Our Agile Tales Podcast
I host the Our Agile Tales podcast with my colleague, Mun-Wai Chung. We interview a number of people that are changing the ways of working in areas like finance and HR, as well as in industries like healthcare, oil and gas, and the like.
The ten most recent episodes are below. They are available on major podcasting sites. You can click on the icons below to subscribe to your desired platform.
Our Agile Tales
Once upon a time, in an agile land, we navigate corporate levels and political waters to transform the business to be adaptable to this forever changing world. We are excited to share with you our agile journey. Enjoy our tales as we weave our stories together, sometimes with others, on our podcasts.
Welcome to another episode of Our Agile Tales, Navigating World Crises: The Agile-Law-AI Alliance in Action!
In this continuation of our conversation with Ondřej Dvořák, CEO of AgiLawyer and COPS Solutions, we go deeper into how you actually run and scale an agile, cross-border legal-aid initiative in the middle of a war. If the first episode was about launching Linking Help, this one is about surviving the scale-up.
Ondřej walks us through the messy, very human side of scaling legal aid for Ukrainian refugees: from dealing with thousands of requests in a language he didn’t speak, to building a “clearing desk” and help desk function led by Ukrainian lawyers, to teaching volunteer lawyers across multiple countries how to work in a pull-based, Kanban system when they’re used to command-and-control and assigned work.
We explore how culture and ways of working showed up in very concrete ways – why France “just got it” from day one, while countries like Romania needed more support and education before becoming top performers. Ondřej talks about how simplifying the Kanban system (fewer columns, fewer concepts, one clear task: connect the person to a lawyer) was crucial to onboarding busy legal professionals quickly in a crisis.
We also dig into scaling patterns: how they expanded country by country, used “early adopter” lawyers to grow local networks, and centralized the help desk while keeping case work decentralized. From there, the conversation shifts to constraints: the difficulty of fundraising for legal aid (which is hard to “picture”), differences in how pro bono is treated across jurisdictions, and the legal and ethical challenges of using AI to support legal work, especially questions of accountability and liability when AI-generated guidance might be wrong.
If you’re interested in how Agile, Kanban, and crisis-driven decision-making play out in the real world, across borders, cultures, and regulatory systems, then this episode is a rich case study in making agility practical, humane, and scalable beyond software.
Episode Outline
- 00:00 Introduction & recap of Part 1
- 01:05 The language barrier: Ukrainian requests and the need for a “clearing desk”
- 07:58 Designing the help desk workflow
- 10:45 Teaching lawyers a new way of working: pull vs. command-and-control
- 13:12 Culture in action: why France “just worked” and Romania needed more coaching
- 16:00 Simplifying Kanban for legal work
- 18:48 Scaling country by country: early adopters, bar associations, and building local communities
- 22:10 Centralized help desk, decentralized service: funding, hiring Ukrainian students, and managing demand
- 24:55 Business model and funding constraints: the challenge of raising money for legal aid
- 26:10 Legal and AI constraints: pro bono differences, AI-assisted legal opinions, and accountability
- 28:30 Reflections on crisis as a catalyst and the future of global, AI-supported legal aid
- 29:07 Conclusion
About Ondrej Dvorak
Ondřej is the co-founder of Linking Help, a nonprofit that mobilized legal aid for Ukrainian refugees using Scrum and Kanban to coordinate real-time support. It’s a powerful story of how agility can make a real difference in humanitarian crises—far beyond the domain of business. Andre’s work shows how Agile thinking can help even the most traditional sectors become more humane, responsive, and resilient.
You can follow Ondřej on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/ondrej-dvorak-agile/
Visit us at https://www.ouragiletales.com/about