so that's sort of a maximum, and so the Scrum size tends to be that size as well. So that lends itself. If that's what you're doing, then those people are working in a pod or a development team or whatever you want to call it. Those pods are not just legal teams. There are legal pods, administrative pods. Scrum happens across the organization. What's cool about it is that these pods which is actually what we call them and we call them by colors. So we have red pod, blue pod, yellow pod they get to know each other really well because they're working together tightly. But because of Scrum, of Scrums and other methodologies that surround this that are part of the cadence that we do, there's a lot of cross-pollination also. It's just a very flat management organization where you get that intimacy with your smaller team but also with the larger team, because everybody's working in very much the same way.

Speaker 2:

Oh, very cool. So when it comes to looking at working with your clients so you've got your law firm and then you've got your coaching clients that you're helping build their business, do you? Is? It a process and you obviously can't work with that many clients at a time, so you're very selective.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, for me, I am very selective and I built a small organization with other people to help me do some of this and help with administrative tasks, or where we actually take one of the seats on their bus out of a law firm and sit in it for three, six months, even a year, and before we pass it off to someone inside the organization because we find sometimes it's hard to train and let go. So we do that as well. But yeah, I am selective because I do this from a John Maxwell perspective. I'm trying to get these ideas out there for other firms to pick up and run with and to really make a change in the way that law firms operate and law firms run. But that's not my main business, it's just part of what I'm doing as a leader in this field.

Speaker 3:

In this industry, I want to affect change, not just in my organization but in other organizations as well, and then you know, hopefully it catches fire. And the cool thing for me about that is, like I love coming on shows like yours and podcasts and spreading the word. I'm not trying to hold it close and go like, hey, anderson's got the magic. All you have to do is pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars and I'll bring my secret magic to you. I'll talk to anybody about it because there's plenty of other people who can pick this up and run with it.

Speaker 2:

I love that Having one of your teams sitting in for a period of time, because it seems like if you're changing your organization, you want someone that's there all the time as you get it going so you don't skip a part. I love the idea of the Lean Agile being able as long as you get the end result is client satisfaction and you're making sales, getting cases.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and I think I skipped over something.

Speaker 3:

But one of the cool things about Lean is, in traditional software like the, the end goal is to build the software, the entire package, shrink, wrapped and delivered.

Speaker 3:

With lean agile, we look for opportunities to ship the smallest things, so you don't have to finish the whole project to deliver it. And this is why it's to me really amenable to law, right, because when you take on a case, if it's a litigation case or a transactional case, it doesn't matter. You don't wait till the end to deliver it, usually to your client. If it's a litigation case, there's motions, there's depositions, there's discovery, there's all sorts of little deliverable things, and even in transactional cases there are little deliverable things, and so Scrum is always about what can we ship in the shortest amount of time, and so we're always moving to what you know. What discrete things can we ship and bring value to the client all the way through the process, not just at the end, and that's part of it. I'm ashamed that I skipped that, because that's a huge part of it is that we're constantly delivering value by doing it this way.

Speaker 2:

Right, and I could see that your clients would be much happier getting those deliverables More often. You build value in their eyes. Better customer service, better customer expectations.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and when things go sideways, they learn about it a lot faster. Yeah, rather than this. You know the waterfall method where you're like, hey, here's the widget you ordered from us. And they're like that's not a widget, I wanted, yeah, the blue one. And you're like, oh my gosh, we had no idea. You have to go back and tear it apart, right, as opposed to oh, you know what, you're starting to ship some things that don't really match and, like in our litigation cases that can sometimes happen, like we seem to be headed in a direction that's not what we wanted. Or in a transactional case, like you know, the documents you're putting together here don't really seem to be accomplishing or moving us towards our goal, and so those conversations happen earlier, and so the pivots are much less expensive. Right, you can just shift, alter Time hours dollars.

Speaker 3:

Exactly, it makes everybody happier, because nobody really likes failure, right? They don't like to ship something that nobody wanted. You don't like to deliver a product that the client's not happy with. So, but in a real sense, this involves the client earlier and faster too, which leads to greater satisfaction.

Speaker 2:

Exactly, and better reviews and better everything else.

Speaker 3:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

I love that. Well, this has been quite interesting. I'm familiar with EOS. I'm not using EOS at this time, but I'm familiar with it. But the Lean Agile sounds very interesting as well. So what's the one big takeaway you'd like our listeners to get from this?

Speaker 3:

I think if I had any takeaway like, one of my really big themes when I talk to people is communication is that every tool in our portfolio of tools in our quiver are all really communications tools. And if we think about them that way because otherwise, when you don't think about them that way, you'll have limited adoption among your team. I see firms have Teams or Slack, which we use, and they'll have Asana and they'll have Outlook. Different team members will adopt different parts of it, but not the whole thing, because they see all these tools as things that help them do their work Okay, and so they'll adopt the parts that are helpful to them as opposed to tools that help to communicate and keep the entire team informed. And so when we make that mindset shift to these are our means of communication, then, a you get wider adoption and B you get to eliminate some where you see that they're not helping us towards that goal.

Speaker 3:

And so you know I think you know when we think about that, how do we best communicate? Does my entire team know what's going on? If not, how can we improve that communication? That's the takeaway for everything. I mean, that's the solution to me for everything, and that's why I love Lean Agile because it's a highly communicative methodology with low artifacts, so, in other words, you're not creating a whole lot of SOPs and materials for people to follow like robots. You're creating a highly interactive and communicative team that solves problems, and I love that.

Speaker 2:

I love that You're creating a highly interactive and communicative team that solves problems, and I love that. I love that, yeah. Especially when you think about it you deliver faster, you can make pivots faster, and it all comes down to communication and not having to wait for something to break. Exactly Well, fantastic, I know my listeners are probably going to want to reach out and connect with you.

Speaker 3:

Where would be the best place to do that? Yeah, how do we communicate? The best way, probably, is you can always drop me an email, christopher, at SunnysideLawcom, and you can check out our website SunnysideLawcom as well. And, you know, check out our podcast. We've got the Unbillable Hour. Every month we have a guest that brings stuff I didn't know about and we share it with everybody else.

Speaker 2:

Awesome. Well, that's fantastic. I I'll make sure that your links are in the show notes and people can reach out to you. This has been a great conversation. I've learned a lot. Thank you so much for your time.

Speaker 3:

Thanks for having me. I really appreciate the invite.

Speaker 2:

Thanks for joining me today for this episode. As we wrap up, I'd love for you to do two things. First, subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss an episode, and if you find value here, I'd love it if you would rate it and review it. That really does make a difference in helping other people to discover this podcast. Second, you can connect with me on LinkedIn to keep up with what I'm currently learning and thinking about. And if you're ready to take the next step with a digital strategist to help you grow your law firm, I'd be honored to help you. Just go to lawmarketingzonecom to book a call with me. Stay tuned for our next episode next week. Until then, as always, thanks for listening to Leadership in Law podcast and be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts so you don't miss the next episode.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for joining us on another episode of the Leadership in Law podcast. Remember you're not alone on this journey. There's a whole community of law firm owners out there facing similar challenges and striving for the same success. Head over to our website at lawmarketingzonecom. From there, connect with other listeners, access valuable resources and stay up to date on the latest episodes. Don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. Until next time, keep leading with vision and keep growing your firm.

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