Tom – I have to disagree with your assessment for several reasons. First, junior associates don’t necessarily have the experience to do the work on their own. They need help understanding how to do the work in an efficient manner. And since lawyers bill by the hour, from the customer’s point of view, it is value added effort for the senior partner to advise the junior associate. It’s similar to a line leader spending time with new front line employees helping them with their job on an assembly line.

Second, the gemba for the lawyer is the office – when the partner goes to see the associate because the latter is having trouble, then he’s in the gemba where he belongs – not holed up in a fancy office away from the work (even though all the offices are probably fancy!).

Third, the “pretty chart” in this case is simply a visual representation of the workflow that each associate is handling. In that regard it’s a useful tool for understanding how everyone is doing. You could probably make a pretty good argument that all the lawyers on a team should be sitting in a single room working together, but my hunch is that that’s unlikely to happen while you and I are still young….