Delivering a new generation of commercially-aware lawyers and leaders

The SRA is currently seeking the approval of its oversight regulator, the Legal Services Board, to implement the LETR’s recommendations from November 2016.

The LETR says that “learning outcomes for prescribed qualification routes into the regulated professions should be based on occupational analysis of the range of knowledge, skills and attributes required”. In other words, the current demands of the job should dictate the composition of education and training programmes in the sector.

Common sense

The idea that training should be designed to help people to perform and develop in their jobs will not seem like anything other than pure common sense to most. And, it is often the case that what the regulator requires is exceeded by the strategic and practical needs of a firm.

For instance, a law firm’s compliance policies might appear to tick all of the regulator’s boxes, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t real business risks which remain unaddressed, keeping the managing partner up at night.

Impactful learning

Similarly, your lawyers might be clocking up their CPD points, but how do you know that their learning is actually having an impact on your clients and your profitability? Your fee earners may have recently attended a training course on the black letter of the law when they could have benefited more from learning how
to develop their practice, or vice versa.

With clients increasingly wanting their lawyers to be more than just legal advisers and to actually guide them on strategic commercial decisions in core markets, it will come as no surprise that the LETR report concluded that training outcomes must place sufficient emphasis on commercial and social awareness.

But smarter law firms are already ahead of the game. They have not needed an external review to prompt them into seeking out high-quality commercial awareness training for their newly-qualified lawyers. They view it as essential – to keep their clients happy and to supply their firms with a new generation of commercially-minded leaders.

After all, given the number of law firm collapses in recent years, the ability of many senior leadership teams to run law firms successfully has been called into question. Large law firms are increasingly looking to the corporate world for the styles and skills they need to compete in the new order.

 

Clients first

Even if some of your lawyers have no aspirations to be leaders, commercial awareness training will help them to understand their clients’ viewpoint better and to offer holistic advice, which includes the commercial ramifications of any decisions taken. This will surely delight your clients and keep them coming back to your firm, rather than to the firm down the road which offers purely technical legal advice.

These skills are therefore no longer just the preserve of the largest law firms or the most ambitious lawyers who are on a track to becoming managing partners.

Instead, they are vital for all fee earners, to fend off the competition.

True, many law firm HR directors bemoan the lack of commercial awareness in trainees joining their firm. A lot has been written about how universities and law schools should do more to train would-be lawyers in the business and interpersonal skills they will need to succeed, whether in a traditional partnership structure or in an alternative business structure, like the Co-op for example.

Responsibility for learning

However, placing responsibility for achieving training outcomes onto the hiring law firm means waking up to the reality that, if law firms want their next generation of lawyers and leaders to be commercially savvy, they will have to provide that missing commercial awareness training themselves.

Commercial training also makes far more sense to junior lawyers when they are already employed by a firm, working on cases and meeting clients than it
does in the classroom.

But it’s not easy to put together a business skills training programme from inside a law firm. Any internal training programme will focus on the particular environment of the firm, which is hardly going to lead to innovative thinking.

The firm’s training budget is another consideration. While commercial awareness training will undoubtedly deliver a long-term return on investment by improving client retention, the initial outlay can be daunting, especially
when there are so many competing demands for investment as firms now
look towards growth.

Anytime, anywhere

Thankfully, at the same time as the LETR review is driving regulatory change in legal training, new technologies are also emerging to make training more efficient. The ability to learn without having to clear the diary for a day or two can be very attractive in an environment in which time is money. Getting fee earners out of the office to attend face-to-face courses, even with CPD deadlines looming, has been a continuous headache for many law firm heads of training.

It is now possible to learn at lunchtime, after hours, on the train or at home, thanks to web-based technologies which deliver video presentations and other material direct to your PC, laptop, iPad or smartphone.

Law firms should capitalise on this anytime, anywhere learning and use these new training platforms to enhance fee earners’ skill sets without jeopardising client work.

A flexible MCS1

One such platform brings the SRA’s compulsory Management Course Stage One (MCS1) to the devices of junior lawyers everywhere. Cutting the cost of training with a price that starts from just £165 per user, Managing Partner’s new MCS1 online (https://mcs1online.com) is one of the first courses on the market of this type. Most importantly, learners can access the modular content in convenient chunks of time to fit around their busy client workloads.

But, in the spirit of the LETR, MCS1 online delivers far more than what is required to tick the regulator’s box. Fully approved by the SRA, it has been designed with the needs of large and medium-sized law firms in mind. Set in the context of the highly competitive legal services market and the increasingly complex and international nature of legal cases, the aim is to develop management thinking early on in a lawyer’s career. It is the kind of training that good managing partners want their juniors to have, compulsory or not.

With the presenter list including those who advise the senior management teams of the best City firms on business strategy, Tony Reiss says “this programme offers junior lawyers access to some big-name trainers who normally deliver workshops to senior associates and partners. Some great insights at a modest price”.

Just one of the practical tips offered to junior lawyers during the course video is “network with juniors at the client, because they may be useful to you in the future when they take up senior positions”. The video is accompanied by presentation slides; a workbook featuring individual and group exercises; relevant extracts from Managing Partner’s management reports; and a graded online assessment.

Excitingly, the technology behind MCS1 online can deliver more than just mobile learning too. Law firm heads of training will be able to monitor the progress of their learners and their assessment grades, which will make chasing solicitors at the end of their third year a lot less arduous. They will also be able to stimulate learning and check understanding through a secure online discussion forum which is only accessible to learners at the same firm.

Delivering the commercial awareness regulatory outcome through high-quality training on a cost-effective platform that is accessible anytime and anywhere – that has to be the key to developing the managing partners of the future.

Leah Darbyshire is head of content at Managing Partner events. If you have any questions about MCS1 Online, please call her on 0207 566 8275 or email ldarbyshire@ark-group.com.