Staying Agile: A Q&A With Reyner Meikle, CEO & President of Agile Legal

Small and midsize businesses often struggle to manage legal projects due to a lack of internal resources. This leaves only one viable solution: Engage costly outside counsel for assistance. When urgent legal and compliance issues arise, it becomes an even more tenuous situation to quickly navigate the issues at hand, while maintaining control over efficiency, quality and legal spend.
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Alternative legal services providers (ALSPs) offer a solution to this dilemma and are fundamentally reshaping how legal services are delivered. However, larger ALSPs don’t offer practical solutions to small and midsize businesses. This is where Agile Legal excels.
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Agile Legal specializes in catering to the needs of small and midsize companies. It employs an Agile project management approach that originated in software development. Projects are broken down into individual tasks, and feedback and testing are carried out after each step to optimize results and understand how individual parts of a project are impacting the whole. The key principles are collaboration and continuous improvement.
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Reyner Meikle, CEO & President, explains how Agile Legal has taken the concept of this methodology and applied it to legal operations for small to midsize businesses – enabling them to rapidly achieve better results with more scalable resources.
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Q: What led to the development of Agile Legal project management?
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RM: Early in my career, I had the benefit of working at a company where I was on the legal technology side and, ultimately, became an in-house counsel. I oversaw legal technology for litigation management, entity management and the team that supported those areas. I was very engaged with sales and customer implementation projects. I would spend a lot of time traveling and working with legal departments.
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One of the things I noticed about small and midsize businesses is they typically do not have project or operations management teams or established in-house legal departments. So, they rely heavily on external resources for many varied and complex legal issues. Small and midsize businesses also need to make decisions and move quickly. They are more opportunistic; they do not form committees or create development plans like large companies do. They require a legal operations framework that evolves with the business and its changing needs.
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That’s how I developed the idea for taking Agile project management concepts and methods and integrating with legal operations. I had seen both the challenges of the legal function in small to midsize companies and, combined with the principles we were using on the technology development side, spotted an interesting way to apply those concepts and work with those companies.
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Q: Why is this approach well suited for the legal industry?
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RM: Agile Legal’s methodology is suitable for the legal industry due to two factors: a dynamic and fluid operating environment for SMBs and repetition. Regulatory environments are always changing, introducing significant layers of complexity. Since small and midsize businesses not only face evolving legal problems but also have specific types of projects that come up again and again. There is always a need to hire, expand and grow to meet these repetitive demands. Agile Legal’s innovative approach delivers on both requirements and provides value equilibrium: Our cost does not exceed the value offered to SMBs.
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Q: What are some key elements of the process?
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RM: The Agile Legal project management methodology consists of four critical elements: assessing, planning, executing and learning. These four elements are centered around collaboration with our clients and service teams. We first reach a mutual understanding of what a successful outcome looks like. Since circumstances can change quickly in small to midsize businesses, we are always asking, “What does the business hope to accomplish?” Every project we take on changes at some point. We make those adjustments and the cycle repeats until we achieve the desired results, always looking for ways to continuously improve.
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Q: How does this approach differ?
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RM: The traditional approach is more task-oriented and singular. It’s reactive nature is usually not connected to the bigger picture; it’s isolated from the rest of the business, and you can lose some of the context. With legal operations management, we have a bird’s eye view and can spot potential implications of a particular transaction or task elsewhere. The difference is in having a comprehensive understanding of the business. Additionally, small to midsize businesses do not allow weeks and months to plan and execute. Everything is constantly moving forward. The Agile Legal project management methodology is more focused on short-term problem-solving and execution through a disciplined project management framework. It lends itself to how small and midsize businesses operate.
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Q: How do clients benefit from Agile Legal project management?
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RM: Clients benefit from the value in the managed services model we provide. We offer a legal operations team across a range of practice areas both on demand and on a subscription basis. Other providers are not able to offer similar capabilities with certainty around budget. Our ability to do so makes the best sense for small and midsize businesses.
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Q: When should potential clients consider Agile Legal project management for their legal and compliance needs?
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RM: The Agile Legal project management methodology operates very nimbly. So, the short answer is anytime. We’re here when clients need us – for small or large projects or as a more integral legal operations management solution. Obviously, we seek to establish deeper, longer, sustained relationships that enable us to assist clients across a range of legal projects. Bringing us in sooner also allows our team to take a broader view of legal operations, address issues sooner and add greater value.
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Agile Legal’s approach to legal project management offers small and midsize businesses dynamic, flexible and scalable solutions as an alternative to more traditional, more expensive methods. By applying agile technology principles to legal operations, Agile Legal enables businesses to address complex legal issues quickly, efficiently and within budget, while maintaining a clear understanding of the broader business context.
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Contact us to learn more about how Agile Legal project management can help you optimize legal spend, enhance efficiency and stay ahead in a rapidly evolving legal landscape.