Welcome to the Workshop
I've spent most of my career building tools for people doing difficult work together.
Over time I learned something.
The quality of a tool depends on how well you understand the work.
If you don't understand the work, you build features.
If you understand the work, you build tools that people reach for every day.
That idea has shaped everything I've built.
It shapes my work in legal operations.
The workshop exists because the work continues.
One Question Kept Returning
Legal departments have never had more technology.
Matter management.
Contract lifecycle management.
eBilling.
Knowledge management.
Workflow automation.
AI.
Yet many legal teams still experience the same frustrations.
Work arrives from every direction.
Priorities change daily.
Communication becomes fragmented.
Lawyers spend more time coordinating work than doing it.
Adding another application rarely makes the work simpler.
For years I found myself asking a simple question.
Why?
Not why one product succeeds.
Not why another implementation fails.
Why capable legal departments continue to struggle despite decades of investment in technology.
Everything on this website grew from trying to answer that question.
Understanding Before Building
We don't begin with software.
We begin by trying to understand the work.
Observing.
Listening.
Looking for patterns that appear across different legal departments.
Some observations disappear.
Some become working ideas.
Some survive long enough to become practical tools.
Occasionally they become software.
The software isn't the starting point.
It's one possible outcome.
What You'll Find Here
This website is a collection of that work.
Field Notes
Short observations from studying how legal departments work.
Theory of Legal Operations
An evolving model for understanding how legal teams coordinate work, adapt to change and continuously improve.
Research Instruments
Practical tools, worksheets and assessment frameworks designed to help legal teams better understand their own operations.
LegalTech Decisions
Long-form papers exploring recurring technology decisions and why they succeed or fail.
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Software built to put those ideas into practice.
Why It Continues
The environment around legal continues to evolve.
Businesses change.
Regulation changes.
Technology changes.
The expectations placed on legal continue to grow.
So should our understanding of how legal departments operate.
So should the tools we build.
We don't expect this work to be finished.
Every new observation improves the model.
Every improvement to the model creates the opportunity to build a better tool.
An Invitation
Everything published here represents our current understanding.
Some ideas are well tested.
Others are still evolving.
If your experience challenges an observation or strengthens a theory, I'd genuinely like to hear it.
Better observations lead to better models.
Better models lead to better tools.
And better tools help people doing difficult work together.
— Mike Tobias