To be the best: Trends in training in an international law firm

In a global playing field, today’s lawyers face huge pressures to deliver expertise seamlessly across different locations, offices and cultures. And clients continue to complain that it is hard to find a firm that is truly consistent in its service standards. Suzanne Fine, head of training at Lovells, assesses the evolving role for training in law firms and the particular challenges of providing support on an international scale.

Training fee earners in an international law firm like Lovells is a challenge. Not only is there a wide geographical spread among practitioners, but there are also, of course, differences in the law itself and the skills employed by lawyers to carry out their work.

Lovells is an international law firm with 27 offices in 19 major financial and commercial centres across Europe, Asia and the US. The 346 partners and 1,200 lawyers employed by the firm are managed through international practice areas, which allows for cross-border co-operation and team work when handling complex transactions, disputes and advisory work. This allows us to provide a seamless service to clients, no matter where in the world they may be based. We aim to achieve:

High levels of co-ordination;
The successful management of projects by forming teams with requisite legal and project-management skills;
Cross-border co-operation to bring together multi-jurisdictional law capabilities;
A sharing of expertise, experience and know how among all lawyers worldwide.

How can legal training assist with this process?

International law firms provide training for their lawyers worldwide in as many different ways as possible. This will not only include face-to-face classroom methods, but also alternative means of communication. It requires creativity and innovation to broaden the scope of traditional legal training, but, if this can be achieved, it enables:

The promotion of consistent personal excellence across the firm;
The provision of a more cost efficient improved level of training support;
Recruitment, retention and development of the best people across the firm;
Greater internationalisation of the practice.

Pure technical (legal) training has to take account of jurisdictional differences in the law across the world; legal skills (such as writing and drafting legal documents) also vary according to local custom and requirements. For instance, we regularly run legal writing courses in London for UK lawyers, and deal with such matters (in the litigation field) as drafting affidavits, in accordance with the Civil Procedure Rules. By contrast, we are currently running a legal writing course in our New York office, where the emphasis is on drafting a Memorandum of Law, for the court, in an application under New York’s procedural law. US judges expect to see documents crafted somewhat differently from those prepared for the UK courts, and this has to be reflected in the training provided.

Lovells has five practice streams, (corporate, finance, dispute resolution, commerce and projects, energy, and property). Each of these offers legal training to its members, wherever they are situated. The biggest challenge, I believe, is to offer legal training to lawyers across each of the practice streams, and therefore cross-culturally, on topics that are common to all fee-earners in a particular field. The next biggest challenge is to do so in the most convenient, accessible and economical ways possible.

How has Lovells risen to the challenge?

First, we have designed a series of innovative, specialised business simulations aimed at lawyers handling international transactions in English. Each programme in the series is specifically tailored for use within a specified practice area. We began with the corporate-practice area, where lawyers regularly work across international boundaries and cultural differences. Multinational transactional corporate work is usually done in English; it is the language of business, and our clients expect advice, whether oral, written or wherever it is from, to be delivered in English to the highest standard. Lawyers who are native English speakers need to understand how the English language is used by non-native English-speaking colleagues. They must learn to adapt their use of English to avoid contributing to misunderstanding. They need to be aware of the disadvantage that may be caused by the use of colloquial or casual language. We have also devised standard-form documentation in English, which lawyers internationally are encouraged to use for written work. These forms have been designed to be applicable firm wide in all jurisdictions, and are extremely useful in achieving a consistent approach in the drafting of legal documentation.

‘Transact Corporate’ was launched in 2003 following development by a Lovells team, working with two external specialist consultants from Sherwood Consulting. Transact Corporate is a simulation of a corporate transaction, which trains lawyers in the conduct of cross-border acquisitions using Lovells’s international standard-form documentation in English. It concerns the acquisition by a German company of a cross-border pharmaceutical company, both of which are entirely fictitious. Transact Corporate is designed to be delivered remotely. The lawyers work at their own desks and in inter-office teams, that is, with other lawyers at Lovells who they may not have worked with or met before. The team has to advise the client and deal with a number of realistic issues as they arise, demonstrating that they are adopting internal processes at the same time.

Transact Corporate is not a direct test of legal knowledge. Participants are not required to provide substantive legal advice, nor to undertake legal research. Instead, they are required to:

Work together with and across offices, in teams of different seniority levels;
Communicate directly with the client and report to a partner to effectively deal with typical issues;
Adopt a common methodology with dealing with cross-border acquisitions, so providing an integrated service to clients.

To our knowledge, this is the first time that a business simulation of this kind has been used in the law-firm training environment. Because participants do not have to leave their offices, yet still communicate during the course with colleagues in other offices, TransAct has proved to be a cost-effective and entirely relevant solution to the issue of maintaining practice standards, which all law firms are facing in this era of corporate internationalisation. Lovells has copyrighted Transact and is continuing to develop the concept to different practice streams. We also train with client teams in the TransAct series, which we believe sets us apart from our competitors.

What other options have we looked at?

There is no doubt that international law firms must look to technology to enable greater accessibility of learning. National firms, some here in the UK, and particularly multi-sited firms in the US, have begun to use some of the new technology for this purpose. Technology is constantly advancing, and so it is important for training departments to keep abreast of new developments that can be applied to their work. At the moment, these include:

1. Video conferencing

Video conferencing can be used to collaborate and deliver training remotely to a number of locations simultaneously. It is particularly effective in lecture-based training where the presenter is the main focus. Delegates can view the presenter simultaneously in different locations, and communication is improved, as compared with just watching a pre-recorded video, as the presenter can gauge reaction from the participants and involve them when appropriate. The main disadvantage with video conferencing is that bandwidth restrictions can mean that the image is not as clear as it could be and may not necessarily be simultaneous with the spoken word. However, it is used regularly for both meetings and training sessions, although it can be an expensive option as it relies on the use of several telephone lines.

As technology improves, we will be able to look at ways of using the internet for international communications at a much cheaper rate than through the telephone system.

2. Online learning – ‘E-learning’

Like other large law firms, Lovells is developing in-house online-training courses for certain fields of work, for which we have taken the first step in building a library.

We have just completed the design of our first course, ‘Clear English Writing’. We had already prepared an in-house English writing guide, setting out some basic principles for our people to follow when writing any document in the English language. We wanted to raise the profile of that guide, however, and encourage people to use it and follow its advice. The guide formed the basis of the online course, which we designed in close collaboration with a company based in the Philippines, recommended by our Hong Kong office.

The course takes an hour to complete and comprises principles and suggested ways of writing, together with several interactive fun exercises for completion by the user. At the end of the course, users are requested to e-mail the training department so that we can track their comments. Advantages of online training include:

Firm-wide accessibility;
Can be completed desk side in own time;
Novelty value;
No trainer or travel costs.

Unless a firm has its own in-house development capability, it can be time consuming and expensive to outsource development of tailored online training courses. Great care needs to be taken to ensure that the content (usually supplied by a subject-matter expert within the firm) is properly converted into online mode, without losing its detail and relevance to the firm.

3. A first for the legal profession

Lovells is currently leading a new project, developing an online training course on the Money Laundering Regulations. Having decided that we would pursue the online route, we looked at various off-the-shelf solutions, but decided that they did not fit our precise requirements. For example, we wanted to be able to direct people to our own in-house precedents during the course. When we discussed our intentions with other City law firms, it became apparent that we all had the same requirements and aspirations. Thirteen major city law firms are now collaborating on the design and delivery of the course, which will train lawyers and other staff to play their part in the fight against money laundering. The firms have together developed core material and case studies, for use in the course; we have outsourced the development and conversion to online training to a specialist company, who will provide both the artistic and technical support required.

4. HotDocs – an online document-assembly tool

Lovells has developed its own software that enables documents to be automatically assembled online, through a series of questions and answers. This enables lawyers to be trained in the drafting of legal documents online, and to view the consequences of drafting a clause in a particular way. HotDocs is also available to clients and can be tailored to their precise requirements.

The future

1. Online presentations

Lovells is already using specialist software that will enable us to replace lectures, which are simply video-taped, to a new format, which can be placed on the intranet and viewed online. Lawyers, wherever they are in the world, will be able to access short, live training sessions through their PCs, seeing the lecturer, hearing the talk and viewing the PowerPoint slides accompanying it, all simultaneously. This online access provides quicker, more convenient access to self-paced, time-efficient learning.

2. Virtual-classroom technology

We are also working with new virtual-classroom technology. This involves the transmission of information and knowledge through the intranet from an instructor to participants in different locations. The presenter and participants communicate in real time, just as they would in a physical classroom. The difference is that the learning is delivered electronically. This enables us to deliver live and interactive presentations or training sessions to a large number of people at the same time. Delegates are able to actively participate and contribute rather than just watch or listen to a presentation. This technology allows a more consistent and accessible approach to training globally and concomitantly reduces travel and accommodation costs. We also train clients in this way.

3. LMS

A further piece of software that firms are investigating is a learning-management system (LMS). Such a system effectively manages the whole process of online-training delivery, including inviting delegates, tracking course usage and maintaining complete training and CPD records for lawyers worldwide. Significant investment is required to purchase an LMS, tailored to the particular needs of the firm, and therefore needs careful thought and planning before a decision can be made.

Brave new world

All of these new and different techniques are available to those of us in the professional-training field. It has now reached the point where, rather than introduce these techniques piecemeal, firms need to plan a strategy to bring together the new and emerging world of training and development for their people. This, I believe, will be the next phase, and will demand close co-operation between the training and IT departments in firms.

Suzanne Fine is a barrister and solicitor, and is head of legal training at Lovells. She is also a visiting professor at Nottingham Law School, where she was head of business development and worked with City firms to develop legal-training courses for qualified lawyers prior to joining Lovells. She has designed and taught courses in Hong Kong, Europe and the US.