A number of my recent posts have focussed on business systems that law firms have, or should have.  For example, automated precedents, opinions databases, and checklists.  These are all very valuable ways of ensuring that the firm can deliver increasingly better services at better value.

However, as my former Buddle Findlay chairman Peter Chemis said in an interview with the National Business Review recently, "There is always a place for people".  I would add, provided they continue to develop new skills that are relevant to the different types of work they will want and need to do when using new technologies.

In this post, I look further at questions (questions 8 and 9 in my Legal Sausage Factory series) clients could ask their lawyers to see how well they are preparing themselves for these new ways of working.

This need for retraining should not be under estimated, nor the effort required.  As Mark Cohen has noted in Legal Education’s Other Challenge: Retraining Practicing Lawyers For A New Marketplace, education is not just for the new lawyers. What’s needed, he says, is a more intensive, granular, training for practitioners - an executive education boot camp that provides:

1   context for how and why new skill sets are required;

2   an overview of what those skills are and their key elements;

3   hands-on/experiential exercises supervised by experts;

4   lessons learned/reflection;

5   a synthesis of how these skills play into new legal delivery models; and

6   discussion of where “alt-law firm” opportunities lie.

We absolutely agree with this. We talk to many lawyers who just don’t seem to be able to process all the changes and options that are being thrown at them, and need help to make sense of it all.  When people are presented with more options than they can process they will often do nothing.

To see how your lawyers are tracking, you could ask:  

8   What training have you done in last 12 months?

Training is a pressing issue for all lawyers – whether in firms or in-house – given the CPD requirements lawyers are now subject to. Even without that, good training helps you do your job better and should be done anyway! However, there are a number of issues with it:

1   The cost of external training can be prohibitive. Traditional law society or private sector training providers charge A LOT per person for training.

2   The cost of internal training is probably higher – given the amount of preparation time that goes into doing it well. That time could be spent on business development, firm management or chargeable work for clients.

3   Much training is not effective in practice. Consider these questions:

•   How many times have you or someone else been scheduled to go on a course, and not been able to go due to work commitments?

•   How often do you have to jump out of training to focus on some more urgent chargeable work?

•   Is the training often not pitched at the right level? Too much of a beginners guide to a topic;  too general because it is trying to speak to too broad an audience; or too focussed on what worked in the past, rather than what will work in the future?

•   How much of the training can you remember at the time you are working on a relevant transaction – perhaps months or years later?

For these and other reasons, many lawyers do not get the training that they really want and need.

With modern technology, there are now different approaches to training that law firms can take which more effectively make the right information available at the right times. These could include:

•   Maintaining an intranet or wiki site, which can contain guidance and links to precedents that people can access as and when required.

•   Recording training sessions as videos, and hosting them on intranets or wikis, so that they are accessible as and when required. In this way, the very best person in the firm can do the training session, and people can watch and listen to them. As part of online training, it is possible to build in tests of whether people have understood and learned what is intended, and you can monitor whether people have watched the whole course.

•   Training and guidance can be embedded into interview questionnaires as part of document automation. Instead of maintaining a 30 page “guidance manual” (or wiki or intranet page) for a particular type of transaction, you can put the specific piece of guidance for each question into the questionnaire. This could be in text, or even in video format so people can get a 2 minute snapshot of what they need to know on each point.

While your law firms may tell you that they do a lot of work on training and staff development, what does this mean in practice? You could easily ask your firms:

•   What training have you done in the past 12 months?

•   How many people completed the training in full?

•   How do you test understanding and learning?

•   What new skills have you developed that are relevant to us, and which will equip you to be our lawyers in the future?

9   Can you show us your training programme for next 12 months? How else do you ensure people learn on job?

Testing the training that your firm has done in the past 12 months will be a valuable indication of their commitment to developing their people. However, with so much change coming to the profession and automation of many existing processes raising the need for your lawyers to develop a broader range of skills and a deeper understanding of your business and industry, you also will want to know what other training they are doing.

Instead of just focussing on the existing law society type courses, you should see whether they are attending more industry specific training, and whether they are also devoting enough time to learning new skills like project management, negotiation and influence, business strategy and how to use the new technology tools they are rolling out. In the past year I have been to some excellent courses run by Biz Dojo, Creative HQ and Kiwi Landing Pad, while also reading many books and articles, and watching courses online on www.lynda.com.

There are now specialist providers of those types of training like Stuart van Rij and Shaun Plant. Stuart, for example, is an expert in negotiation and influence.  If you’re in Wellington, you may want to check out his upcoming public two-day workshop on 27 March and 3 April 2017: http://www.theagilenegotiator.com/. 

As mentioned previously, LawFest is another easy way to keep up with all the latest developments.