The founder, Alex Geisler, worked as a lawyer for car makers, visiting countless production lines, and coming to understand their philosophies and processes. 

It was striking how automakers involved their suppliers at the beginning of projects, collaborated with them to the end, and how they baked in quality assurance. In turn, the suppliers would focus on client goals, create effective plans and eliminate inefficiency.

This was client-centricity at a whole new level and it was the key to the relationships between automakers and their suppliers. These suppliers were all integral to the business, and the relationships were all long-term, sometimes decades. 

Could the supply of legal services be anything like that? Could an outside counsel operate like the supplier of an essential component and become vital to the client’s business? What would that take?

That question became a mission. Alex studied the ‘lean’ principles which automakers use and began adapting them for legal work. He drew on their three goals: 

1. Lowest cost;
2. Fastest delivery; &
3. Highest quality. 

What client wouldn’t want that? To meet these goals, he copied the idea of planning assignments collaboratively with clients, he built in transparency, and embraced the idea that legal service delivery could be engineered for effectiveness and efficiency.  

The idea of applying lean to law became a method and a mindset: Lean Law.

Clients saw the difference. The Legal Directors had found what they wanted, reliability. Repeat business followed and spread across the firm. Reliability created trust and over time, trust turned into loyalty.

What began as an experiment is now a proven system used by legal teams worldwide to get hired, paid and rehired.