At a mid-sized corporate firm, I was responsible for project managing a secretarial restructure from a traditional model of lawyer to secretarial ratio of between 4:1, to a secretarial team structure.  This was done to help resolve an inequity issue between secretaries of differing workloads, problems with absence cover and the increased amount of time secretaries spent processing large documents.  Moving to the team structure was not an easy sell initially as lawyers were reluctant to lose the secretaries they had for a number of years, and secretaries did not want to be part of a pool. I worked extensively with the firm’s managing partner, secretarial coordinator and IT manager to put forward a proposal that would improve the level of support being provided to fee earners.  A lot of technical work was involved and I personally supervised the user testing with a small pilot group, formalised procedures and published to all stakeholders once ready to go live.  It took a few months to work effectively but a much-improved service resulted.  This is a great example of a low-cost solution to a service problem resulting in significant operational improvements.