A continuous improvement (CI) and operational excellence programme for in-house legal teams.
Learn from industry peers: Look at the challenges other in-house legal leaders are facing and share ideas for tackling them (Chatham House rules!).
Align to business growth: Address how the legal team can be a business driver in your organisation through targetted process improvements and focusing on what matters.
Optimise team efficiency: Discuss better and more sustainable ways of working for your team, to enhance productivity and improve engagement.
Embrace CI principles: Identify opportunities to make small changes that significantly improve efficiency and problem solving.
Improve legal supplier relationships: Look at what you should be asking of your external counsel to maximise value, and why CI can’t just be a buzzword
Manage resources: Stop wasting money on slow, expensive and inefficient processes that are creating barriers to great relationships with your prospective customers and suppliers.
Practical solutions: Take away practical ideas for embedding a continuous improvement culture in your organisation, and work with a lean expert to support your journey.
THE PROGRAMME
Session One:
Introduction to Continuous Improvement in Industry and what legal can learn and apply
Locations: Leeds (HSBC offices) or London - private meeting space.
Timing: 5pm to 9pm.
Format: Presentation on CI principles. 1.5 hours open facilitated discussion. Q&A. Drinks and dinner.
Dates: Leeds - 20th September 2023
London - 27th September 2023
Pre-session preparation materials and post-session guidance materials provided.
Sessions Two and Three:
Implementing Continuous Improvement: Discussion groups
Location: Virtual conference call
Format: Two 90-minute sessions to discuss progress, challenges and map a pathway forwards for specific challenges in your business.
Dates: November 2023 and February 2024.
Session Four:
Continuous Improvement Site Visit
Location: Manchester (other options tbc)
Timing: 11am to 3pm, followed by drinks and dinner
Format: A site visit to a world-class manufacturing organisation to see how operational excellence is embedded across teams, and discuss how the principles translate to the legal function. Review your CI journey and progress against your roadmap.
Location: Manchester (other options tbc)
Date: April 2024
Have a better understanding of the blockers in your legal workflow and contracting processes.
Understand the basic concepts of lean and continuous improvement and how they can be rolled out in your contracting process (which can then be applied more broadly in the legal team).
Have a plan for how to approach sustainable improvements, so that you can accelerate the pace of change.
Understand what improvements look like in practice and have real world examples and data to show the impact that Radiant’s continuous improvement approach can make.
To join the In-House Legal Continuous Improvement best practice group, get in touch!
Radiant always helps us to think bigger, look at future proofing, see the bigger picture, think about how to unlock potential. I’d recommend them not just for their delivery, but also the wider benefits of helping a company learn how to move the dial and make an impact, how to simplify the way you contract and provide legal advice and have a good customer experience, how to get your data in shape, how to make changes. They give companies ideas to think about, they don’t just look at the problem but the cause.”
Legal project manager
Vodafone
Chris has many years of experience operating at senior management positions in blue chip multi-national companies including Corus, JCB, ABB, and Jaguar. He was fortunate to be a member of the leadership team that established one of the first “lean” facilities in the UK in 1990. He has held senior commercial, operations and Continuous Improvement roles in a range of different sectors, and helps organisations implement Lean Thinking in less traditional areas such as Legal Teams, Education Institutes, Financial Services and Defence and not for profit.
Chris has spoken on Lean Thinking at several International Conferences and has published papers in various journals and books, as well as facilitating Lean Thinking workshops for executive management programmes. He is a co-author of three Shingo Publication award winning books - "4+1 Embedding a Culture of Continuous Improvement in Financial Services", " The Essence of Excellence" and “Why Bother?”. He is also editor of the Shingo Institute book “Enterprise Alignment and Results”.
Chris is a certified Shingo Institute master trainer, a Shingo examiner and winner of Best New Speaker of the Year Award for TEC - The Executive Connection. He continues his lean learning journey...
Serena is Radiant's Director with oversight on overall strategy, including client relationships, lawyer experience and new product development.
Prior to joining Radiant Law Serena co-founded Axiom Law’s Asian offices in 2010, starting in Hong Kong and expanding into Asia. Serena was responsible for management of the Asia offices, including client development, lawyer recruitment and marketing. Under her leadership the practice grew to 60 lawyers across the region, and a management team that included eight practice managers, analysts and hiring managers across both offices.
Serena works with the Radiant team to embed continuous improvement and practical thinking into our day to day behaviours. Add to that Serena’s background as a trained lawyer, and you have a leader with a 360 degree understanding of what’s important to our business and our clients.
Commitment to and delivery of improvements are so important to us. One thing we are bad at internally, and historically providers were bad at too, is making stuff work better. Documents, processes, standard text, all of it. We have struggled to improve so there is great value to us in support proactively bringing improvement suggestions to us and actually making it happen.
From my perspective, you have a true commitment to improve and we are constantly being challenged internally by you on can we do this better. It is a great discipline to force on us. I think it would be easy to start strong with improvements for the first few months of taking on this work and then settle and let it go, but Radiant isn’t doing that. We are still talking together about making things better, ways of doing it differently and always striving to get a good result.
Delighted Associate General Counsel
Global banking and financial services institution