The Sterling Family Law Show
The Sterling Family Law Show is where successful family law attorneys share the exact systems they used to build million-dollar practices.
Host Jeff Hughes scaled Sterling Lawyers from zero to $20M with 30 attorneys.
Co-host Tyler Dolph runs Rocket Clicks, the agency in charge of supercharging Sterling and other family law practices to success using revenue-first marketing strategies.
Together, they share the playbook for building the law firm of your dreams.
If you're looking to grow exponentially, generate revenue, and get good at business, this podcast is for you.
The Sterling Family Law Show
The 1-Bottleneck Rule Behind Every Law Firm's Slowdown - #256
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
John Grant, founder of Agile Attorney Consulting, joins the show to break down how the Agile and Kanban methods built for software actually apply to running a law firm.
For almost 13 years he's coached law firms through Agile transformations using a two-day, in-person workshop that puts everyone in the practice — intake staff, paralegals, and senior attorneys alike — through the same diagnostic process.
This episode covers how to find the one true bottleneck slowing down your firm, why fixing anything else in your practice won't actually speed things up, what "failure demand" looks like when clients keep calling for status updates, and how Kanban's "stop starting, start finishing" principle keeps concurrent work from colliding.
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📄 CHAPTERS
00:00 - Introducing John Grant, Agile Attorney Consulting
00:23 - From a Family of Lawyers to Getty Images
01:54 - Leaving Getty and Landing in Law School
02:52 - Starting Agile Attorney Consulting
03:22 - The Before-and-After at Getty
04:04 - The Question That Started It All
04:42 - "I Help Lawyering Suck Less"
05:47 - The Theory of Constraints
06:42 - Why Fixing the Wrong Part of Your Firm Doesn't Help
07:31 - The Bottleneck Trap Behind Chasing More Leads
09:17 - Kanban's "Stop Starting, Start Finishing"
10:09 - Designing Workflow Phases for Predictability
11:05 - What Is "Failure Demand"?
12:19 - Inside a Two-Day Agile Workshop
13:15 - Day One: Diagnostics, Training, and Safe-to-Fail Games
14:35 - Day Two: Applying the Tools to Your Firm
15:07 - What Happens After the Workshop
15:46 - Launching GreenLine, an Agile Legal Software Platform
16:49 - How to Get in Touch With John Grant
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Ready to find the accountability partner you need to build your dream family law firm the same way we grew Sterling Lawyers?
Follow these steps:
1. SUBSCRIBE TO JEFF'S NEWSLETTER: https://jsterlinghughes.com/
2. BOOK A FREE 30-MINUTE AUDIT WITH US: https://rocketclicks.com/schedule-a-family-law-quick-audit/
3. CONNECT WITH US:
LinkedIn: Jeff Hughes, Tyler Dolph, & Anthony Karls,
Facebook: Jeff Hughes, Tyler Dolph, & Anthony Karls,
Instagram: Jeff Hughes, Tyler Dolph, & Anthony Karls
4. TELL US WHAT YOU WANT:
Tell us in the comments if you liked this episode and what other kinds of episodes you would like to see.
----------------------
Ready to find the accountability partner you need to build your dream family law firm the same way we grew Sterling Lawyers?
Follow these steps:
1. SUBSCRIBE TO JEFF'S NEWSLETTER: https://jsterlinghughes.com/
2. BOOK A FREE 30-MINUTE AUDIT WITH US: https://rocketclicks.com/schedule-a-family-law-quick-audit/
3. CONNECT WITH US:
LinkedIn: Jeff Hughes, Tyler Dolph, & Anthony Karls,
Facebook: Jeff Hughes, Tyler Dolph, & Anthony Karls,
Instagram: Jeff Hughes, Tyler Dolph, & Anthony Karls
4. TELL US WHAT YOU WANT:
Tell us in the comments if you liked this episode and what other kinds of episodes you would like to see.
Bottlenecks And Weakest Links
SPEAKER_00One of them is this concept known as the theory of constraints, but it's sort of more colloquial known as bottleneck theory. And what bottleneck theory teaches us is that in any complex workflow, multi-part workflow, there is always ever just one part of the workflow that is constraining the flow of work through the entire system, right? So it's basically another way of saying every chain has a weakest link. And there may be parts of the chain that are rusty, but only one of them will break under tension.
Welcome And Guest Introduction
SPEAKER_01John, thank you so much for joining us on the Sterling Family Law Show, the podcast designed to help family attorneys build the firm of their dreams. And, you know, as they're building their firm and they're learning and building new processes and procedures, they may use uh a firm like yours to help them streamline some of that. Give us a little introduction to who you are and uh what your company does.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so um, you know, I wear a lot of different hats. Um, as we talked about before we started recording, I've been uh running my business called Agile Attorney Consulting for uh gosh, uh coming up on 13 years now, uh in some form or another. Um before that, I had my own law practice. I was mostly in the IP area. Uh and then I've got this sort of funny story where um, you know, law isn't my first career. So uh I am other things, I come from a deep family of lawyers. I've got uh great grandfathers in multiple directions who were attorneys, um, which kind of meant that I had no intention of becoming a lawyer. Uh, and and I spent the first part of my career uh in the technology industry um working for uh a startup that was known at the time as Photodisc. Uh, we eventually merged with a company that people mostly have heard of now called Getty Images. And we were one of those great uh innovation, disruptive innovation plays of the
Tech Startup Roots And Law Pivot
SPEAKER_00late 1990s, early 2000s. And that really gave me uh a good look into um basically how to do uh not just sort of project management and things like that, which were all important, but um innovative design and sort of disruption and and ways to sort of break the and challenge the status quo about how things are always done in an industry and how you can uh sort of make a better business and a better life in you know whatever industry you happen to be in. But the one I care about these days is legal.
SPEAKER_01How uh how did you get into the legal space after that kind of professional?
SPEAKER_00You know, it it was funny. I I um uh I when I left Getty, it was partly because uh that disruptive innovation phase was over. Um and that was amazing. It was fun, it was exciting. And then, you know, once we'd sort of um uh uh uh acquired all of this new turf um in the industry, they sort of buckled down and shifted to defending that turf. And while that's a natural pivot, it wasn't nearly as exciting for me. So I I left, I was um kind of bouncing around with a couple of other startup companies, but I applied to uh, well, I took the LSAT and then applied to law school as a plan B. And uh, you know, obviously that sort of got legs of its own. Um, yeah. So that's how I wound up in legal, you know, the family profession, even though that wasn't my initial inclination.
SPEAKER_01You got sucked in.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, for sure.
SPEAKER_01So tell me about how you started your business and like what the problem solution was back then and kind of how it's evolved
Why Agile Belongs In Law
SPEAKER_01today.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. You know, um, you know, it's interesting. So the the agile thing, and you know, a lot of lawyers still don't know that capital A agile is even a thing, right? They agile attorney's got a nice ring to it, regardless of whether you know what capital A agile is. But it's this whole sort of set of tools and and you know, philosophies and practices that evolved in the software industry in the early 2000s. It was actually, I got this amazing sort of before and after uh because my first job out of law school was actually back at Getty as in-house counsel. And while I was away in law school, Getty had made this agile transformation, um, this new way of working and and delivering their products and services. And, you know, I obviously still knew a lot of the people. I knew the business really well. It's partly why they hired me as in-house counsel straight out of law school is I wasn't your average new lawyer. Um, and I noticed that the business was just running better. The products were going out the door faster, the communications were easier, there was less frustration, less conflict. Um, not to say that those things didn't exist, right? It wasn't perfect, but it was way better. And I had this flash of a question where I was like, oh, this is really interesting. I wonder if it could work for lawyers. And, you know, at that time I was too busy learning how to be a lawyer to really pursue it, but obviously it never left me. And so when I did wind up pursuing it and I kind of pivoted out of my law practice into consulting, I worked with a larger consulting firm for a couple of years, and that's where I really sort of dug in and was able to learn and get training in agile and lean and some other tools of modern business practice.
SPEAKER_01Love it. And so what does the what does the consultancy do? How do you work with attorneys?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you know, um I would say there's a lot of things. I I I have sometimes joked that my elevator pitch is I help lawyers suck less. Um I I eventually pivoted that to I help lawyering suck less. Because it wasn't really that the that the lawyers suck, right? But there just are so many things about um our assumptions about the profession. I think uh sort of the culture and values of the profession and uh specifically the profession as it existed, as it has existed under the billable hour for the last probably six decades now, um, that drive to some suboptimal practices and some suboptimal, suboptimal ways of working. And, you know, when I started saying I want lawyer to suck less, I so truly believe in the importance of lawyers in the world and the value that we bring for our clients in uh, you know, navigating the complexity of the legal world and mitigating the risks that are inherent in all these legal challenges. Um, and so I kind of really see Agile as a better way of helping lawyers do that. Um a big part of it is uh there are these tenets, and and I won't go deep into the nomenclature, but give us a little overview just for those that have never heard of Agile.
Find The Bottleneck Before Scaling
SPEAKER_00So so there's there's a few, let me let me teach a couple of quick concepts because I think they're useful, right? Um, one of them is this uh concept known as the theory of constraints, but it's sort of more colloquial known as bottleneck theory. And what bottleneck theory teaches us is that in any complex workflow, multi-part workflow, there is always ever just one part of the workflow that is constraining the flow of work through the entire system, right? So it's basically another way of saying every chain has a weakest link. And there may be parts of the chain that are rusty, but only one of them will break under tension. And so in a workflow, I will often envision it as sort of a series of pipes. And as work goes through your law practice, there's always one pipe that's the narrowest, right? There's only, and that's the constraint, that's the bottleneck in your entire law practice. Once you accept that as true, and most people do, there are two corollaries that also have to be true. Uh, the first kind of easy one to accept is that if you can improve the flow of work at your bottleneck, then you are improving the flow of your entire law practice, right? You will you will deliver your work more quickly, more efficiently, more predictably. Um, and again, that's the one that's easy for folks. The one that's harder to accept, at least, is that any improvements you make to part of your practice that aren't the bottleneck won't help. And so if you think about that, right, if you make an improvement that is downstream of the bottleneck, who cares? Because the work is getting stuck at the bottleneck. So you've just invested time and energy and effort into improving part of your system that isn't actually yielding a benefit, right? There's no return on that investment. What's worse, if you improve something that is upstream of the bottleneck, you might actually make things worse because you're gonna slam more work, you're gonna put more pressure on that bottleneck stage, and that can create more friction, more chaos, more turbulence that can actually lead to some real problems. And so, you know, one of the things, and I know, you know, I say this with a little hesitation because I know you're focused on marketing and getting the work and really delivering the leads into a law practice. But one of the things that I caution the firms that I work with is you've got to be careful about trying to open up that spigot on new work if it isn't truly your bottleneck, because you might wind up just slamming more pressure into the bottleneck itself, and it can create some downstream tension in your law practice.
SPEAKER_01Uh, one thing you'll hear us say uh when you work with Rocket Clicks is that when marketing works, other shit breaks.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Well, so it's funny. I've got the inverse of that that I talk about, which is uh I want to get my uh client workflow so well dialed in that we create a marketing problem.
SPEAKER_01Yes. Like we know that as things come in, and and let's say you have one intake person and you overwhelm that person, well, that person's gonna do a worse job on every single sequential call because they're gonna be overwhelmed and busy and stress and all the things.
Kanban Rules For Work In Progress
SPEAKER_00This is it. Yeah, and you know, one one of the other things, sort of metaphors, and I'm I'm big on torturing metaphors, but um, you know, I I often think about, well, get counterintuitively, right? And I'll I'll get to another teaching moment, I guess, which is uh one of the slogans of the Kanban method, which is the branch of Agile that I use kind of most consistently with my uh clients, um, is there's two sort of ways of saying it. One of them is uh stop starting and start finishing. Um, the other is start less in order to finish more. And and what both of them are getting to is you have to pay a lot of attention to the amount of concurrent work that you have in a system because those units of work um collide with each other, right? They create tension, they create friction, they create confusion, they have switching costs. And so, you know, I I often will talk about, and and the Kanban method is really uh intentionally designed around knowing what your phases of work are, knowing what the value and the deliverables for each phase consist of, and then really trying to make sure that the work flows through those phases as smoothly and predictably as possible. Um, and notice I didn't say quickly, because I know in legal you can't always go for fast. And in fact, sometimes going for fast will create problems. Um, but I think oftentimes when people think they want speed, what they really want is predictability. And so we're we're trying to build systems that allow teams to uh predictably deliver a known quantity of work when they say they're gonna do it. And that way you don't wind up with this other problem, right? And and I think when you talk about the intake person being overwhelmed or you anywhere in your practice being overwhelmed, uh there's this kind
Failure Demand From Poor Communication
SPEAKER_00of interesting concept in the agile world uh that we refer to as failure demand. And failure demand is loosely defined as anything that is taking up your finite time and attention, right? Your finite capacity as a result of some failure in the system upstream of where this demand came in. So the classic form of failure demand is clients calling or emailing or otherwise bugging you and going, where's my stuff? What's going on with this case? Where, you know, what's the status of my matter? Um, and you know, a team that has built communication and information into their structures isn't going to get that form of demand, which means that they're not going to have to turn their finite time and attention to answering a question that isn't doing anything to actually uh solve that client's legal problem, right? Those status updates, um, especially when they come in in an unpredictable way, which which failure demand almost always does, um, right, they're literally just taking you away from doing something productive.
SPEAKER_01100%. Yeah, that's so interesting. So, how do you work with law firms? Do you come in and assess all their processes and procedures?
SPEAKER_00And
Two Day Workshop For Process Change
SPEAKER_00yeah, you know, I I've developed a very collaborative uh method. So my my favorite way, and I I start almost all of my engagements with um a workshop with that with that firm. And um I really like for it to be in person, and I really insist on it being uh unless it's a giant firm, and a giant firm to me is like more than 20 people. Um so not like you know, big law giant. But as long as it's a manageable number of people, I want everybody in the room. I don't care if they're the intake person, if they're the senior attorney, if they're a junior paralegal, whatever. You know, everybody plays an important role in the delivery of the work through a system. And I think one of the principles of the agile methods um is to encourage acts of leadership at all levels. And so I want to create an opportunity for that to happen. So that initial sort of workshop, it's um there's a few different elements of it that come into play. One of them is a diagnostic, and we spend most of the morning of the first day uh going through a very specific set of uh practices that I've developed over the years, and you'll borrowed from others. Obviously, I didn't invent them all. Um, that really gets to the heart of what needs to happen in this law practice. Um, then it kind of morphs into a little bit more of a training where I introduce a lot of the concepts and the tools from the world of project management, which you know, lawyers don't have any natural exposure to typically. Um, but that's usually interspersed. There's actually a couple of games that we play. Um one of the other things we talk about in Agile is safe to fail experiments. So we want to create opportunities to learn how to use these tools in a way that doesn't necessarily put your law practice at risk. So um games are very safe to fail. Um and uh, you know, really by the end of that first day, I think people are feeling pretty empowered around what needs to change and what are the tools that they can think about using to make that change, but they don't necessarily know quite how to do it yet. And so the second day of the workshop is really focused more on applying those tools to the specific needs of that law practice. And, you know, I really try to sort of um help people gain a lot of momentum towards the improvements that they need to make. And different practices go in different directions. I never quite know where something's gonna go when I when I start the workshop on that first day. Um, but by the end of the second day, I think people are usually feeling really empowered and really encouraged about the opportunity to make things better in their practice.
SPEAKER_01And so the end of the second day, are they left with your next steps, or how do you stay in good?
Coaching Roadmap And Green Line
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Um, you know, uh yes, we usually will have some next steps that we that we talk about in the workshop. Um, there usually are a lot more of those next steps that come up. You know, people need some time to digest and reflect on what's going on. Um, you know, oftentimes, at least historically, that has often turned into a coaching relationship where I'm working with leaders inside of the firm. And, you know, sometimes uh working specifically with teams, sometimes just working with individuals, but um kind of moving things forward. Uh increasingly I'm kind of evolving that. And, you know, as I mentioned before we started recording, I'm I'm in the process of launching a legal software company that is really trying to embody a lot of these agile practices, these different, uh, I think better ways of working and managing a law practice, um, giving us the data and the feedback and the workflow uh information that we need to make sure that, hey, we're not just trying things, we're actually running experiments and we we are validating our assumptions and our hypotheses about what works and what doesn't. Um and so, you know, again, historically this turned into a coaching relationship, but uh I think going forward, I'm trying to make that uh something that is sort of more and more embedded in using this tool. And the coaching to the extent that it's gonna happen is gonna be a little bit more uh in a group coaching uh and a support uh workflow rather than me necessarily going in and doing the work one-on-one with the team. Although there'll still be elements of that.
SPEAKER_01Love it.
Where To Learn More And Reach Out
SPEAKER_01Sean, this is awesome. Um, if someone, if if an attorney is listening to this podcast and they want to get in touch with you, what's what's the best way to kind of start the process? You know, is they're thinking about agile, and then how can they leverage you guys if they're interested?
SPEAKER_00Sure. So I mean, I would say in a lot of ways, the best place to start is to go try to find my podcast, which is the Agile Attorney Podcast. Um, the first uh sort of 10 episodes, if you go back, it's I I'm about to uh release episode 100. And then actually starting with 101, I'm about to rebuild some of these core concepts. So if you subscribe now and just wait for uh a few weeks, you'll start to get that 101 content uh showing up in your feed. But if you want to go back and sort of listen to my original articulations of it, you can find it back in, you know, sort of episodes one through ten, um, where I introduce some of the core concepts for the first time. Um from there, uh, if if it sounds interesting, you know, you can always reach out to me either through uh my agile attorney.com website or you can go to my new venture, which is called Green Line, and uh the URL for that is greenline.
SPEAKER_01I love it. John, thank you so much for spending some time with us. I am excited to uh get your message out into the world.
