About Us
Why We Do What We Do
We are driven by a commitment to: continuously improve, facilitating the ability to innovate and work collaboratively, helping our clients deliver greater value to theirs, and developing competitive advantages.
The concept of creating courses to teach the application of process improvement methodologies such as Lean and Six Sigma, to the legal profession was conceived by CEO and Co-Founder Catherine Alman MacDonagh, JD, a former corporate counsel and law firm executive who is a process improvement practitioner and professor. Legal Lean Sigma® and the Legal WorkOut® are so unique that each is a registered trademark.
In 2007, Catherine developed White and Yellow Belt certification course with a practitioner who possessed deep process improvement experience. Those courses and other programs were launched in 2008 under the umbrella of the Legal Sales and Service Organization. The Legal Lean Sigma Institute became a separate entity in 2011 thanks to increasing requests for consulting services.
With our specific focus on and depth of experience in the legal profession, our team is uniquely capable of providing services to law firms and legal departments. After more than a decade, we have delivered our programs, workshops, and consulting services to thousands of teams, leaders, lawyers and practitioners, business professionals, and senior management in the legal profession.
Our certification courses are the first and only combined process improvement and project management certification courses designed specifically for the legal profession. Our faculty, agenda, and course materials consistently receive excellent ratings. LLSI’s Yellow Belt Certification courses are offered at Suffolk Law School and at George Washington University (Master’s Degree in Law Firm Management). Our faculty frequently guest lecture at law schools and for other academic programs.
LLSI’s offers a spectrum of consulting services. With a clear understanding that success is different for every organization, group and project plus adherence to PI, PM, and change management principles, each of our process improvement projects and programs has delivered significant returns on investment.
Legal Lean Sigma Institute faculty have worked on process improvement projects as well as delivered courses and programs for the legal profession, both privately and publicly, including: ACC’s Value Challenge Master Class, the Association of Legal Administrators (ALA) Annual Conference, ALA’s Regional Conferences, ALA’s Large Law Firm Retreat, US Army Judge Advocate General’s School, Law Without Walls, the Legal Marketing Association’s Annual Conferences, LMA’s P3 Conferences, LSSO’s RainDance Conference, Managing Partner Forum, the College of Law Practice Management’s Futures Conference, and for many law firm and corporate legal departments (and their clients).
Our Focus
The Legal Lean Sigma Institute LLC has a particular focus on:
- Curriculum design and delivery – Tailored programs and workshops to introduce, build, advance, and enhance skills that are the basis for high performing, high performing teams
- Smart collaboration – through a Smart Collaboration Accelerator accreditation, we will help you leverage your strengths, engage authentically, and capitalize on diversity. Our toughest and highest value challenges are becoming more VUCA – Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous. These complex problems require experts to integrate their knowledge in order to generate higher-impact solutions than anyone could produce on their own.
- Strategy, change management, and organizational development work – advising organizations that are interested in a coordinated approach and execution across and within the P+ Ecosystem™, building the architecture of their PI/PM programs, structuring for success, and/or improving their process improvement and project management programs
- Project facilitation, leadership, and support – leading and/or supporting process improvement projects
- Certifications and certificates – teaching process improvement and project management in certificate and certification programs, both privately and publicly