Dave Swanner has a nice piece on Why It's So Hard to Move Cases at the Trial Lawyer Resource Center.
When I sit down and review cases with my staff we have a lot of cases that are right on the edge of being resolved, but have one thing hanging. My friend Todd O'Malley calls that Litigation Constipation, where the cases come in, but they don’t go out. That’s a real apt description. What is that one thing that is left undone?
He applies some things he has learned from his study of Theory of Constraints and The Goal. I really like his application of the classic dice game to the work he does in his own office to show the impact of everyday task variation to a sequence of events.
The next question or simulation is to look at the impact of accepting as many cases as possible. What happens to the system (how many cases get completed) if it gets full of so much work that people cannot decide which specific item to work on when they have the time? What should be the focus of a system like this?