The In-House Train Wreck: Why train, and how to make it work

What is the point of training an in-house legal team?

The answers seem obvious: to ensure continuous improvement, to upskill junior team members, to ensure baseline competencies, and so on.

Problem is, not a lot of that actually happens within the average in-house team.?It’s something that has bothered me for a long while, and I wanted to jot some thoughts about how it can (and should!) be done a lot better.

(As always - mileage may vary.?If you’re working in an awesome team with lots of time and resources for well-structured training, then you’re lucky, and this might all be a little academic.?And I hope the weather is nice this time on Mars).

So let’s start at the start.

How Do Lawyers Typically Train?

Your training as a lawyer really begins in school, where you develop skills in research, writing, and advocacy.?(Most kids are also picking up some other handy skills, such as dealing with bullies and other toxic people).?

You then learn some very useful things at law school, in particular how contracts work, and a reasonable understanding of core legal areas such as torts, property, criminal, corporate and administrative law.?These will all remain pretty useful as you go along, even if you don’t know much yet about how they apply to the real world.

Depending on where your path takes you, you might find yourself in a law firm next, working under a partner or a senior lawyer, and enjoying the thrill of having a salary and working all night putting stickers on documents.?Depending on the firm, your training in this phase could be any combination of active coaching and feedback, structured training for graduates, hanging around CPD seminars feeling awkward, being yelled at, being ignored, or performing months of menial tasks with no real understanding how this fits into your career.?

It’s hugely variable, and the point is, by the time a lawyer joins an in-house team, their training could range from brilliant, to miserable, to anywhere in between.?And their experience from that point onwards will usually be even more chaotic - depending on the size of the team, the pace of the business they support, the budget and resources available, the mindset of the General Counsel or legal leadership team.?(And that’s assuming there’s any team at all, given many companies operate using a sole counsel.)?

This leads to two major gaps in training, which will widen over time:

• The things you never learned in the first place - areas of law you didn’t study, or competencies which weren’t considered part of legal training in the first place (such as people management skills);
• The things you learned along the way - which gradually decay if you don’t invest in keeping up to date (eg. what’s the latest judicial thinking on the meaning of consequential loss, or when is the last time you brushed up on the current trade practices laws).

In theory you should be able to cover a lot of this through your daily work, including working with external counsel.?If you had excellent issues-spotting capability, a healthy outsourcing budget, and a good thirst for knowledge, then you’d ensure your templates were well-drafted by a firm and supported by a playbook, you’d be receiving the latest updates on legislative developments and cases, you’d have a handy repository of forms, advices, clauses and slide decks, and you’d be able to focus your efforts on providing strategic advice to your business and investing time in projects that would genuinely move the dial.

Wow!?But instead, you’ll likely have a patchwork of those things (if any), and will be spending a lot of your time fixing typos, raging at Microsoft Word, and being asked to urgently review NDAs.?You’ll have some ideas about the training you want to do, but you’ll tend to fall back upon law firm CPD sessions, and you’ll also slog your way through various internal ‘training’ where you stare at slideshows and answer kindergarten-level multiple choice questions about your company’s code of conduct.

So when you try to sketch this for an individual, their training pathway might look a bit like this:

That’s becoming more and more variable over time, both in terms of what training you’re doing, and how relevant the previous training actually is.?For example, you might have developed a whole body of expertise as a construction lawyer, only to move in-house and discover that’s useful for about 20% of what you now work on.

If you expand this to an entire team, it becomes even more variable:

If you were to bring these four staff together as an in-house team, their collective experience of training up to that point is going to be a kaleidoscope.?The challenge for the in-house team is to recognise that variation, leverage the good aspects of it, and make the training experience more structured for them going forward.

Individuals vs. Team: Aligned and Competing Drivers

It’s important to recognise that in most cases, the interests of the individual aren’t going to be 100% aligned with the interests of the team.?In this example, the General Counsel on the right is thinking broadly about what she needs to deliver, while the junior on the left is being mindful of his long-term interests.

A takeaway is that planning training for an in-house team should be a collaborative exercise - not an autocratic one.?Individuals have the right to look out for their own interests, which includes planning for a future which may not be with the same organisation.?But they also need to be team players and make sure they’re helping to position the team to achieve the goals on the right.?If you’re leading a team, it’s important to be clear about this when you communicate with your staff, and when considering what you’re willing to invest in.?

Planning for Training: Mapping the Needs

If you’re part of (or leading) an in-house team with that kind of training profile, then it’s up to you to put training to better use.?But how do you start???

For the General Counsel, the first step is to map out the skills you actually need your team to have.?This can be as simple as listing out the areas of practice you see as being core, and those that are merely nice-to-have (NTH).?This shouldn’t be difficult if you understand your business, and it can be done in a single whiteboarding session with your team.??

Next, list who you see as actually having the relevant skills within the team, and whether they are considered to be expert or only have an ‘issues spotting’ capability.?It might look something like this:

In practice you’ll need a more complex table - for example, a multinational company will need skills across?different countries, languages and legal systems. You should also consider the broader skills that are essential for success, particularly your legal operations, financial management and leadership skills.

Regardless, just doing that quick sketch will tell you a lot about what your team’s capabilities are, how well placed you are to support your business, and what sort of key-person risks you have within the team. For example in the table above, it’s likely Denise has become the go-to on construction matters for the team without having deep experience, while Cameron is considered an excellent IP lawyer but has nobody to back him up.?Likewise Anna is the team’s only real option when it comes to property matters.??

Where the team has gaps, you have a choice: either develop the team’s skills in those areas, or rely on outsourcing.?Outsourcing isn’t a good solution if the practice area is considered ‘core’; you’re simply making yourself dependent on an external firm.?But it can be very sensible for matters which come up infrequently or as part of a discrete project - particularly if the legal component can be factored into the project budget.

Mapping your team’s skillset can flag the opposite problem. Consider Belinda’s terrific skills in M&A and Competition, which aren’t particularly relevant to the current business. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as it adds range and agility to what the team can handle - and Belinda might be one of your best operators.?Just be careful if you have niche experts in your team who aren’t clearly aligned to sources of work.?It can be a hidden source of friction in the team, and can attract difficult questions when you’re asked to reduce headcount. You need to be clear about the capability you’re investing in, and why.

And of course, I’m mindful of the sole counsel out there whose table probably looks a little more like this:

Nice Table… So What?

For the General Counsel, the initial map is a useful starting point in understanding their team’s composition, and a good input to overall capability planning.?It should provoke some good thinking about topics like:

• How accurate are our assessments??By what criteria do we rate someone an ‘expert’?
• Why are some areas considered ‘core’??What data do we have to support this?
• What are the financial and risk implications of our gaps??Are we outsourcing these matters?
• Which of our lawyers are interested in which areas??Are they getting exposure to the right work?

For individuals, it also offers some interesting questions:

• How much do you agree with the team’s overall assessment and planning?
• Which areas are you most interested in?
• Would upskilling in particular areas help your progression within the team??
• What career options would be enhanced if you could gain expertise in particular areas?
• If you want to enhance your skills in other areas, will you need to do that independently?

Both the team and the individuals within it now have a reference point when planning out their training for the year, and when considering what training to invest in.?Identified gaps in the team’s skillset will also create obvious inclusions for team and individual annual objectives.?

Getting the Training: Where and How?

Well done on figuring out the training that’s going to be needed - but getting it done can be a real challenge, because it’s rarely the highest priority on anyone’s list.?It’s also a highly variable problem depending on the nature of your role, the size of your team, your access to external firms, your budget, and so on.?I want to focus here on some general concepts which might help in how you think about the challenge.

1. Use the 70-20-10 Model as a Prompt

You’ve likely come across the 70-20-10 model of workplace learning, which suggests about 70% of our learning is on-the-job, 20% through our relationships with people, and 10% through formal learning.

This has some challenges as a “model” - there’s a good summary here about its unclear origins and lack of empiric basis.?(The “70%” is also very convenient for managers who don’t want to fund training).

However the 70-20-10 model is quite helpful in practice when it comes to brainstorming the possible sources of training.?Let’s return to the team matrix above, where the skills mapping identified a significant lack of support or succession for Cameron, the team’s IP expert.?If it was desirable for Belinda to move into that space, the 70-20-10 could be used as a starting point:

There are plenty of complexities, of course.?Perhaps Belinda is a more senior team member than Cameron.?Perhaps they’re both flat out already - making double-teaming on matters difficult.?You need to be mindful of the wider context, communicate clearly what you’re doing, and allow for the time involved rather than just bolting it onto team members’ “day jobs”.

As noted above, it’s tempting for managers to lean too heavily on the “on the job” part of this model, so that it becomes 100-0-0 in practice.?Needless to say this is a very poor strategy (or rather, lack of one), because it limits what staff can learn, results in people practicing their mistakes, and ultimately fails to create an environment where staff feel they are properly developing.

2. Partnering with Clients Multiplies Value

Many in-house teams don’t have sufficient budget for training.?When they do, they’re often unsure how to spend it.?You can sometimes solve both issues by co-training with your clients, particularly in areas which overlap between your functions and are of interest to both.

Most in-house lawyers have at some point gone down the well-meaning path of “contract training”, where an earnest and overworked lawyer tries earnestly to explain to a room of bored salespeople why indemnities are a bad thing.?It doesn’t work, and it’s largely pointless.

Contrast this with a topic like contract negotiation, which is relevant to everyone in the contracting process, is interesting, and is generally done in a very amateur manner.?Pairing legal with a sales or procurement team to learn new skills in this space can be fun, confidence building, strengthen your organisation’s ability to negotiate effectively in teams, and help staff understand who is meant to be doing what when sitting at the negotiation table.

It’s essential to ask your clients what sort of training they are interested in, rather than sticking to the time-honoured (and tedious) “how to work with legal”, or just delivering the mandatory stuff like Code of Conduct training.?If those topics become the only interface with your clients when it comes to training, you’ll often just be reinforcing that legal is a boring department they’d rather not be near.

And best of all??You can split the costs, or even piggyback on a function that’s better funded than you.

3. When Stretching your Budget, ‘Fairness’ is Overrated

Scrounged as much budget as you can for training, but still wondering how to afford anything useful??Challenge whether you’re impeding the long-term benefits of training by trying to be too equitable.?Lawyers naturally try to be even-handed, and particularly for new managers, it can be very tough to explain to one team member why they’re not getting the same training as the colleague sitting next to them.?But don’t get carried away with being ‘fair’ - at least, not in the short term:

• The first reason is purely mathematical.?If you have 5 staff and a $5,000 training budget, spending $1,000 per person will mean everyone gets mediocre training opportunities every year.?You’ll get far more impact by putting eg. $2,000 and $3,000 to two staff this year, and spreading the same budget between other staff the year after.??
• The second reason is that you should reward staff who come to the table with a clear vision for their training, including what they want to do, and how it’s connected to the training plan (which you’ll have shared openly, as discussed earlier in the article).?It’s curious how often a GC will receive feedback that the team is dissatisfied with the training provided, yet draw blank stares when she asks people what training they’d like to do.

Don’t forget that your budget isn’t the only lever you can pull.?You may have a staff member who wants to do training that is self-funded, or that their business clients are willing to pay for.?Could you move some of their workload to allow for this??Could you give them additional leave to accommodate the training (whether inside or outside organisation policy)???

4. A ‘T-Shaped Lawyer’… or an Exit Plan?

I’ve said above that your training plan should take into account a much wider set of skills than just the technical legal ones.?Plenty has been written about the evolution of in-house lawyers from the “I Shape” (technically skilled lawyers who get better at those skills over time) to the “T Shape” (the same spine of technical skills, but combined with more lateral skills (eg. technology, management, finance).?It’s not a very exciting concept (I mean, who’d have thought it’s useful to have well-rounded staff?), and unsurprisingly there’s many variants of it floating around:

(For what it’s worth, the one which resonates best for me is the ‘Delta’ model, which I’ve circled in red. There’s a primer article about it here, and it gets away from the odd “T-shaped” visual which almost suggests?people would develop up a vertical path before worrying about their broader skills).

Regardless which model you have in mind, the important question is - how do you find the right balance between helping your team develop, versus funding training that really isn’t that relevant to what you’re paid to deliver??It’s not an idle question, because lawyers are clever, adaptable and often a bit bored of their profession - particularly the ones who’ve moved in-house to feel more directly involved in the running of a company.?Migrating from private firms to in-house roles to business roles isn’t uncommon, and while you want to encourage your staff to grow, you also don’t want to be taken advantage of.?You need to be balanced, be realistic, and also maintain a healthy dose of scepticism along the way.

5. The External Firm Conundrum

When looking for training, one of the most obvious sources is external law firms.?However “free training” is about as attractive as “free secondees” - it’s not going to happen unless there’s something in it for the firm.??

Certainly you can engineer training from firms that are trying to win or maintain you as a client, but it takes a lot of time and effort to run training (particularly if it’s customised to your team), and there’s only so much work a firm can do in the hope of generating paid work. So how can you best approach this problem?

• First, you need to be realistic about your positioning.?If you’re a large client of a large law firm, you’re going to have plenty of leverage to ask for “value add” activities like training.?If you’re a smaller client, or have very limited spend, you might be better to simply focus on the CPD program that your external firms offer, and try to utilise this wherever it maps well to your training plan.
• Second, if you do have the ability to negotiate training as a “value add” within a panel arrangement, make sure someone in your team is actively managing each law firm contract, just as you would any other vendor.?Strangely, in-house teams often set up training or help-desk arrangements with firms but don’t use them, look to ‘cash in’ promised training without much notice, or take a passive approach and wait for the firm to suggest training which isn’t well-suited to the team’s needs.
• Third, consider how you can maximise the information flow from firms even if it’s not formal “training”.?For example if you have to take specialist advice on a topic, could the whole team listen in on the discussion instead of just discussing the issue 1-to-1 with a partner??Likewise could you record the discussion for later consideration with the wider team?
• Fourth, remember that simple, free-form, or generic training is usually a lower impost for the firm, and can be precisely what you need to fill an identified training gap.?I’ve been to many training sessions over the years, but still recall a simple session more than 20 years ago, where a partner walked us through the basics of a commercial contract, from recitals to governing law (and Nick Miller is still out there if you’re looking for someone who can present things simply!). If you have juniors in your team, don’t underestimate what they might find valuable compared to your more senior staff.

Finally, while firms aren’t in the business of providing free services, they do have some drivers which are quite aligned with those of the in-house teams when it comes to training.?Getting in front of your team (or better yet, your business clients) helps to embed the law firm as your go-to for difficult matters.?Presenting to clients is often a mandatory part of the “partnership track” for senior associates, who are often excellent, experienced counsel.?Why not share your training plans with your external counsel and see how they might be able to help with the training plan you’ve mapped out.?After all, firms want to be seen as innovative and adding value - and here’s a perfect area to demonstrate it.

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That’s all on training!?This is far from a comprehensive guide, and I’m always mindful of the huge variation in circumstances, budgets and client demands that exist between different in-house teams.?You know your team the best, but hopefully this article prompts some thinking on how to put a bit more order around the training chaos, and move instead towards a structured learning environment.?