Applying Agile to Legal Practices

Lesson 5: Reading the Board

Reading the Board: Your Workflow at a Glance

With the full board in place, this lesson shows you how to use it—spot bottlenecks, balance workloads, and keep matters flowing steadily from left to right.


What You’ll Learn

  • Column-by-Column Health Check
    Instantly see which phase is overloaded and redirect resources before delays snowball.

  • Client & Task Visibility
    Every card displays the client, matter, and key tasks—no more digging through emails or spreadsheets.

  • Flow Mentality
    Treat each card like a car on a track: your job is to keep it moving smoothly to “Done.”

  • Agile Adjustments
    Use the visual data to tweak WIP limits, add queue buffers, or redeploy staff in real time.

Course Curriculum
Your 9 Agile Lessons

Lesson 1: How to Tell If Kanban Could Work For You

In this lesson, you'll learn how to identify if you should implement the Kanban methodology and how to get started.

Lesson 2: Applying Agile to Legal Practices with John Grant

An in-depth look at integrating Agile methodologies in a legal setting, guided by industry expert John E. Grant.

Lesson 3: Getting Started

Where and how should you start implementing Kanban? Let's go over how to use what you already do and translate it into Kanban.

Lesson 4: Building a Board

Let's walk you through how to build a Kanban board using Legalboards for our example firm.

Lesson 5: Boards As An Overview Of Workflows

Now that we know the framework and how to build a board, let's step back and examine how to view the work we've completed so far.

Lesson 6: WIP Limits

In this lesson, we'll dive into one of the concepts that John covered in lesson 2, WIP limits. You'll learn how to apply them for effective management.

Lesson 7: Board Viewing Tips

Tips about how to best view your board so you can ensure you understand everything at a glance.

Lesson 8: Client Centric Operations

One of the most important benefits of using Kanban is the enhanced client experience. Let's examine how to optimize your operations for clients.

Lesson 9: Conclusion

In this lesson, we'll wrap up this course and the Agile concepts covered.