What “Done” Looks Like
“Done” is not a feeling. It’s a design decision. Until you define it in writing, your staff can’t tell when to hand off — and you become the judge of completion for everything.
“Done” is the most expensive word on your board, because in most firms nobody has decided what it means. Ask three people when a stage is finished and you’ll get three answers — which is another way of saying the firm has no answer at all.
So the question travels. The paralegal isn’t sure the intake packet is complete, so they ask. The associate isn’t sure the draft is ready to file, so they ask. Every uncertain handoff routes back to the one person who is presumed to know: you. Not because you’re a control freak, but because completion was never defined anywhere except in your head.
If done lives in the owner’s judgment, the owner is the bottleneck for every stage — forever.
Law Firm Architects · Operating Philosophy
01Done is a decision, not a feeling
Teams treat completion like a vibe — a sense that the work is probably finished, close enough, good to go. Feelings don’t transfer. What one person feels is done, the next person receives as half-built. The gap between those two feelings is where rework, dropped balls, and midnight partner emails come from.
A definition of done replaces the feeling with a fact. It states, in plain language, exactly what must be true before a stage or a task can be called complete. It is checkable by anyone, on any case, without your opinion. Done stops being something you decide and becomes something the system already decided.
02What an undefined “done” costs you
The cost is invisible because it never shows up as a line item. It shows up as friction — the small, constant drag of a team that can’t self-certify its own work.
- Adjudication tax: you personally rule on completion dozens of times a day, one case at a time.
- Stalled handoffs: work sits between stages because nobody is sure it’s ready to move.
- Silent rework: the next stage quietly fixes what the last one left unfinished, and the pattern never gets named.
- Uneven quality: “done” means whatever the person on that case decided it meant that week.
You can define done once, in writing, or you can adjudicate it daily, forever. Those are the only two options — and only one of them scales.
03Write the criteria once
Completion criteria aren’t a philosophy exercise. They’re a short, blunt list attached to each stage: the conditions that must be true before the work moves on. Written down, they turn a judgment call into a checklist — and a checklist is something you can hand to anyone.
Default / Undefined
- Done is a feeling
- Completion is the owner’s call
- Handoffs wait for approval
- Quality varies by person
- “Is this ready?” every day
Designed
- Done is a written standard
- Completion is self-certified
- Handoffs fire on criteria met
- Quality is the same every time
- The stage answers for itself
The test of a good definition is simple: could a competent new hire read it and know, without asking you, whether the work is finished? If yes, you’ve removed yourself from that decision permanently. If no, the criteria are still living in your head — and so is the bottleneck.
04Where to start this week
Pick the stage that generates the most “is this ready?” questions. Write three to five conditions that define done for it — concrete, checkable, no adjectives. Post them where the work happens. Then stop answering the question and point to the list.
The first time a paralegal closes a stage without checking with you, you’ll feel it. That’s not luck or a better hire. That’s a definition of done doing the job you used to do by hand.
Luis designs law firm operating systems — the people, process, and technology architecture that lets a firm grow without running on burnout. He writes The Blueprint every week.
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