This article first appeared in the November 2026 issue of PLC Magazine
https://uk.practicallaw.thomsonreuters.com/Browse/Home/Resources/PLCMagazine
Lucy Nixon of NuCAS Managed Legal Services, and Andrew White of LearningE7, look at capturing legal workflows.
In order to try to establish what the key steps are in conducting successful transactions and cases, the authors attempted to get successful lawyers to explain their matters and how their standard transactions worked, by setting out the steps and breaking down the thought processes involved. Some of the responses received were startling: one highly regarded outsourcing lawyer replied, “If you paid me a million pounds, and you left me in a room all day, I wouldn’t be able to do that… It’s not how I think, it’s not how I operate. I just do really good deals”.
This anecdote might be a bit extreme, but it reveals something fundamental. Not all lawyers find it natural or easy to dissect into logical steps how they think, or how they approach their work. This is not a matter of being evasive; it is just not a skill at which they are adept. However, this makes their success difficult to replicate without their direct involvement. In view of that reality, legal organisations need to work out how to capture the ways of working and methodologies that reside in their lawyers’ heads, and those of their teams, which drive the firm’s core activities.
A human challenge
The legal industry’s jargon term for this process, “capturing workflows”, is over 20 years old. “Legal engineering” is the current, highly prominent label, which is also largely about capturing workflows and logically dissecting them. But the heart of the challenge remains human: how can a firm extract the wisdom of its lawyers in a way that is authentic, scalable, dependable and can serve as an engine for business success and differentiation?
These questions are not new for either law firms or in-house legal teams. What is new is the urgency of the mission. The breathless adoption of AI has made this into a strategic priority across the legal sector. The workflow challenge has now been recognised as a vital stepping stone towards success in the AI adoption challenge. In the words of The Economist columnist, Bartleby: “no information is harder to pass on than tacit knowledge, the know how born of experience and intuition… How can AI learn about work when even humans cannot articulate why they do things a certain way?” (27 June 2026, www.economist.com/business/2026/06/25/teaching-ai-how-people-work-is-fraught-with-problemsOpens in a new window).
Wider benefits
While the AI benefits of capturing workflows are steadily becoming better recognised, it is important not to lose sight of other benefits. These include:
Enabling efficient delegation and reducing dependence on a few key individuals.
Driving efficiency and consistency in service delivery.
Accelerating integration across offices delivering similar types of work.
Enhancing risk management.
Streamlining the training of staff and new joiners.
Enabling law firms to innovate in their operating models and pricing strategies.
Enabling in-house legal teams to further increase the value that they provide to the businesses they serve.
These reasons predate the widespread adoption of AI, can help to drive smart working and are powerful commercial reasons in their own right for addressing the challenge.
An organisational framework
Many in the legal industry have been thinking about these challenges on a strategic level for many years. The authors have worked, in different capacities, to devise effective solutions, both for law firms and in-house legal teams. In their experience, there is too little grounded discussion on how to capture workflows. Success is critically dependent on understanding the human and cultural dimensions of how lawyers work.
In 2023, one of the authors published proposals for an organisational framework, known as SmartLab, to meet this challenge (“Smart Law: Innovative Tools, Methodologies and Building A SmartLab” by Andrew White, Modern Lawyer, October 2023, Globe Law & Business). The SmartLab approach has three building blocks.
Inclusive leadership. It is vital to have leadership that is visionary, sets a good example by sharing thought processes, spells out the big-picture benefits and engenders a sense of trust, excitement and mission in the project. Above all, leadership needs to be both empowering and inclusive, recognising the insight and wisdom residing in the organisation from grassroots to senior leadership.
Non-judgmental facilitation. Many lawyers, across all levels, are uncomfortable with the idea of sharing the everyday processes that guide what they do. In addition to the obstacles described above, they worry about being judged by knowledgeable peers, and perhaps being exposed for gaps in their knowledge. It is therefore essential to facilitate an atmosphere in which lawyers are ready to share, using a non-judgmental and light-touch style in workshops, conversations, seminars and sessions to capture know how. Empathetic facilitation is the best way to enable expertise and experience to be shared authentically.
Using storytelling. Sometimes, when lawyers share what they do, it can be oddly unrevealing. Many lawyers shrug at the thought of describing their thought processes and dismiss it as “no big deal”. This reticence can be addressed through storytelling. Stories are human and relatable. A facilitator can encourage lawyers to recount their work matters in a natural, authentic and spontaneous way. Using a skilled facilitator’s guidance, this process can be truly revealing and drive the creation of powerful workflow tools.
The SmartLab approach in action blends together these blocks and uses them in an empathetic, human-first approach to workflow capture and distillation (see box “Case study on re-engineering the operating model of a law firm service”).
Unlocking success
The temptation is to stick with the operational status quo, even if it leads to partners finding themselves doing low complexity, mundane work. But the law firms that can find efficiencies will create loyal clients for years to come.
The SmartLab approach can unlock enduring success for law firms and in-house teams. And the case study example illustrates the approach and the benefits. One thing is for sure: patience and determination are vital. In the AI era, it is tempting to try to achieve instant success. But, as the saying goes, instant success takes time.
Case study on re-engineering the operating model of a law firm service
A recent NuCAS project demonstrated the SmartLab approach. It involved working with a national law firm that supported a client with a high volume of repeat work. Nothing was wrong with the existing systems; client satisfaction was high, the work was profitable and delivery was consistent. However, the firm’s leadership team recognised that there was an opportunity to do even better. They asked NuCAS to take a fresh look at their operating model and identify ways to drive greater efficiency, work more intelligently and build additional resilience into the team.
The firm recognised that the team serving the client was building up excellent expertise, but that the expertise was locked in the minds of a few individuals. This, along with tight deadlines, made it difficult to train new staff. Partners often did simple and routine tasks because the team was too small and the knowledge was too concentrated. If those lawyers became unavailable through holiday or illness, it put the workflow, and resulting client work, at risk.
NuCAS sought to address this challenge by conducting detailed interviews with the key lawyers, exploring not only what they did, but how and why they did it. They mapped processes step by step, identified pain points and bottlenecks, and gathered the templates, checklists and practical tools that individuals had developed as personal precedent banks over many years of experience.
This knowledge was then consolidated into a comprehensive yet highly practical client playbook. Spanning more than 70 pages, the playbook provided a complete roadmap for delivering the work, from matter inception through to completion. It included process maps, role and responsibility matrices, standardised documents, best-practice guidance, efficiency opportunities and, most importantly, the valuable institutional knowledge that had previously existed only in the minds of a handful of experienced lawyers.
The result was a more resilient, scalable and efficient delivery model. New team members could be onboarded quickly, work could be delegated with greater confidence and the team was less dependent on individual lawyers. The response from both the partners and the client was overwhelmingly positive, and the playbook has been formally adopted as the foundation for delivering and training on this work in the future. Furthermore, that playbook can also be used in the training of the firm’s AI tools.
Lucy Nixon is founder and Chief Executive of NuCAS Managed Legal Services. Andrew White is founder of legal education and professional skills provider LearningE7, and Honorary Professor of Law, Queen Mary, University of London. The authors would like to thank Rebecca Annison for her support in the preparation of this article.