Gemba Academy Podcast: Lean Six Sigma | Toyota Kata | Productivity | Leadership GA 610 | Lean and AI in the Legal Field with Heather Underwood and Adam Marsland
Dec 11, 2025
Heather Underwood, a business transformation lead who applies Lean and AI to legal operations, and Adam Marsland, a transformation leader with law firm and finance experience, discuss Lean in law, practical Lean examples for litigation and back-office work, AI use cases for process diagnostics, risks of automating the wrong things, and how multidisciplinary teams and curiosity will shape legal transformation.
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Lean Looks Different In Law
- Lean in professional services looks different than manufacturing because waste appears in different guises.
- Legal work is a greenfield for lean with unique complexities and centuries-old assumptions to challenge.
Unburying Processes From Hundreds Of Emails
- Heather found a process buried in a zip file of over 300 emails and used AI to extract process data rapidly.
- AI turned timestamps and waiting periods into analyzable data that would have taken days to prepare manually.
Use AI To Democratize Process Data
- Put guardrails on messy workflow data and use AI to surface patterns teams can act on without specialist skills.
- Empower teams to own their data so they can test small improvements in real time.
