Phase 1: Embed With the Team
Two weeks shadowing the people doing the work. Not interviews. Not surveys. Watching real cases move through.
Deliverables
- Shadowing log: who does what, how long it takes, where it gets stuck
- Inventory of every manual workflow in scope — including the "invisible" ones nobody mentions
- Time-and-motion data on the top 5–10 candidate workflows
Actions
- Sit alongside fee-earners, paralegals, ops staff, finance — wherever the work actually happens
- Time each workflow step with a stopwatch
- Note where work gets re-keyed, hand-checked, or chased
Outcome
- An honest baseline of how work currently moves — usually different from how leadership thinks
- The "obvious in retrospect" candidates for automation, identified by evidence
Phase 4
Phase 2