Education, education, education

Law firms take their training very seriously. LB spent some time in the classroom to see how education has become more than just a break from the billable hour

It’s all far removed from a university lecture. The 20 Norton Rose senior associates turn up on time, apparently without a hangover in sight. The lawyers help themselves to the spread of fresh fruit and coffee and take their seats at a U-shaped desk which leaves nowhere to hide. They have come from as far afield as the Hong Kong and Dubai offices to the firm’s London HQ for a three-day course on marketing and business development.

Over the course of three days – referred to internally as International Academy 5 – the lawyers will take part in presentations, role plays and mock interviews, as well as group discussions. Norton Rose director of learning and organisational development Carolann Edwards cuts a not unconvincing school mistress figure. She asks those present to write down the firm’s strategy in a minute or two because: ‘that’s all the time you’ll have to describe it to a client.’ All the while each and every one of them is being assessed on what they do or don’t say.

Training, recognised as a crucial part of the culture at professional services firms, has shifted in recent years. While the technical side of an assistant’s development remains of utmost importance, with lawyers engaging in some form of legal training at least once a week, it is the softer business development aspects that are receiving more and more attention.

The bare minimum a lawyer has to achieve is the CPD requirement of 16 hours per year, with the average associate committed to somewhere between 30 and 40 hours a year at the very least. Thousands of training hours a year are now dedicated to those skills that a generation ago most would have sneered at.

In an increasingly competitive sector, employees are demanding more sophisticated and better resourced training programmes. Firms have become much savvier in marketing their programmes to new recruits and articulating a difference between themselves and their competitors. In-house academies, ‘universities’, and law and business schools are now embedded in firms’ very fabric. Welcome back to school, but not as you remember it.

Timetables

It’s ten years since the Clifford Chance Academy opened its doors. One of the first firms to launch a pre-packed, structured lawyer training programme, the Academy was set up to co-ordinate the firm’s training across its offices. In the last financial year it offered 512 courses globally, of which 325 were business skills courses for lawyers – the number of participants worldwide through the year was 5,175, including both lawyers and support staff. Throw in the additional e-learning and practice area specific training and you get a sense of the scale of what’s on offer.

These sorts of numbers are now not uncommon at any of the major law firms. Training is no longer so much an imposition as a necessity. In this era of austerity, firms like Linklaters have ring-fenced their training budgets. Clifford Chance’s global learning and development partner Julia Clarke says that one of the biggest changes over the past decade has been the growing acceptance by partners and junior fee-earners that marketing skills are a crucial part of a lawyer’s development.

‘Lawyers realise that BD and marketing training helps develop their knowledge, skills and ability to get business.’
Carolann Edwards, Norton Rose

‘The programmes are more accepted by our partners as being important and more embedded in what the firm does,’ Clarke adds. ‘The driver behind this change has been increased expectations from clients and a more competitive environment.’ The change has also, in part, been driven by more demanding employees. Gone are the days when, as one City partner puts it: ‘We received piecemeal training with very little emphasis on marketing.’

Young lawyers are actively looking for a rounded business training that will stand them in good stead for the rest of their career – one in which partnership may not be the end goal. ‘The psychological contract between employer and employee has fundamentally changed,’ suggests Hogan Lovells’ director of knowledge, research and learning Chris Stoakes. ‘From, “you devote your life to work for us and we will pay your pension” to, “we will train and develop you to the highest possible standards and prepare you for the next stage of your career”.’

‘It is absolutely critical in the recruitment process that we articulate our training processes properly.’
Kevin Hogarth, Freshfields

Of course, that change means that, whereas firms historically invested much less training but kept hold of a higher proportion of their lawyers for life, now firms invest thousands only to see talent walk out of the door after a few years. Stoakes reckons that around 25% of lawyers recruited as trainees will leave Hogan Lovells by the time they are four-years qualified. At Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer the largest proportion of its lawyers leave when they are 28. A cynic would ask why so much is being invested in people when there is a strong likelihood that they will move on, possibly in-house to clients but also potentially to a competitor. This question is especially valid considering that it is estimated to cost a firm somewhere between £250,000 and £300,000 to hire and take a trainee through to the cusp of partnership.

But there is no room for such cynicism, particularly concerning business skills. ‘In 1999 there was a lack of understanding within law firms about the value of business development and marketing training. The biggest shift has been that as the legal environment has become more competitive the appetite for such help has grown,’ remarks Edwards. ‘Lawyers have realised that such training helps them develop their knowledge, skills and ability to get business. It also assists with their career development and progression. The business reinforces the training and training reinforces the business.’

Herbert Smith senior associate Mike Flockhart agrees: ‘The biggest change in legal training is the increased focus on soft skills, professional development and business skills. You cannot stand still in this job, you need to keep sharp and that’s where training comes in for us – it is so important.’

Herbert Smith, along with its focus on the softer business skills side, invites regular speakers to talk with associates on the latest legal developments.

Updating the curriculum

Even at firms without the same level of resources as the Magic Circle, training has become increasingly sophisticated. At Shearman & Sterling’s 110-lawyer London office, professional development and training manager John Worrall, and his team of three trainers have revamped the firm’s career development track for UK lawyers. Technical, business leadership and management skills are embedded in the new competency framework.

In 2010/11 Shearman’s junior lawyers have 180 training sessions to choose from, which equates to around 300 hours – 50% more than last year. Worrall believes that in many ways the best training leads to a more collegiate culture. But what’s wrong with learning on the job?

Shearman corporate senior associate Rebecca Hilton says: ‘Of course you pick up a decent amount on the job but training can really focus your mind. As with everyone, some lawyers make great teachers and are brilliant at passing on skills, some less so. So it really helps to do training as well.’

Shearman’s training regime is – as with many firms – split into three areas: core training such as contract and EU law; practice group training; and business skills, which cover everything from PR to client care and people management.

Anglo-Scottish practice McGrigors uses a mix of its own team of six specialist trainers as well as a panel of preferred external providers for its training. ‘There has been a recognition that the training isn’t purely for CPD progress anymore,’ says the firm’s head of training and development Deborah McCormack. ‘There is more rigour around the quality of lawyers and we have found that by using a blend of internal expertise and external providers who understand our business, our lawyers get a great start in their careers.’

Most UK firms are no strangers to providing this depth and breadth of training. The key for them is being able to sell the training offering internally and externally. ‘It is absolutely critical in terms of the recruitment process that we articulate our training processes properly,’ Freshfields global director of HR Kevin Hogarth says. ‘The interviews are now much more about what general business education associates will receive because partnership isn’t necessarily the one and only goal anymore. The fact that we are offering professional development with an internal dimension is a huge selling point.’

In recent years Linklaters has been particularly effective in getting its training message across, thanks in part to the launch of the Linklaters Law & Business School in 2008. Advised by a board which includes academic luminaries such as Ashish Nanda, professor of practice at Harvard Law School, and in-house lawyers including Christian Rau of Linde AG, the school develops courses for all levels of lawyers. Trainees are put through the new lawyer global orientation programme, which sees all new arrivals spend a week in London gaining entry-level training. The last course had 125 participants taught by 70 staff across the firm.

For newly qualified associates, the Magic Circle firm’s practice diplomas provide a training regime for the first four years of a junior lawyer’s career. Since 2008, 588 junior associates have enrolled on the diploma. Global knowledge and learning partner Michael Voisin says that, typically, a Linklaters associate will spend around 40 hours a year on training but a first year could do as much as 90. He adds that, training aside, an associate will spend 160 hours on other knowledge activities, meaning creation, collection and dissemination of knowledge, as well as accessing and learning from it. The firm has a ten-strong learning and development team in London with a further five regional knowledge and learning managers across its international network.

Voisin says the firm has got better at selling itself internally as a training provider. ‘These courses have to be sufficiently impressive for partners to take associates away from client-facing activities for a week. That is a demanding (but fair) sell for us,’ he adds.

Since he took over as managing partner at the start of 2008, Simon Davies has placed particular emphasis on the quality of the firm’s training. It was a lesson he learnt while he was head of Linklaters’ Asia business. ‘We found that there’s an inverse relationship between the amount of training that people receive and the attrition rate,’ he says. ‘When I came back to London it occurred to me that we had not focused sufficiently as a firm on knowledge and learning and if we did it would give us a sustainable advantage.’

Linklaters’ structured and derivatives managing associate Alyona Smith admits that the time spent on training is part and parcel of the job but it is necessary to stay ahead, especially on the technical side. ‘The emphasis has always been on training but more so now because we are being bombarded with regulatory changes,’ she says.

Smith, recently promoted to managing associate, has begun a three-year managing associate diploma. The first part saw her and her colleagues head off-site for a two-day course where, along with actors, they role played every twist and turn that a managing associate might face. She says that she learnt a lot about herself over the 48 hours, like testing her temperament with difficult clients.

It is not just the City players who have implemented sophisticated training structures. TLT has dubbed its associate development programme Aspire, run in conjunction with Ashridge Business School. Managing partner David Pester says the programme is put together to accommodate the four main learning styles: activists, pragmatists, theorists and reflectors. ‘Aspire is about developing practical skills and putting those into practice on projects of strategic importance to the business and it’s about encouraging them to think beyond the core elements of their day-to-day roles,’ Pester adds.

As Voisin and many others argue, lawyers at the highest level are hardwired to succeed through self-improvement. The structured training that firms deliver gives them the opportunity to do just that. Allied to this, associates are now operating in an increasingly competitive internal market, with the larger firms more hawkish on leverage and tougher than ever on promotion. Any perception that the level of engagement is dropping will not go unnoticed.

‘The happier you are to engage in deals and with the firm in general, the happier partners are to include you in what they are doing,’ Hyder Jumabhoy, a corporate associate at Freshfields, enthuses. ‘I think the firm’s attitude in general has become more inclusive – there is much more responsibility given to us from an early stage.’

See you after school

At the largest firms the majority of training is handled in-house. Norton Rose says that 95% of its training is done within the firm, with similar estimates from all the large City practices. When there is a need for outside teaching, firms do bring in accountants, barristers or business development specialists to supplement their offering. Freshfields uses a roster of business coaches as and when it needs the expertise. The firm says that around 50% of its current programmes are delivered by, or in conjunction with, external providers, such as consultancy firm Moller PSF Group. Eversheds turns to a number of different specialists, including business psychologists Pearn Kandola.

Junior lawyers are given guidance on exactly what is expected at each stage in their career. Norton Rose’s associate career development booklet is a dense 14-page guide to what the firm expects from its associates at every level and what they need to do to progress. At Eversheds, paralegals, trainees, associates and partners navigate their way through a matrix of overlapping goals and assessments on everything from client care to driving the firm’s profitability.

‘The psychological contract between employer and employee has fundamentally changed.’
Chris Stoakes, Hogan Lovells

The challenge is how to measure the success of training schemes. The vast majority of firms include some sort of metric that gauges individual engagement with training and is part of lawyers’ appraisals. Hogarth says the difficulties around assessing success through training come down to the problems in measuring cause and effect. ‘Training is rarely the only change that takes place,’ he comments. ‘We are looking into ways that we can do this and in particular to focus on the long-term effect of the investment that we put into our associate base.’

There’s no room for apathetic back-row dwellers in the modern law firm. As Hogarth points out: ‘The investment that we make can make a real difference to the average trainee.’

At the Norton Rose academy, Carolann Edwards is still casting around for answers on Norton Rose’s strategy. While more than a few scratch their heads, LB ducks out with a sick note, time for a little more homework. LB