Best Practices for Planning an Effective Workflow
Before building, consider these best practices to ensure your Vincent Studio workflow is successful and adopted by your team.
Summary
To ensure your workflow is successful and adopted by your team, you must plan before you build. Start by identifying a high-value, repetitive task, map out your current manual process, and define a simple, focused solution that solves one core problem well.
Why This is Important
A well-planned workflow is an adopted workflow. While Vincent Studio makes it easy to build powerful automations, the success of your project depends on the quality of your initial plan. Investing a small amount of time in planning ensures you are solving the right problem for the right people, which is the key to successful legal process automation and a high return on your investment.
5 Key Considerations Before You Build
Before you even open the Vincent Studio workflow builder, take a moment to consider these five key principles for effective planning.
1. Identify the Right Problem to Solve
The best candidates for automation are tasks that are frequent, repetitive, and standardized. Don't try to automate a complex, one-off task. Instead, look for the routine work that consumes the most non-billable hours.
Good Candidate: Reviewing a standard NDA (done multiple times a week).
Poor Candidate: Drafting a novel, complex argument for a unique case (done once).
2. Map Your Manual Process First
You cannot automate a process you don't fully understand. The first step is always to document your current, manual process from start to finish. This act of "mapping" will reveal the logical stages and specific actions that will become your workflow's Tasks and Steps.
3. Define Your End-User
Who are you building this for? A junior associate? A paralegal? A senior partner? The answer will change how you design the workflow. A tool for a junior associate might have more guidance and guardrails, while a tool for a partner might be designed for speed and efficiency.
4. Start with a "Minimum Viable Workflow"
Don't try to build a perfect, all-encompassing solution on your first attempt. Instead, build a "Minimum Viable Workflow" (MVW) that solves one core problem effectively. You can always edit the workflow later to add more features and complexity based on feedback from your team.
5. Plan for Reusability
As you map your process, think about which components could be useful in other workflows. A well-designed "Extract Key Dates from a Document" task is a modular building block that could be reused in dozens of different custom legal workflows, saving you and your colleagues significant time in the future.
Best Practices & Pro Tips
The "Five-Minute Rule": A great way to find a candidate for automation is to look for tasks that you or your team perform multiple times every single day. The cumulative time savings from automating these small tasks can be enormous.
Interview Your "Client": Even if you are building a workflow for your own team, treat them like a client. Sit down with a future end-user for 15 minutes and ask them to walk you through their manual process. You will uncover crucial details and assumptions that you might have missed on your own.
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