I worked for many years at the largest bank in Brazil. About a decade ago, the bank faced a new problem—legal labor expenses. In Brazil, legal labor expenses are very common, and there was a significant volume of labor lawsuits, leading to high financial costs.
At the time, the bank followed the same practice that is still widely adopted today—hiring specialized law firms to handle labor lawsuits. However, the results did not meet the bank’s expectations, and the bank was dissatisfied with the law firms' performance. Seeking innovation, the bank decided to create an in-house law firm, which was a groundbreaking move. Dozens of lawyers were hired, and a large firm was established with 46 professionals.
The Initial Challenge
The objectives of this new internal law firm were clear: to achieve better results in the judiciary and to develop a structured approach to handling legal processes, which could later be shared with external law firms to improve their performance. However, the firm was built around a classic Taylorist structure—hierarchy, command and control, functional divisions, and silos.
Unfortunately, after a few years, the structure failed. The department was on the verge of closure due to poor results, an inability to transfer knowledge to external firms, and even worse performance than external law firms. Morale was low, and skepticism surrounded the department's activities. The closure of the internal firm seemed imminent.
Implementing Agility
At this critical moment, I was called in. Having studied agility and worked as a legal manager for years, I saw clear signs that Taylorism was failing. When analyzing the internal law firm, I believed the problem was not the people, the bank’s behavior, or the judiciary itself—it was the work structure. It did not support knowledge workers like lawyers or the fluidity of legal work.
I decided to implement an agile framework—Scrum. However, making this transition was not simple, as I had to solve several key issues first.
Key Issues and Solutions
1. Management Paradigm Shift
The entire structure was based on hierarchy, command and control, and functional silos. The first challenge was to reposition management. Agility promotes customer centricity, where teams autonomously work to meet customer needs. Traditionally, managers are served by teams, but in an agile structure, managers orbit around teams to serve them and ensure strategic alignment.
To achieve this shift, I and the other managers positioned ourselves as leaders who served the teams. Our role was to provide the necessary conditions for teams to succeed. This change ensured that agile teams could act autonomously, with customers at the center of everything, while managers focused on enabling and supporting the teams.
2. Defining New Responsibilities
Scrum introduced two new critical roles that we previously lacked: the Product Owner (PO) and the Scrum Master. The PO was responsible for prioritizing tasks and ensuring alignment with business needs, while the Scrum Master facilitated Scrum adoption and helped the team achieve peak performance.
At that time, I took on the role of Scrum Master to guide the transformation.
The Scrum Framework
To summarize our initial steps:
- We established a new management paradigm where managers served teams instead of being served by them.
- We defined new roles (Product Owner and Scrum Master).
- We assembled teams and started working in Scrum.
Scrum is a simple yet powerful framework. It begins with creating a product backlog—a prioritized list of tasks maintained by the Product Owner. With this backlog, the team conducts Sprint Planning, deciding what will be done, who will do it, how, and by when.
Once planning is complete, the team starts the Sprint, executing the work while continuously adapting. Because plans are inherently unstable, daily Scrum meetings help inspect progress and make necessary adjustments. At the end of the Sprint, a Sprint Review is conducted with stakeholders to gather feedback, followed by a Sprint Retrospective, where the team reflects on their performance and identifies improvements.
This one-week feedback loop, repeated 52 times a year, fosters continuous improvement.
The Results
After just six months of Scrum implementation, the results were astounding:
- Our ability to absorb labor lawsuits increased by 425%.
- Per capita productivity of lawyers increased by 175%.
- The number of legal challenges successfully addressed rose significantly.
Professor Clayton Christensen’s work on disruptive innovation influenced my perspective. We weren’t looking for technology to transform our legal department—we were transforming the way people worked. Agile legal management became a disruptive force.
Before Scrum, we held only 8% market share, competing with mass law offices that offered low-cost, low-quality services. However, despite our higher costs, our results were not better than theirs. With Scrum, our market share grew to 25–30% in just six months. Productivity gains allowed us to handle more cases with fewer lawyers, reducing costs while improving quality.
Our work quality reached boutique law firm levels while maintaining mass-market prices. This innovation disrupted the legal industry, making our services unmatched.
Scaling the Transformation
With such success, I proposed an even more ambitious transformation. While our internal legal teams operated with agility, our internal suppliers (legal operations) still followed a traditional hierarchical structure. This created inefficiencies, communication failures, and cultural friction.
My proposal: integrate legal teams with legal operations into fully autonomous teams. We created "AdvOps"—a fusion of "Adv" (lawyer in Portuguese) and "Ops" (operations). AdvOps teams absorbed 100% of labor lawsuit inputs and applied agile principles to scale excellence across all law firms.
The bank approved the project, and during the pandemic, we launched six fully remote agile teams. The results were even more dramatic:
- Productivity increased by 900%.
- AdvOps teams delivered far superior results compared to the original legal department.
Final Evolution
The success of AdvOps made the original in-house law firm obsolete. Since AdvOps handled everything efficiently, the internal firm was no longer needed. It was eventually shut down, and its legal work was outsourced—to me.
Today, I run my own law firm—the first to be born in Scrum. We continue handling the same legal processes, benefiting from the structure I helped create.
Conclusion
This journey proves that even a small agile team can transform an entire company. Agile legal management not only disrupted the industry but also created sustainable, win-win relationships. Agile principles, when applied correctly, can revolutionize how knowledge workers operate, leading to unprecedented success.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is my story. Thank you very much.