Teaching new tricks: How to help lawyers to learn new skills

In many ways, law firms are the ultimate learning organisations. They are full of clever, self-motivated and ambitious professionals with a track record of academic success and a focus on developing expertise in their chosen field. Lawyers are typically A-grade students who pass exams with ease, absorb information quickly and relish the challenge of keeping abreast of changes to the law.

For young lawyers, private practice is, in effect, a postgraduate school where they can apply what they have learnt at law school in a commercial environment. The training contract, just like the ‘articles’ of the past, encapsulates the apprentice model of juniors learning from seniors.

Yet, with so much demanded of lawyers these days, the capacity required to develop wider commercial and interpersonal skills, alongside deep technical knowledge, is under sharp focus. Firms expect their associates as they progress to become skilful in negotiation, project management, people leadership and client relationship management.

Clients take technical excellence as a given in their legal advisors. They also expect an understanding of the commercial issues facing their business and the ability to form and sustain a productive relationship. Lawyers’ careers are at risk of plateauing without these wider skills as clients gravitate towards those they consider to be multi-skilled business advisors.

Given their intellectual credentials, it is perhaps surprising that so many lawyers struggle to develop skills as easily as they acquire knowledge. An understanding of how lawyers learn, however, can help to explain why this might be, and can assist in determining the right mix of development programmes and training methods that both support and accelerate learning amongst lawyers.

Psychological barriers

Bass and Vaughan defined learning ?as “a relatively permanent change in behaviour that occurs as a result of practice and experience”.¹

Practice is at the heart of learning a skill and this presents the first challenge for lawyers. While knowledge can be acquired by studying hard and committing facts to memory, developing a skill requires an acceptance of initial incompetence that improves only through practising something over and over again.

Lawyers are typically insecure about their abilities and make constant comparisons of how good they are compared with their peers. They therefore feel particularly uncomfortable with showing any type of perceived weakness in front of their colleagues. If that were not enough of a barrier to learning, lawyers are also under constant pressure and practising a new skill requires both time and patience.

As a consequence, most firms experience high levels of training programme cancellations in topics such as influencing, presentation, interviewing, giving feedback and negotiation – the so-called ‘soft’ skills. Strong arguments are typically put forward about lack of time and clients needing to come first, but at the heart of this resistance is a fear of exploring areas that lawyers know instinctively they will be initially incompetent at, which makes them ?deeply uncomfortable.

Methods of learning

The style of learning that most lawyers prefer presents another significant barrier to personal development. Honey and Mumford’s research identified four distinct types of learners: activists, reflectors, theorists and pragmatists.²

Given the academic background and typically introverted nature of many lawyers, it is not surprising that the majority learn as either reflectors or theorists. Reflectors learn best when observing someone else, reading books, or surfing the internet. They need time to think before they act and the opportunity to reflect upon what they have learnt. Theorists learn best when they can relate the learning to ?a system, model, concept or theory.

So, for them, taking part in question and answer sessions, being stretched intellectually or solving problems that require rigorous analysis and logical thought all help them to understand and learn new things.

Training programmes centred on role playing to develop skills for those with these preferred learning styles are doomed to failure. Not only do lawyers dislike the intrinsic lack of authenticity involved and the way it shows up their incompetence, they also find it hard to digest and reflect upon what they are learning through the act of role playing.

There are, however, practical and proven ways of overcoming these barriers to learning. As an alternative to role-playing, for example, lawyers respond well to observing two professionally-trained actors playing out a scene between an associate and a partner or a partner and a client, in a situation they are all familiar with, such as giving feedback or negotiating ?on a price.

Encouraging lawyers to watch, comment on and brief the actors on how to tackle the next part of the conversation, without the pressure of being in the spotlight themselves, allows them to explore and develop their interpersonal skills in a supportive environment. Through this method, they acquire the tools and knowledge that enable them to practice the skill in question back in the office and, by doing so, their competence grows.

Alongside workshops using observe and learn techniques, the active use of work allocation as a developmental tool is a critical way for lawyers to experience a variety of assignments and to accelerate their learning. Working with different principals and partners with their own ways of working and thinking also makes a crucial difference in rounding out an individual’s skills.

Inviting associates to attend meetings and to observe and learn from how each principal approaches a negotiation or ?a client meeting helps lawyers to develop skills in handling commercial situations and to develop their own leadership style.

Quality of supervision is critically important, and all supervisors need to be trained in how to facilitate effective learning. The best supervisors encourage juniors to answer their own questions, to share their thoughts and put forward arguments, and ?they delegate rigorously as a ?means of transferring knowledge ?and creating understanding.

There is a risk in today’s world of electronic communication and on-screen document review that the profession loses the innate benefits of coaching that took place when documents were discussed and marked up at the principal’s table.

Principals therefore need to find ways of replicating this type of on-the-job learning through the way they interact with their juniors and what they expect of them. Integrating a short debrief conversation after every meeting, reflecting on what went well and what lessons were learnt, is an excellent way ?of fostering continuous development without needing to invest time in formal training sessions.

Senior lawyer development

As lawyers become more senior, their need to learn does not diminish. It’s never easy to persuade a busy experienced professional to spend discretionary time in active learning, but one way to do so is to ensure that the style of teaching reflects and respects the experience and learning preferences of those attending.

A didactic approach is likely to lead to challenge, resistance or withdrawal from the intended learning. A Socratic approach however, is much more likely to lead to active engagement and a thirst to learn more.

Programmes based on real-life case studies or scenarios, where asking questions of the participants is the prime methodology, have been proven to work extremely well with lawyers. For many, this style of learning is reminiscent of their days at law school, with the same fear and stimulation of not knowing what you are going to be asked and not wanting to be shown wanting by your peers.

In a Socratic style of teaching, all answers to questions are responded to with further questions that develop thinking in a fuller and deeper way, and all thoughts are treated as in need of development. For lawyers, this is intellectually stimulating and an enjoyable intense experience that motivates them to learn.

It is just as important to encourage more senior lawyers to broaden their skills through different experiences as it is for more junior lawyers. Client secondments, international assignments and cross-practice marketing initiatives are obvious ways of tackling this.

A problem-solving approach can also be taken by giving real client or business issues to a group of lawyers who ?don’t normally work together, and charging them to come up with solutions that they must present to a group of senior partners.

This approach allows lawyers to learn from each other, to explore issues they have not come across before and to develop their commercial understanding of how to get decisions taken and executed. As importantly, it is often a source of new ideas to old challenges and can create impetus for action.

Organisational change

To be a genuine learning organisation, a law firm needs to not just have a range of tailored approaches to on-the-job and more traditional learning activities. It also needs to create a culture where learning is actively encouraged and mistakes are seen as opportunities to reflect and learn, rather than to criticise and assign blame.

Embedding an expectation of active learning in the annual appraisal process, and making everyone responsible ?for their own personal development, ?serve to underpin a culture of ?continuous improvement.

Partners need to be true role models by openly acknowledging their own skill gaps and demonstrating a personal commitment and enthusiasm for learning. Emphasising the importance of mentoring, and encouraging senior lawyers to take responsibility for the development of their juniors, helps to reinforce the apprentice model beyond the training contract and provides organic growth in skills, knowledge and experience within a firm and across all practice areas.

Not least of all, lawyers need to be brave and prepared to jump in and try new things. As a teacher once said: “you don’t learn to swim by sitting by the pool and waving your arms: you have to get into the water”.

 

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Helping lawyers to learn new skills

• Use case studies to broaden thinking and develop good commercial judgment.

• Actively use work allocation as a developmental tool.

• Demonstrate skills in action for lawyers to observe and replicate.

• Avoid role playing as a learning technique.

• Set up mixed learning groups where lawyers are given real business challenges to solve.

• Keep all learning intellectually stimulating, intense and fast paced.

• Adopt a Socratic teaching style.

• Reinforce the apprentice model with the use of mentors.

• Embed the requirement for continuous learning into the firm’s performance appraisal system.

• Create a culture where learning is positively encouraged and mistakes are learnt from.

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Jill King is a consultant and the former global HR director at Linklaters ?(www.jkinsights.co.uk)

Endnotes

1. See Training in Industry: The Management of Learning, Bernard M. Bass and James A. Vaughan, Wadsworth Publishing, 1966

2. See The Manual of Learning Styles, Peter Honey and Alan Mumford, 1992

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