Training rising stars: Training young lawyers in relationship law firms

Key takeaway points:

1. Take a long-term view of what you want to achieve from the training programme. Too often, training can become a series of one-off events with short-term appeal and effect. A high-value training and development programme with a longer perspective will enrich knowledge and skills and have a lasting effect on participants.

2. The aims of the training programme should be to share knowledge and best practice and to equip lawyers with the tools needed to build their practice, retain and develop talent and provide excellent client service.

3. Planning is the key to success. On average, a training programme the size of the A&O Global Academy will take approximately one year to plan, including market research.

4. Listen to your target audience before, during and after the training programme. This will help you to continue to develop the training programme for the future.

5. Obtain engagement from and provide acknowledgement of legal and business skills trainers. Legal technical trainers may be busy transactional lawyers. They not only deliver the legal technical sessions but are often asked to co-present or facilitate business skills sessions. Use their time efficiently and, where appropriate, accredit training with continuing education points.

6. Build a culture of learning and development for future generations so that knowledge and best practice are shared globally.

 

Relationship law firms provide legal advice on local law in jurisdictions in which we do not have an office. As such, it is important that lawyers in these firms are not only legal experts in their field but are able to work well with our lawyers and share our commitment to delivering a first-class legal service for clients on a global scale.

Of course, in an increasingly competitive international market, offering a first-class legal service is not sufficient. Clients operating in multi-jurisdictional markets are demanding cost effective, high value legal and commercial advice from lawyers they like and trust. Therefore, a close working relationship and a sense of shared values are important features of these relationships.

Over the past few years, Allen & Overy (A&O) has hosted a number of networking opportunities for relationship firms, which include the Business of Law seminars (held four times a year) and the popular annual Global Markets Conference, targeted at senior and managing partners across our network of 140 relationship firms.

In recognition of the importance of building strong relationships and providing an opportunity for these law firms to network and share best practice, we launched our first training and development programme for young talent at relationship law firms in July this year, called the A&O Global Academy.

The three-day programme, which we believe is the first of its kind in the market, was designed by our firm’s heads of training from banking, corporate, litigation and learning ?and development.

It is targeted at prospective and junior partners at relationship firms ?that do business with our firm. The ?managing partners of selected relationship firms are invited to nominate rising stars in their organisations to attend the programme.

The first programme, which was held at our London office, was delivered by transactional lawyers from across our network, training consultants who are primarily recently retired A&O partners and a selected group of external trainers who deliver our internal development programmes for senior associates and recently made-up partners.

There were, of course, various challenges of designing a training and development programme for a diverse group of lawyers.

Providing targeted training

This programme is neither a simple training event nor an ad-hoc marketing exercise. I and the other training heads had to come up with a programme with substance and longevity.

As our senior partner, David Morely, said at the programme launch, we are all faced with challenges of attracting and nurturing talent in our organisation. The academy is intended to go some way towards addressing those challenges.

Our challenge was to produce a training programme that:

• encourages lawyers to share knowledge and best practice;

• equips them with the tools they ?need to build their practice;

• retains and develops talent; and

• ensures we provided excellent ?client service around the world.

As most training professionals and recipients of good-quality training will know, targeting training at an appropriate audience or experience level is critical. The challenge for us was to design a programme that would be of interest ?to a very diverse group of lawyers ?from multiple jurisdictions with ?different skill sets.

After you have identified the target audience, it is important to ask what they want or would expect from the training programme. So, a detailed listening exercise was also needed, which meant a number of conference calls with lawyers in different countries. The listening exercise also continued informally throughout the programme and, of course, following the event. This is an important part of any long-term training programme.

At A&O, the majority of legal technical training is delivered by our transactional lawyers. They are busy people, so using their time effectively and acknowledging the value of their expertise and contributions is ?paramount. Supporting lawyers by sourcing training materials and accrediting the appropriate training ?with continuing education points, for example, is very helpful.

For the global academy, we asked a number of partners from our international offices to provide training. So, good coordination was needed for ?the programme.

Designing the programme

Our first challenge was to come up with a list of legal technical and business skills topics that might appeal to a diverse group of lawyers. We developed topics based on our own experience of running structured training programmes for our lawyers and clients.

We then conducted telephone interviews with a number of relationship firms to agree topics that would be ?of interest to their junior partners. We also asked them whether they would prefer a three-day or a five-day programme. There was a 50:50 split between firms wanting a three-day programme and those wanting a ?five-day programme.

We decided to run a three-day programme after considering some ?basic logistical issues, such as internal training room availability, the busyness ?of lawyers and, of course, the timing of the Olympics.

Once we were satisfied with the choice of topics, our next challenge was to structure the programme – which comprised 15 legal technical topics and seven highly-interactive business skills sessions – into three days and to give our relationship firms the flexibility of choosing the topics they wanted their lawyers to attend.

In order to achieve this, we ran the legal technical programmes comprising corporate, finance and litigation as parallel sessions on day one, followed by a choice of business skills programmes on days two and three.

The idea was that the relationship firms – which registered online for the global academy – would choose one legal technical programme for day one, two business skills sessions for day two and another two sessions for day three.

The outcome

Over 60 relationship firms attended our global academy in July 2012. The feedback has been exceptional. Satisfaction levels, the positive impact and amount of goodwill surrounding the programme have all been very high.

Our global markets partner Stephen Denyer, who is responsible for activities relating to relationship firms, noted that the reception the inaugural global academy received from participants is testament to the huge appetite for learning and sharing across jurisdictions large and small.

The most striking feedback from relationship firms is that the global academy has provided an excellent networking opportunity for firms across the globe. The business skills sessions in particular have been very popular, with firms commenting:

“Great opportunity for small market law firms to develop other non-legal but not less important skills.”

“Great opportunity to meet colleagues around the world and ?share experiences, develop new skills and get great practical advice from ?A&O partners.”

“Educational and intellectually challenging academy. Good ?networking opportunity.”

We have no doubt that a training programme such as this will continue to deepen our relationships with our relationship firm network for many years to come. We hope that the global academy will become a rite of passage for all junior partners at our relationship firms, who will one day lead these firms to new heights.

The global academy is now a key element in our suite of programmes for relationship firms. The next global academy will take place in June 2013.

Rita Dev is the global head of banking training at international law firm ?Allen & Overy (www.allenovery.com)