About GreenLine

Lawyers know the drill. Arrive at work, take a call, answer emails, start drafting, get interrupted by a question, meet with a client, answer more emails, take another call, leave late, wonder why you didn’t get all your work done, get up the next day, and do it again. For 15 years, Jeff De Francisco, a practicing attorney serving high-net-worth families’ estate, tax, business, and related legal needs, found himself in this rut, yearning for a way out. His search for balance and well-being led him to Lean and Agile methodologies – and to a fortuitous connection.

Enter John, a fourth-generation lawyer who spent eight years in tech, immersed in modern approaches to product development and process improvement before embracing his family’s legal legacy. After finding balance and happiness by applying these methods to his own intellectual property law practice, John began his legal operations consulting business, helping others do the same.

After Jeff found John, they collectively built a legal workflow system that gave Jeff exactly what he was looking for – time. Time to relax, time to manage, time…to think. Finding his team empowered to work without his constant supervision and his ability to focus on the management of his firm, together John and Jeff looked for a solution to their persistent challenge, a software tool that fully supported the proven methods driving Jeff’s success.

The solution emerged through Dimitri, an experienced Agile coach who has done everything from managing to directing to serving as the Chief Technology Officer of various e-commerce and tech companies, and most importantly…creating an innovative workflow platform that Jeff and John determined could serve as the backbone of GreenLine.

The name started with a piece of tape on a wall.

Nearly a decade ago, I was consulting with my co-founder, Jeff, at this law firm. At that time, his firm was using a physical kanban board – sticky notes moving across columns on his hallway wall. We had a problem where team members would frequently say they were “working on” various matters, but those matters didn’t seem to be progressing toward completion.

As Jeff and I were brainstorming ways to motivate people, we needed to make it crystal clear what we wanted. So we stretched a long piece of green painter’s tape vertically before the “Done” column on the board, and stuck a note with a big dollar sign on it at the top. “This is the firm’s goal,” we said, “when you move a card past the green line, money comes in. Yes, we want you to get things right, but we also need you to get them done.

Simple. Visible. It worked.

Years later, after I’d started using one of Dimitri’s previous products with my consulting clients, I noticed that his software tool always showed the Done section with a green background. Getting a card across the green line means it’s 100% done – same concept as with Jeff, but digital. I also started to teach people that getting work done means three positive things happen at once: the client’s happy, the firm gets paid, and you’ve freed up capacity for the next thing on the board.

Later still, I realized there was a deeper reason the green line image stayed stuck in my head. Legal teams are constantly redlining in one of two ways: either they’re overloaded and burning out, or they’re running in the red financially because they don’t have enough of the right cases. The green line is the happy place between those extremes: enough work to keep the practice healthy, but not so much that people get overwhelmed. It’s sustainable performance, not crisis mode.

That’s where we want our GreenLine customers to be.