Solicitors Journal

Practice Management - 23 June 2006

Be Prepared

Law firms need to get into training to tackle the changes facing the profession.

With major changes afoot in the legal professional after the publication of the Legal Services Bill, solicitors up and down the country are being proverbially grabbed by labels and told "Do something about it!” And as Tesco is setting out to provide cut-price legal services and estate agents to carry out conveyencing work, the time to act is indeed nigh.

It is here that training companies can really prove their worth, offering guidance to solicitors who know that they should be preparing themselves for their biggest change to the legal profession for one hundred years., but are not quite sure how to go about it.

Legal trainer CLT has led the way with a course covering the two basic shake ups for the high street solicitors – the legal services Bill and the advent of the home information pack (HiP). The HiPs-Challenges and Opportunities course ran for 15 courses, ending last week but another batch of seminars are already booked for October, according to CLT programme development consultant Janet Baker. The course examines what HiPs are, what technology is needed to benefit from them and related practice management issue such as working with local estate agents and developing niche practices. “ We are all aware of the Legal Services Bill and how competition will be entering the market through Co-Op and Asda and we are trying to help solicitor build their conveyancing  practice to make a leaner and meaner model to compete with the big players, “says Baker. “It really is a double whammy for conveyancing solicitors, helping with HiPs and the new shape of the legal market. Hopefully it can help them find their way through the fog.”

Attendances for the 15 sessions have been good nationwide, so solicitors are obviously clued up on the changes, and Baker hopes that the response will be the same when a course on attracting external investments is launched next spring. The new course run by Professor Stephen Mayson of NottinghamLawSchool will focus on how firms should position themselves to attract an injection of cash from the investors and prospective buyers and identifying who this buyer might be. The take up for this course will be good reflections of how lawyers are reacting to change.

The need for lawyers to run a more streamlined business is catnip to training firms like Altior, which specialises in management and skills courses. “We have never tried to be one of theses providers that does 1001 legal update courses, our niche has always been to train lawyers in skills they weren’t taught at law school,” says Altior CEO Mark Loosemore. “People are looking now for more qualifications that will set them apart from other solicitors and are far more aware now of management and ‘soft’ skills than they were.”

Among the other courses on offer are sessions on ‘Time and stress management for lawyers’- “one of our more popular courses2” according to Loosesmore and ‘Marketing yourself and your firm’. Altior also conducts a course on ‘How to buy into partnership’, telling lawyers what they need to know to be a partner and how to

negotiate their way into a business. “As a result of smaller firms merging and amalgamating in the market, more opportunities are arising and the interest in this course has increased accordingly.” says Looosemore, highlighting that training providers need to respond to market changes as much as lawyers.

“The legal market is becoming more competitive and I don’t see it letting up”, says Loosemore. “Theses are the kinds of skills solicitors will increasingly need if they want to stay at the top of their game.”

Change is not limited to firms’ business structures – there has been growing support for the increased use of mediation at an early stage. Michael Lind, Managing Director of Bristol Based-company the ADR Group, believes handling business this way can help law firms conduct in the new corporate environment. The preamble to the company’s course on ‘Practical Business Training’ says. “Negotiation, facilitation and mediation are all techniques that every effective business manager needs to be familiar with and this should not be confined to lawyers.”

“Lawyers can do legal work, but that does not necessarily make them good managers,” says Lind. “Increasingly within small to medium law firms, there is a need for good management and they are under more pressure to perform as a unit. Learning how to deal with people within the firm, as well as clients can only enhance a firms commercial standing.”

Lind says that, although 90% of ADR Group’s clients are lawyers, most legal professional still do not see mediation as a core business skill. “It is still a huge obstacle for us to overcome,” he says. “Mediation can prove to be enormously beneficial for non-mediators within businesses.”

Looking ahead, ADR Group will be launching a course on the ‘Integration of corporate social responsibility’, which says Lind more and more forms are taking seriously. “If you get this structure right within a firm, it helps attract the right lawyers and clients,” he says “It also represents a strong move towards top law firms behaving more like corporations.”

The fact that legal training companies have started providing such courses means that there is a demand – law firms are to start adapting for a new way of working. This is positive news, but should also come as a warning to those who haven’t yet taken such steps. The help is available fro those willing to take the initiative.

Reported by Andrew Towler

News Editor, Solicitors Journal