When Jennifer Teskey became a partner at Norton Rose Canada LLP (now Norton Rose Fulbright) last year, the global law firm sent her to London for training. Most of the annual three-day orientation session, in which about 50 newly minted partners from around the world participated, covered so-called soft skills: business development, negotiation skills, leadership training and “emotional intelligence” — that is, learning how to navigate difficult conversations with clients.
Firm-driven training isn't new for Teskey, who practises commercial litigation. Shortly after graduating with a common-law degree from the University of Ottawa in 2002, she joined Ogilvy Renault LLP. At the firm, prior to its merger with Norton Rose, she received training in both business skills (how to work in teams and the realities of practice) and professional skills, in which she and other associates in litigation would argue mock motions in front of the firm's partners and get their feedback.
A couple of mergers later, now at Norton Rose Fulbright, Teskey has helped train associates through the firm's “International Academy,” which relies on in-house and outside academic subject-area experts to provide associates with coursework on such topics as understanding Norton Rose Fulbright's goals, business and project management, strategy, law-firm economics and “making an impact in meetings.”
She explains that the business skills she's acquired – understanding law as a business, learning how to manage teams of people, working effectively with clients – were honed by the training offered at the firm, which is fashioned from feedback received from associates who identify skills they want to learn or refresh. “You learn certain things in a classroom at law school and learn other things by doing them in a law-firm environment.”
When Ogilvy Renault merged with Norton Rose two years ago, the former Montreal-based national firm “tapped into one of the world's best knowledge-management systems,” says Andrew Fleming, managing partner of Norton Rose Fulbright's Toronto office. “It recognizes that teaching lawyers the law and how to apply it is not enough because a large percentage of any lawyer's day is not practising law in the strict sense. It is now about client management, project management, financial management, and life coaching to help partners and associates become leaders who can motivate people.”
He says that as a global firm, Norton Rose Fulbright – whose 700 lawyers in Canada make it the third-largest in the country – also faces a major challenge in aligning the different cultures of the some 3,800 lawyers in offices on every continent save Antarctica. “What better way to do that than through training and getting people thinking along the same lines in terms of client development and maintenance, and practice management,” says Fleming, who leads Norton Rose Fulbright's financial institutions practice in Canada.
The firm's training programs include one for practice leaders, which has been approved by the Institute of Leadership and Management in the United Kingdom. For its heads of departments and chief operating officers around the world, the international firm offers a business service excellence program that addresses such issues as leading a department, implementing and managing change, and dealing with conflict. A similar program is available for partners, with one specially tailored for partner team leaders.
As well, Norton Rose Fulbright sends young lawyers on secondments to offices in other countries. For instance, several new hires from Canada are currently working in Australia and Dubai as part of this secondment program. “We identify future leaders amongst our junior partners who stand out as being particularly strong in terms of client management and as stars in our system, and routinely send them for outside coaching to help them in terms of dealing with clients, the media, the community,” says Fleming, who after 38 years of practising law also takes advantage of the firm's training opportunities. “I recently had a two-hour session on managing time effectively,” he offers.
Apart from the international secondments and the partner-orientation sessions in the UK, almost all of Norton Rose Fulbright's training in Canada is delivered in-house, led by Michelle Gage, national director of legal talent, who oversees professional skills and development programs for associates and lawyers, and is joined by a group of knowledge-management program coordinators who arrange for courses to be delivered by in-house or external subject specialists, typically from the global firm's head office in London.
Fleming explains that, before outside experts train Norton Rose Fulbright lawyers, they will interview the firm's clients in a given geographic area and find out what they like and do not like about the legal services they receive, which in turn helps the trainers tailor the program appropriately. “We will also go to partners who are developing a practice area and equip them with the skills to deal with a particular client in that area,” he says.
The key is focused training, especially for young lawyers, according to Fleming, who sees articling as “a bit anachronistic.” He says it “wouldn't impact anything” if that one-year mandatory program disappeared and was replaced by the training law firms provide their young associates.
“Articling meets some of the training needs. But it's only for one year and is very broad and you have to learn all subjects, such as how to file notices of objection to liens on land, which may be totally useless to some lawyers.”
Marlene Kane articled and practised law at multi-industry-focused McMillan LLP before becoming its National Director of Professional Development, responsible for the firm's training regime. “We try to provide our lawyers with tools, training and support at each stage of their career, from summer student to equity partner,” she explains. “We want to deliver the right training at the right time to the right audience. As a result, we focus on the key drivers for success at each stage of a lawyer's career because, for example, what makes you a successful junior associate does not necessarily make you a successful senior associate.”
Recognizing that recent law-school graduates received an “education” as opposed to “training” in law, McMillan places considerable emphasis on equipping its young lawyers with skills needed to solve client problems under the realities of time constraints and possibly limited resources, while helping these new associates manoeuvre the steep learning curve they face, according to Kane, a former corporate lawyer at the firm who holds a certificate in adult training and development from the University of Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.
At the front end, McMillan introduces its summer and articling students to the realities of practising law. “We give them the message that law is a profession, but it's also a business where we solve clients' problems,” says Kane. “That's an important message for them to have, which permeates all of their training.”
Geoff Moysa, a 32-year-old senior associate in the litigation and dispute resolution group at McMillan, chose to begin his relationship with the firm in 2005 when he was still a summer student because of its “robust” training system.
“Right at the outset, you hit the ground running, with two weeks devoted to intensive training — sharpening your legal research skills, making sure your memo writing is up to snuff, learning about what technology, such as document systems, are available to lawyers in the firm,” he says. “Then every couple of weeks, summer students have in-depth sessions with each of the practice groups – such as competition and litigation – to get a sense of what they do on a daily basis and then go out for an evening with the lawyers in the group to spend some quality time with them. That's very helpful when you're thrown into a law-firm environment for the first time, when you not only have to complete assignments for lawyers but also have to navigate the procedures of a 200-lawyer office.”
The goal, says Kane, is to provide the firm's young lawyers with a solid foundation in such core skills as legal research, analysis and memo writing, where new associates receive a legal brief at 9 a.m. and have to hand a memo in to their writing mentors by 5 p.m. that day.
That exercise is “immensely valuable,” says Moysa. “In my past life I was a freelance writer, but when I submitted my first assignment, my writing mentor very nicely hacked it apart and rebuilt it from the ground up — and I believe I became a more effective and concise writer as a result.”
Kane says that McMillan also trains its young lawyers on business etiquette. “If they're at a cocktail reception, how do they break into a group already talking, or introduce themselves to someone who may be standing alone? How do they make small talk or remember people's names? We even give them tips on business dinner etiquette, since a lot of students may not have grown up with formal dinners around the table. We want them to be comfortable in a business environment because that's where their clients come from.”
McMillan holds an annual national orientation session at its largest office in Toronto for all of its new associates from other offices in Montreal, Ottawa, Calgary and Vancouver. “Most of them have already summered and articled with us, so they know the firm very well,” says Kane. “But we want to be very transparent about what the firm's expectations are and cover things like meeting their professional responsibilities as well as so-called soft skills like tailoring their communication to the needs of their clients. For example, identifying which clients like details and which do not.”
“We are a business law firm and want our young associates to think like businesspeople, whether they happen to litigate or do deals.”
To that end, new associates attend the “McMillan Business Academy,” or MBA in shorthand. Half of the four-day intensive training program consists of a competition in which young lawyers are grouped into teams to simulate operating a business, and the team that ends up with the most profitable enterprise wins a prize (a $500 donation to a charity of their choice). “It helps them understand the pressures and stresses and become more savvy about the way businesses are run,” explains Kane.
New associates who are attending the business academy also spend a day each on accounting and negotiation skills. Moysa, who took advantage of the academy as well, says the program is intended to encourage associates to “think like lawyers and think about how our clients work, so much of the focus is on understanding the client business end of a transaction.”
Senior associates, meanwhile, receive training on business development and leadership skills, and this past April McMillan held a retreat for them in the southern Ontario town of Niagara-on-the-Lake. The one-day program consisted of a session on developing a practice, which involved an external trainer and an in-house panel of equity partners who shared their experiences of how they secured and retained their initial clients.
Senior associates participate in the firm's training regime too. For instance, Moysa helps articling students with basic legal research skills. Other sessions teach them how to be effective team workers in specific practice areas, such as the financial-services group, where they are presented with a case on, say, a debt-financing transaction and have to figure out how to handle it with their colleagues. In addition, articling students are invited to attend brainstorming sessions at McMillan involving lawyers from their respective practice groups.
Junior associates also receive hands-on training, such as in litigation, in which Moysa again is involved. “We cover everything from preparing for trial and doing a first discovery effectively, to how to work with expert witnesses and common mistakes young advocates make and how to avoid them,” he explains. “We also let students sit in on those sessions so they can get a sense of the kind of training associates receive, and that helps them figure out what practice group they might want to work in when they come back as lawyers.”
Moysa, who has practised in McMillan's litigation group since 2007, says the training evolves as lawyers “grow up” within the firm. “It transitions from core legal skills at the beginning into practice management and building business as you grow,” he explains. “There's a real push from management to make sure we're always updating our skill set, and that we're on the cutting edge both substantively and in terms of how the firm is run.”
McMillan runs retreats focused on leadership that help senior associates stay on top of their heavy workloads, preserve their client relationships, and build teams of juniors to work with them on files, explains Kane, who points out that all lawyers at the firm receive ongoing substantive legal training within their practice groups, and non-equity partners can take advantage of business-development coaching.
In addition, she says the firm offers external coaching for its associates. “It's no secret that lawyers need to be resilient since they're in a very challenging profession, and we want our associates to stay sturdy and thrive. For instance, if they have work-life balance issues or are about to go on maternity leave, they can contact coaches available to them across the firm.”Should a lawyer have problems managing his or her time, McMillan gives them access to a “productivity” coach, says Kane. “We also address remedial issues, so if someone in a practice group needs help or someone has high potential, we make sure they get whatever they require to accomplish or achieve that goal.”
On substantive legal skills, the firm's partners train students and associates. On negotiation and presentation skills, as well as business etiquette, McMillan relies on outside consultants, according to Kane.
The firm also reaches out to its in-house-counsel clients and runs regular webinars – as it recently did on human rights in the workplace – and seminars, such as one on social media that featured McMillan partner Tim Murphy, TV Ontario anchor Steve Paiken and David Herle, principal partner of Toronto-based strategic communications firm The Gandalf Group. McMillan's lawyers can also access videotaped internal training programs posted on the firm's internal intranet. “We do competency-based training,” says Kane, “for our lawyers at various stages of their career and incorporate adult-learning principles, and deliver all of this in a variety of ways so we reach everyone in the firm.”
Having spent seven years on the client side as senior counsel at the Royal Bank of Canada, Carla Swansburg was struck by how often young lawyers with outside law firms didn't grasp the basics of their practice. “Often new lawyers don't understand the real-world practicalities of what they're doing, and that it's not always about intellectualizing a question of law, but sometimes involves balancing risk as opposed to eliminating it.”
Now as Director of Professional Development at Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP, Swansburg is committed to ensuring that the national business law firm has “well-trained” lawyers rather than just simply “good technical” lawyers. “The senior leadership of the firm recognizes soft skills and leadership and development as key to the future of the firm and a significant differentiator in terms of our legal talent.”
One of her first initiatives after joining Blakes in 2011 was to launch a “school of business” and equip the firm's newer lawyers with the language of financial-statement analysis and macroeconomics spoken on Bay Street. “This is it to give them a set of tools they can use when dealing with their clients,” explains Swansburg, who recently invited former RBC Global Asset Management Chief Economist Patricia Croft to come to the firm and talk about the state of the global economy.
Inculcating “corporate fluency” in its lawyers is one of Blakes' training goals, along with leadership development, communication and presentation skills tutoring, all of which is supported by ongoing mentoring, according to Swansburg.
Like McMillan, Blakes also targets its lawyers at various stages of their career. A week-long national intensive training week is held every year for new recruits to introduce them to the firm and provide them with a primer on substantive law. Junior and senior associates receive training on leadership, delegating, and communication and presentation skills. For new partners, the training is more focused on business and network development.
Swansburg says that the mandatory continuing legal education requirement has increased attendance in training sessions offered at Blakes. “The senior levels of practice weren't necessarily as interested and engaged before CLE was introduced, so we've used it as an opportunity to bring them skills in-house they might not otherwise have.” The firm also offers training for its in-house corporate counsel clients who need to fulfil their CLE requirements.
Swansburg points out that Blakes has moved away from lecture-style learning and has embraced case studies and group discussions as part of its training program. She says that lawyers learn better when they work in smaller groups and are presented with scenarios, as was the case recently when Blakes held a training session on guidelines for employers under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act and had lawyers role-play situations that might arise in the workplace reflecting the provincial law.
If they cannot physically attend a workshop, the firm's lawyers can access a new online training initiative that provides tutorials on such topics as maximizing the use of technology in their practices. That, says Swansburg, also keeps costs down, since Blakes can then use its budget to bring in outside experts to lead training on leadership development and more people-oriented communication, presentation, networking and negotiation skills.
She explains that since Blakes is a full-service law firm, it almost always has lawyers with some expertise in a certain practice area to lead in-house training in substantive law as well as emerging issues, such as social media, anti-spam legislation, and regulatory changes involving taxation or industry.
“Sometimes we'll send our lawyers to external conferences, but only if it involves a specialized area that we feel we need to do that to obtain outside expertise,” says Swansburg, who prior to joining RBC spent a decade practising civil litigation, mostly with Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP. “We have such a breadth of subject-matter experts in-house that the core of our budget is really devoted to hiring external consultants, since the substantive law training led by our senior lawyers has no hard costs associated with it and only involves their time.”
Again as with McMillan, Blakes offers its lawyers access to outside coaches if, for instance, they are returning to work following maternity leave or are attempting to ramp up business for their practice.
Ultimately, Blakes' training is about instilling “real-world practicality” into the practices of the firm's young lawyers beyond the “academics of law,” according to Swansburg. “Unless they're MBA grads, they may not necessarily understand how businesses operate and manage risks, how financial statements are analyzed, how the global economy works or how currency fluctuations may affect some of the industries the firm works in. So we try to fill in those gaps for new lawyers.”
The educational emphasis on business development and leadership skills that extend beyond teaching just basic practice skills reflects a change in what law firms are training their young lawyers, according to Karen Bell, Senior Director of Professional and Client Education at McCarthy Tétrault LLP, who is also involved in changing how skills training is delivered.
In light of the time constraints all lawyers at all levels face and the different ways in which adults learn, Bell – a former business litigator who created the 15-year-old practicePRO risk management program for the Lawyers' Professional Indemnity Company (LAWPRO) – believes that incorporating some degree of online learning is one way firms can make training both more accessible and flexible for associates. At McCarthy Tétrault, she is moving to incorporate a more interactive component to in-class learning and placing more emphasis on new technologies to provide young lawyers – via their desktops, iPads or smartphones – with basic information and guidance that prepares them to work effectively on files.
Bell feels an e-learning component will advance the way lawyers receive training at law firms in the future. “For us, it's about making the learning experience more meaningful and comprehensive for our associates, and making our investment in training them more efficient.”
But the innovation doesn't end there. “The firm is also looking at ways to ensure that our young lawyers appreciate the clients' perspective,” explains Bell. “To that end, we set up sessions which bring together our lawyers with their in-house counsel peers, where they have the opportunity to learn together and learn from each other.”
She says that these new directions in training will continue to shape the firm's talent-development platform, McCarthy Tétrault Advance. “The same holds true for the profession at large as it explores new avenues to equip lawyers with the means to better serve clients.”
Christopher Guly is a freelance journalist based in Ottawa.
Firm-driven training isn't new for Teskey, who practises commercial litigation. Shortly after graduating with a common-law degree from the University of Ottawa in 2002, she joined Ogilvy Renault LLP. At the firm, prior to its merger with Norton Rose, she received training in both business skills (how to work in teams and the realities of practice) and professional skills, in which she and other associates in litigation would argue mock motions in front of the firm's partners and get their feedback.
A couple of mergers later, now at Norton Rose Fulbright, Teskey has helped train associates through the firm's “International Academy,” which relies on in-house and outside academic subject-area experts to provide associates with coursework on such topics as understanding Norton Rose Fulbright's goals, business and project management, strategy, law-firm economics and “making an impact in meetings.”
She explains that the business skills she's acquired – understanding law as a business, learning how to manage teams of people, working effectively with clients – were honed by the training offered at the firm, which is fashioned from feedback received from associates who identify skills they want to learn or refresh. “You learn certain things in a classroom at law school and learn other things by doing them in a law-firm environment.”
When Ogilvy Renault merged with Norton Rose two years ago, the former Montreal-based national firm “tapped into one of the world's best knowledge-management systems,” says Andrew Fleming, managing partner of Norton Rose Fulbright's Toronto office. “It recognizes that teaching lawyers the law and how to apply it is not enough because a large percentage of any lawyer's day is not practising law in the strict sense. It is now about client management, project management, financial management, and life coaching to help partners and associates become leaders who can motivate people.”
He says that as a global firm, Norton Rose Fulbright – whose 700 lawyers in Canada make it the third-largest in the country – also faces a major challenge in aligning the different cultures of the some 3,800 lawyers in offices on every continent save Antarctica. “What better way to do that than through training and getting people thinking along the same lines in terms of client development and maintenance, and practice management,” says Fleming, who leads Norton Rose Fulbright's financial institutions practice in Canada.
The firm's training programs include one for practice leaders, which has been approved by the Institute of Leadership and Management in the United Kingdom. For its heads of departments and chief operating officers around the world, the international firm offers a business service excellence program that addresses such issues as leading a department, implementing and managing change, and dealing with conflict. A similar program is available for partners, with one specially tailored for partner team leaders.
As well, Norton Rose Fulbright sends young lawyers on secondments to offices in other countries. For instance, several new hires from Canada are currently working in Australia and Dubai as part of this secondment program. “We identify future leaders amongst our junior partners who stand out as being particularly strong in terms of client management and as stars in our system, and routinely send them for outside coaching to help them in terms of dealing with clients, the media, the community,” says Fleming, who after 38 years of practising law also takes advantage of the firm's training opportunities. “I recently had a two-hour session on managing time effectively,” he offers.
Apart from the international secondments and the partner-orientation sessions in the UK, almost all of Norton Rose Fulbright's training in Canada is delivered in-house, led by Michelle Gage, national director of legal talent, who oversees professional skills and development programs for associates and lawyers, and is joined by a group of knowledge-management program coordinators who arrange for courses to be delivered by in-house or external subject specialists, typically from the global firm's head office in London.
Fleming explains that, before outside experts train Norton Rose Fulbright lawyers, they will interview the firm's clients in a given geographic area and find out what they like and do not like about the legal services they receive, which in turn helps the trainers tailor the program appropriately. “We will also go to partners who are developing a practice area and equip them with the skills to deal with a particular client in that area,” he says.
The key is focused training, especially for young lawyers, according to Fleming, who sees articling as “a bit anachronistic.” He says it “wouldn't impact anything” if that one-year mandatory program disappeared and was replaced by the training law firms provide their young associates.
“Articling meets some of the training needs. But it's only for one year and is very broad and you have to learn all subjects, such as how to file notices of objection to liens on land, which may be totally useless to some lawyers.”
Marlene Kane articled and practised law at multi-industry-focused McMillan LLP before becoming its National Director of Professional Development, responsible for the firm's training regime. “We try to provide our lawyers with tools, training and support at each stage of their career, from summer student to equity partner,” she explains. “We want to deliver the right training at the right time to the right audience. As a result, we focus on the key drivers for success at each stage of a lawyer's career because, for example, what makes you a successful junior associate does not necessarily make you a successful senior associate.”
Recognizing that recent law-school graduates received an “education” as opposed to “training” in law, McMillan places considerable emphasis on equipping its young lawyers with skills needed to solve client problems under the realities of time constraints and possibly limited resources, while helping these new associates manoeuvre the steep learning curve they face, according to Kane, a former corporate lawyer at the firm who holds a certificate in adult training and development from the University of Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.
At the front end, McMillan introduces its summer and articling students to the realities of practising law. “We give them the message that law is a profession, but it's also a business where we solve clients' problems,” says Kane. “That's an important message for them to have, which permeates all of their training.”
Geoff Moysa, a 32-year-old senior associate in the litigation and dispute resolution group at McMillan, chose to begin his relationship with the firm in 2005 when he was still a summer student because of its “robust” training system.
“Right at the outset, you hit the ground running, with two weeks devoted to intensive training — sharpening your legal research skills, making sure your memo writing is up to snuff, learning about what technology, such as document systems, are available to lawyers in the firm,” he says. “Then every couple of weeks, summer students have in-depth sessions with each of the practice groups – such as competition and litigation – to get a sense of what they do on a daily basis and then go out for an evening with the lawyers in the group to spend some quality time with them. That's very helpful when you're thrown into a law-firm environment for the first time, when you not only have to complete assignments for lawyers but also have to navigate the procedures of a 200-lawyer office.”
The goal, says Kane, is to provide the firm's young lawyers with a solid foundation in such core skills as legal research, analysis and memo writing, where new associates receive a legal brief at 9 a.m. and have to hand a memo in to their writing mentors by 5 p.m. that day.
That exercise is “immensely valuable,” says Moysa. “In my past life I was a freelance writer, but when I submitted my first assignment, my writing mentor very nicely hacked it apart and rebuilt it from the ground up — and I believe I became a more effective and concise writer as a result.”
Kane says that McMillan also trains its young lawyers on business etiquette. “If they're at a cocktail reception, how do they break into a group already talking, or introduce themselves to someone who may be standing alone? How do they make small talk or remember people's names? We even give them tips on business dinner etiquette, since a lot of students may not have grown up with formal dinners around the table. We want them to be comfortable in a business environment because that's where their clients come from.”
McMillan holds an annual national orientation session at its largest office in Toronto for all of its new associates from other offices in Montreal, Ottawa, Calgary and Vancouver. “Most of them have already summered and articled with us, so they know the firm very well,” says Kane. “But we want to be very transparent about what the firm's expectations are and cover things like meeting their professional responsibilities as well as so-called soft skills like tailoring their communication to the needs of their clients. For example, identifying which clients like details and which do not.”
“We are a business law firm and want our young associates to think like businesspeople, whether they happen to litigate or do deals.”
To that end, new associates attend the “McMillan Business Academy,” or MBA in shorthand. Half of the four-day intensive training program consists of a competition in which young lawyers are grouped into teams to simulate operating a business, and the team that ends up with the most profitable enterprise wins a prize (a $500 donation to a charity of their choice). “It helps them understand the pressures and stresses and become more savvy about the way businesses are run,” explains Kane.
New associates who are attending the business academy also spend a day each on accounting and negotiation skills. Moysa, who took advantage of the academy as well, says the program is intended to encourage associates to “think like lawyers and think about how our clients work, so much of the focus is on understanding the client business end of a transaction.”
Senior associates, meanwhile, receive training on business development and leadership skills, and this past April McMillan held a retreat for them in the southern Ontario town of Niagara-on-the-Lake. The one-day program consisted of a session on developing a practice, which involved an external trainer and an in-house panel of equity partners who shared their experiences of how they secured and retained their initial clients.
Senior associates participate in the firm's training regime too. For instance, Moysa helps articling students with basic legal research skills. Other sessions teach them how to be effective team workers in specific practice areas, such as the financial-services group, where they are presented with a case on, say, a debt-financing transaction and have to figure out how to handle it with their colleagues. In addition, articling students are invited to attend brainstorming sessions at McMillan involving lawyers from their respective practice groups.
Junior associates also receive hands-on training, such as in litigation, in which Moysa again is involved. “We cover everything from preparing for trial and doing a first discovery effectively, to how to work with expert witnesses and common mistakes young advocates make and how to avoid them,” he explains. “We also let students sit in on those sessions so they can get a sense of the kind of training associates receive, and that helps them figure out what practice group they might want to work in when they come back as lawyers.”
Moysa, who has practised in McMillan's litigation group since 2007, says the training evolves as lawyers “grow up” within the firm. “It transitions from core legal skills at the beginning into practice management and building business as you grow,” he explains. “There's a real push from management to make sure we're always updating our skill set, and that we're on the cutting edge both substantively and in terms of how the firm is run.”
McMillan runs retreats focused on leadership that help senior associates stay on top of their heavy workloads, preserve their client relationships, and build teams of juniors to work with them on files, explains Kane, who points out that all lawyers at the firm receive ongoing substantive legal training within their practice groups, and non-equity partners can take advantage of business-development coaching.
In addition, she says the firm offers external coaching for its associates. “It's no secret that lawyers need to be resilient since they're in a very challenging profession, and we want our associates to stay sturdy and thrive. For instance, if they have work-life balance issues or are about to go on maternity leave, they can contact coaches available to them across the firm.”Should a lawyer have problems managing his or her time, McMillan gives them access to a “productivity” coach, says Kane. “We also address remedial issues, so if someone in a practice group needs help or someone has high potential, we make sure they get whatever they require to accomplish or achieve that goal.”
On substantive legal skills, the firm's partners train students and associates. On negotiation and presentation skills, as well as business etiquette, McMillan relies on outside consultants, according to Kane.
The firm also reaches out to its in-house-counsel clients and runs regular webinars – as it recently did on human rights in the workplace – and seminars, such as one on social media that featured McMillan partner Tim Murphy, TV Ontario anchor Steve Paiken and David Herle, principal partner of Toronto-based strategic communications firm The Gandalf Group. McMillan's lawyers can also access videotaped internal training programs posted on the firm's internal intranet. “We do competency-based training,” says Kane, “for our lawyers at various stages of their career and incorporate adult-learning principles, and deliver all of this in a variety of ways so we reach everyone in the firm.”
Having spent seven years on the client side as senior counsel at the Royal Bank of Canada, Carla Swansburg was struck by how often young lawyers with outside law firms didn't grasp the basics of their practice. “Often new lawyers don't understand the real-world practicalities of what they're doing, and that it's not always about intellectualizing a question of law, but sometimes involves balancing risk as opposed to eliminating it.”
Now as Director of Professional Development at Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP, Swansburg is committed to ensuring that the national business law firm has “well-trained” lawyers rather than just simply “good technical” lawyers. “The senior leadership of the firm recognizes soft skills and leadership and development as key to the future of the firm and a significant differentiator in terms of our legal talent.”
One of her first initiatives after joining Blakes in 2011 was to launch a “school of business” and equip the firm's newer lawyers with the language of financial-statement analysis and macroeconomics spoken on Bay Street. “This is it to give them a set of tools they can use when dealing with their clients,” explains Swansburg, who recently invited former RBC Global Asset Management Chief Economist Patricia Croft to come to the firm and talk about the state of the global economy.
Inculcating “corporate fluency” in its lawyers is one of Blakes' training goals, along with leadership development, communication and presentation skills tutoring, all of which is supported by ongoing mentoring, according to Swansburg.
Like McMillan, Blakes also targets its lawyers at various stages of their career. A week-long national intensive training week is held every year for new recruits to introduce them to the firm and provide them with a primer on substantive law. Junior and senior associates receive training on leadership, delegating, and communication and presentation skills. For new partners, the training is more focused on business and network development.
Swansburg says that the mandatory continuing legal education requirement has increased attendance in training sessions offered at Blakes. “The senior levels of practice weren't necessarily as interested and engaged before CLE was introduced, so we've used it as an opportunity to bring them skills in-house they might not otherwise have.” The firm also offers training for its in-house corporate counsel clients who need to fulfil their CLE requirements.
Swansburg points out that Blakes has moved away from lecture-style learning and has embraced case studies and group discussions as part of its training program. She says that lawyers learn better when they work in smaller groups and are presented with scenarios, as was the case recently when Blakes held a training session on guidelines for employers under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act and had lawyers role-play situations that might arise in the workplace reflecting the provincial law.
If they cannot physically attend a workshop, the firm's lawyers can access a new online training initiative that provides tutorials on such topics as maximizing the use of technology in their practices. That, says Swansburg, also keeps costs down, since Blakes can then use its budget to bring in outside experts to lead training on leadership development and more people-oriented communication, presentation, networking and negotiation skills.
She explains that since Blakes is a full-service law firm, it almost always has lawyers with some expertise in a certain practice area to lead in-house training in substantive law as well as emerging issues, such as social media, anti-spam legislation, and regulatory changes involving taxation or industry.
“Sometimes we'll send our lawyers to external conferences, but only if it involves a specialized area that we feel we need to do that to obtain outside expertise,” says Swansburg, who prior to joining RBC spent a decade practising civil litigation, mostly with Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP. “We have such a breadth of subject-matter experts in-house that the core of our budget is really devoted to hiring external consultants, since the substantive law training led by our senior lawyers has no hard costs associated with it and only involves their time.”
Again as with McMillan, Blakes offers its lawyers access to outside coaches if, for instance, they are returning to work following maternity leave or are attempting to ramp up business for their practice.
Ultimately, Blakes' training is about instilling “real-world practicality” into the practices of the firm's young lawyers beyond the “academics of law,” according to Swansburg. “Unless they're MBA grads, they may not necessarily understand how businesses operate and manage risks, how financial statements are analyzed, how the global economy works or how currency fluctuations may affect some of the industries the firm works in. So we try to fill in those gaps for new lawyers.”
The educational emphasis on business development and leadership skills that extend beyond teaching just basic practice skills reflects a change in what law firms are training their young lawyers, according to Karen Bell, Senior Director of Professional and Client Education at McCarthy Tétrault LLP, who is also involved in changing how skills training is delivered.
In light of the time constraints all lawyers at all levels face and the different ways in which adults learn, Bell – a former business litigator who created the 15-year-old practicePRO risk management program for the Lawyers' Professional Indemnity Company (LAWPRO) – believes that incorporating some degree of online learning is one way firms can make training both more accessible and flexible for associates. At McCarthy Tétrault, she is moving to incorporate a more interactive component to in-class learning and placing more emphasis on new technologies to provide young lawyers – via their desktops, iPads or smartphones – with basic information and guidance that prepares them to work effectively on files.
Bell feels an e-learning component will advance the way lawyers receive training at law firms in the future. “For us, it's about making the learning experience more meaningful and comprehensive for our associates, and making our investment in training them more efficient.”
But the innovation doesn't end there. “The firm is also looking at ways to ensure that our young lawyers appreciate the clients' perspective,” explains Bell. “To that end, we set up sessions which bring together our lawyers with their in-house counsel peers, where they have the opportunity to learn together and learn from each other.”
She says that these new directions in training will continue to shape the firm's talent-development platform, McCarthy Tétrault Advance. “The same holds true for the profession at large as it explores new avenues to equip lawyers with the means to better serve clients.”
Christopher Guly is a freelance journalist based in Ottawa.
