Integrated learning

The problem with training and development is that it can too often appear a distant, disconnected function of the firm. Integrating critical support groups, however, could make all the difference.

By Tony Wright, CMS Cameron McKenna

Law firms are complex businesses, populated by intelligent, high-achieving individuals, serving sophisticated clients. External factors, ranging from Sir David Clementi’s proposed reforms for the legal profession, to the commoditisation of certain areas of legal work, are increasing the challenges of managing a successful law firm as well as succeeding a lawyer working within one. Internal factors – such as the increasing demands for a work-life balance from a new generation of lawyers – make it increasingly important to support the firm and its lawyers to deliver excellent client service.

CMS Cameron McKenna’s people and development function

Last year, in order to respond to these pressures to meet clients’ demands and support the fee earners’ people-related needs, CMS Cameron McKenna reorganised three of its support groups – human resources (HR), training and development, and know-how – into a single people and development (P&D) group. This single group now offers integrated support services across all people-related activities within the firm, from the recruitment and development of graduate trainees, through their ongoing personal career-development needs, to the retirement of the firm’s senior partners.

Within the P&D group, our training and development team works to ensure our people are trained in the diverse skills they need to succeed in their role at the firm; roles that cross each jurisdiction in which the firm operates. We increasingly work with the firm’s clients to help them address their development needs. Internally we work with the practice-group support lawyers, who focus on the technical skills relevant to their teams, and with our IT training colleagues to establish a rich curriculum of training that covers everything from language to leadership skills.

Fee earners expect the same excellent level of service internally from their support teams that they offer the firm’s external clients. Nevertheless, fee earners care less about how their support services organise themselves and more about professional advice and joined-up thinking.

One means of invigorating the integrated P&D service has been to create a team of people and development managers – a team of human-resources professionals, each dedicated and sitting within a particular fee-earning team. These individuals are pivotal to the new team’s ability to offer high-quality, relevant, people-related services to individuals and managers working within a given practice area. They are what other industries already recognise as the HR ‘business partners’ of the fee-earning teams. They are able to appreciate the commercial demands of their respective teams and work closely with partners and lawyers to identify how central P&D resources can assist with fee earners’ issues, whether it be a partner who needs to recruit a new secretary, individual coaching or training needs, or a team that needs to identify a succession plan for its senior partners. They are also able to integrate the P&D contribution with those of local marketing and finance staff. Figure one highlights how the P&D organisation is designed to work.

The P&D managers represent an accountable human link between the P&D support team and the practice areas. Having a single contact provides the practice with a reference point for all things related to an individual’s training and development, for example. That is not to say that the P&D manager needs to know everything about every training course the firm offers. What it does remove is the lawyer’s burden to undertake an exhaustive search of support contacts to establish answers to different people-related activities.

Part facilitation, part anticipation, the P&D manager in each CMS Cameron McKenna practice area handles training-related queries on everything from Partner Assessment Centre timings to appraisal processes.

Introduced to our P&D function this year, the role of P&D manager brings several advantages. Benefits to our practice areas of the P&D manager model include:

A single point of contact for all people-related matters – including training and
development needs;
A dedicated HR professional who becomes familiar with the practice’s commercial and human-resource requirements;
A shift in support assistance, away from purely reactive ‘hire and fire’ responsibilities. P&D managers increasingly adopt a role of ‘trusted adviser’, consulting on the people-related issues associated with a practice area’s business objectives;
Effective, joined-up working with other support functions, particularly marketing and finance.

Benefits to the central training team include:

More opportunity for personal follow-up after development courses. P&D managers help to ensure that learning continues after classroom/workshop sessions;
Tailored communication, disseminated quickly throughout the firm. Whether the communication is about new training programmes or this month’s courses, P&D managers help spread word from the central team during their day-to-day contact on the floors of their practice;
Greater insight into individual issues in each team via enhanced P&D manager-lawyer relationships.

Working with the practice to enhance personal development

There are common skills that lawyers need as they move through their career. This is why we have gradually established a comprehensive curriculum of training for fee earners at the firm (see figure two). It is a curriculum against which lawyers can measure and develop their skills from the moment they join the firm and on through their tenure as assistants and partners. It is a curriculum that has, to date, focused on our fee-earning staff. Gradually, however, we are extending the development curriculum, in a systematic way, to every group in every office around the firm. While the baseline curriculum is now in place, we recognise that the key to effective development of high achieving individuals is to recognise the development needs of our people as individuals.

This is why CMS Cameron McKenna’s learning and development team is focused on addressing individual development needs and, alongside our P&D managers, enhancing one-to-one relationships. I, or a member of my small team, sees every individual who joins the firm as part of the firm’s induction. Between our team of four – again in conjunction with the P&D managers – we undertake psychometric profiling and development coaching for all of our qualified solicitors as part of our EXCEL programme (see figure two). We brief all individuals when they join the senior-solicitor programme and we are about to visit every partner-team meeting, to communicate the launch of our new partner-development programme.

Developing senior solicitors

One group of lawyers within the firm, on which the P&D team has focused during recent months, is the body of senior solicitors – classified in CMS Cameron McKenna’s case as those with more than five years’ post-qualification experience. The changing times within the law mean that this group faces more demands and a more complex environment than lawyers of equivalent experience might have faced in previous decades. Whether it is balancing traditional demands to hit chargeable targets, increasing their marketing and pitch activity during non-chargeable time or supervising a junior solicitor set who want to realise the same work-life balance as their counterparts in the accountancy firms, for example, the senior lawyer faces a demanding managerial balancing act before they even start to consider their own personal development and career plan.

Launched in the firm’s UK and central and eastern European offices in April 2005, the programme is one of personalised development to which every fee-earning member of the firm with more than five years’ post-qualification experience will have been invited by the end of the year. Since the launch, senior solicitors have been enthusiastic about the personalised focus and tailor-made programme that is available to them, as well as highlighting the frustration of peers at other firms who feel less well looked after at this stage in their careers.

This group of senior solicitors is now supported by the P&D team through a dedicated development programme. Each solicitor is encouraged to develop a personal development plan that will drive development activity for the coming year. The cornerstone for the development plan is a process of 360-degree feedback and individual development coaching. This is done through encouraging the firm’s lawyers to undertake 360-degree feedback, supplemented by confidential coaching and development support. The aim is to have more aware, highly skilled individuals, able to match their technical skill with a more rounded perspective of how to serve their clients effectively.

The programme includes workshop training in presentation and personal impact skills, networking and client-relationship skills, as well as more traditional financial-management skills. Furthermore, tailored case studies are being designed according to the nature of the work within each of the firm’s practice areas to provide senior solicitors with a chance to develop more sophisticated commercial acumen, alongside peers, in a ‘safe’ development environment, albeit working on practical, real-life client scenarios.

The senior-solicitor development programme is another building block en route to implementation of CMS Cameron McKenna’s business strategy. The skills, against which the firm’s lawyers are assessed throughout their careers with the firm – whether as trainees, solicitors or partners – are fully aligned with that firm-wide strategy. The firm’s development activity aims to bring to life the strategy by giving our people the skills to enhance client relationships, improve management of people and enhance teamwork throughout every team and office within the firm. The senior-solicitor development programme is just one example of how the firm’s P&D activity aims to embed the principles of personal development throughout the organisation.

Is it working?

Responding to the needs of a diverse group of senior solicitors – some of whom are considering options other than the traditional route to partnership – means enhancing the value that the firm can bring to their careers. This approach reaps benefits for both parties as solicitors see a longer-term, more appropriate future with the firm.

Alistair Watson, a six-year qualified planning lawyer at CMS Cameron McKenna, highlights some of the benefits from a solicitor’s view point: “The end results of engaging senior solicitors are a good outcome for the firm and individual in terms of professional career development. It also enables senior solicitors to take the right themes to others and perhaps persuade them to give it a go. The programme is not a one-size-fits-all template, it is a genuine opportunity to shape your own development.”

Equally, the firm’s partners and more senior employees are responding to the additional support that they are getting in managing the careers of their valued senior assistants.

“The significant aspect of this new programme is that the 360-degree analysis, coupled with the external coaching process, will be enlightening for senior solicitors. By assessing and recognising their own development needs, they are much more likely to take up relevant parts of the programme. This provides a much more tailored approach to learning and development than laying on traditional classes and saying ‘this is how you do it’. “For the partners and business, the return on investment will be in a matter of months, as people start taking up the programme,” says Simon Hegarty, a consultant to the learning and development team, and a former Camerons partner.

The firm’s increased attention to people-related matters appears to be paying dividends. This year, the firm is rightly proud of its return to The Sunday Times league of ‘100 Best Companies to Work For’. February 2005 saw a further demonstration of the firm’s commitment to its people in the publication of a ‘People Report’ – an outline of the firm’s approach to human-capital management. The People Report gives the P&D team a reference point and a standard against which to benchmark all its efforts. The challenge is to ensure that the firm’s lawyers and our clients feel the benefits of the changes that the report highlights, to offset natural cynicism of such reports. We are not resting on our laurels. As we come to the conclusion of 2005, the P&D team is already initiating a review of performance against standards set out in our initial People Report in the development of our People Report for 2006.

As with all development, our P&D activity is an ongoing journey. A year into that P&D journey we are proud of closer links with our internal and external clients. We strive for closer relationships still, so that we can add value to each individual within the firm and extend that value to our clients. Our intention as practice professionals remains to demonstrate valuable support to our fee earners in development activities that respond to the challenges they face in their working lives, and help them, practically, to realise their professional and career objectives.

Tony Wright is head of learning and organisational development at CMS Cameron McKenna LLP. He can be contacted at tony.wright@cms-cmck.com