1. Lean Methodologies for General Counsel - How can You Drive Efficiencies in the
Legal Department through Process Excellence?
In advance of the Corporate Counsel Exchange, IQPC Exchange caught up with Martin Clausen,
General Counsel of Maersk Line, the largest container ship operator in the world, to discuss the way
that Martin has incorporated lean methodologies, inspired by the process excellence department into
his legal department, and what impact this is having on productivity. Martin has a legal team of 12 in
Copenhagen, and there are approximately 30 lawyers located out of Denmark who use the standards
and documents created by the Copenhagen legal team.
Not many legal departments apply process improvement methodologies, why did Maersk Line
decide to apply such methodologies and theories in the legal department?
Martin explained that to some extent it was a bit of a coincidence. In 2011 there was water damage in
the Maersk Line head office so the legal team were temporarily relocated next door to the process
improvement department. Martin thought it was silly to miss the opportunity, so approached the
process improvement department to see if they could assist the legal team because they had already
helped a number of departments in Maersk Line.
What systems, tools or frameworks have the legal department put in place?
Martin’s team have implemented a number of systems and methods and are planning to expand
these in future. The key tool they are applying so far is visual management system. Many other
departments started using visual management systems so the legal team also introduced these. The
idea behind visual management is that you illustrate (on a whiteboard or similar) the processes or
projects you are working on in some form of visual manner. You indicate at what stage you are at,
what tasks you are doing, note how well the project or process is going and how happy or unhappy
people are with the project and the current direction. This tool then keeps the whole department and
yourself up to date on the project. Martin pointed out that visual management takes a lot of work as
the participants must do multiple iterations on how it should look and how to get the right data so they
continue to evolve and improve it so it becomes a better tool.
The team have also done some work observations with help from the process excellence department.
In these observations they looked at how the legal team currently do their work and offered tips on
how to improve their methods. They started by focussing on basic tasks rather than complicated
processes: looking at how much difference a clean desk and a tidy email inbox can make. As Martin
pointed out, in-house lawyers spend most of their time using these tools, yet very few are expert
users; this is not an efficient use of their time. He also explained that although improving lawyers’
skills with Microsoft Word and Outlook will not necessarily improve the quality of the documents
produced, becoming an expert user does free up a significant amount of their time which can be used
on other tasks. Martins team spends significant time analysing the requests received in their shared
inboxes. The analysis is used to guide the development of training and self-service solutions.
These work observations and findings have also led Martin and his team to search for external
training on the tools they use regularly (Word and Outlook for example) and also to question whether
these are actually the right tools for writing their legal documents.
Download the full article here: http://bit.ly/W1gvf0
Martin Clausen, General Counsel of Maersk Line was speaking on Applying Lean Methodologies
and Techniques to Drive Efficiencies in the Legal Department at the 7th Corporate Counsel
Exchange, taking place from 14th – 16th October 2012 in The Netherlands. For the new programme,
attendees and sponsorship opportunities visit www.corporatecounselexchange.co.uk