More than thirty years ago, I read “The Machine That Changed The World,” the book that introduced lean manufacturing to a Western audience. It changed the way I thought about everything. Not just manufacturing, but every process, every workflow, every business I would go on to build. The core insight was deceptively simple: most of the time spent in any process is waste. Not because people are lazy or incompetent, but because the systems they work within are designed around tradition rather than purpose.
When I first looked seriously at the UK conveyancing market, I saw the same patterns that lean thinking was designed to address. Work sitting in queues waiting for someone to pick it up. Information being re-entered from one system to another because the systems do not talk to each other. Quality checks happening at the end of the process rather than being built into every step. People spending most of their day on activities that add no value to the client but are necessary because of how the process is structured.
In lean terms, these are classic wastes: waiting, transportation, over-processing, and defects. The conveyancing industry has all of them in abundance. A remortgage transaction might take six weeks to complete, but if you added up the time during which someone was actually doing productive work on it, you would struggle to reach a single day. The rest is queue time, waiting for responses, and rework.
The lean approach to solving this is not to make people work faster. It is to redesign the process so that work flows smoothly from one step to the next without interruption. In manufacturing, this meant moving from batch production to flow production. In legal services, it means moving from a model where transactions sit in a solicitor’s tray waiting for attention to one where the system actively pushes work through each stage as soon as the prerequisites are met.
At LEXcelerate, we have applied lean principles to every aspect of our operation. We have mapped the entire remortgage workflow, identified every point where value is added and where waste occurs, and designed our systems to eliminate as much waste as possible. Our AI handles the repetitive, rule-based work not because automation is fashionable, but because lean thinking tells us that the fastest and most reliable way to complete a task is to remove the need for human intervention where it adds no value.
The legal profession sometimes resists this kind of thinking, perhaps because it sounds like it diminishes the importance of legal expertise. I would argue the opposite. By removing the waste from the process, we are freeing lawyers to do what they trained for: applying judgment, managing risk, and solving problems. That is where the real value lies, and lean thinking is how we get there.