Professional Development: A Key Tool for Law Firm Management

Professional development. Bright-eyed law school graduates who need finely crafted orientation programs; seasoned practitioners who require CLE credits; law firm CFOs who need strategies to control the costs of outside CLE courses. Is this all it is? Absolutely not! Professional efforts and opportunities can be used to pursue many of your firm's most important strategic objectives. You simply need to remember to tap into professional development in order to use it to its full advantage.

1. Strengthen Your Core

Joseph Pilates and Nike, Inc. would tell you that the strength of your biceps and quadriceps are greatly diminished if you have weak core strength. This concept applies to law firms as well. Particularly in today's volatile legal market, a firm should deploy all available resources to strengthening its core.

Glue, fabric, core strength ' however you refer to it, today's law firm needs it in spades. Your firm's core values must not only drive the firm's strategy, but also must be communicated, shared and ultimately embraced by each lawyer as his or her own. Use your professional development efforts and opportunities to articulate these values and highlight their benefits to the members of your firm. When you produce in-house programs, weave the firm's values into each presentation. Show how these lofty and erudite concepts apply to the practice of law at your firm everyday.

If you are a multi-office firm, use the opportunity provided by your creation of professional development programs to assemble a faculty from several offices. Lawyers working together to develop and refine a program have the opportunity to get to know one another. Ultimately, bonds of loyalty and trust grow from such encounters and your firm's core is reinforced.

Non-programmatic professional development opportunities offer myriad ways to help you strengthen your core. Mentoring programs and relationships are a key way to transmit firm culture and values. At Kirkpatrick & Lockhart (K&L), we ask our mentors to model corporate citizenship, ethical practices and standards of practice among their other duties and functions. Be explicit about your values and train and develop your lawyers to embrace them. Your core will strengthen as your lawyers grow.

2. Advance Your Firm's Strategic Objectives

Involve your professional development department in the firm's strategic planning and employ the department to assist you in attaining your strategic goals.

Has your firm targeted a specific legal market to pursue? If so, gain expertise not only from a market research perspective, but substantively as well. Identify the key areas of substantive law needed to service the target market and focus your training efforts in those areas. Partner with your firm's marketing staff to determine specific client relationship skills that will give an edge to lawyers targeting this market. Decide if a select group of lawyers or all of your lawyers should be offered this focused training. Once educated and skilled, your marketing efforts can begin and your lawyers can lecture, teach and write in order to reach potential clients.

Do you want your lawyers to be adept in a certain area or at a specific skill? In addition to being excellent lawyers, what kind of lawyers do you want your professional development efforts to produce: aggressive rainmakers, professionals with the highest sense of legal ethics, flexible and creative thinkers? Your professional development efforts can help you achieve these goals.

Articulate the key skills and qualities you wish to develop and determine if they are best addressed through programs or mentoring and modeling. Custom designed programs are an excellent way to address certain skills, such as the expert use of your firm's technology. Watching more senior lawyers can help junior lawyers acquire additional skills and qualities that you seek to impart, such as the exercise of good judgment. Identify senior lawyers who possess these key qualities and make sure they are modeling these skills for associates on a day-to-day basis. At K&L, the concept of professionalism is of such import that currently we are designing an entire curriculum around it, a curriculum that will include both programmatic and institutional elements.

Do future firm leaders need to be identified and developed? If so, professional development can be extremely helpful both programmatically and institutionally. Leadership skills programs can be offered to a targeted group or to all senior associates. Institutionally, the department can help management provide the mentoring, coaching and opportunities within the firm where attorneys can gain leadership experience.

Do you need to increase cross-selling among your practice areas? Knowledge of firm resources and confidence in one's partners are key elements to cross-selling. Presentations by practice groups to practice groups can help satisfy the knowledge gap that can occur in a large firm. And such programs can enhance confidence among partners. Showcasing practices and deconstructing transactions allow partners to witness each other's talent and business acumen.

Are you determined to increase and support the diversity of your workplace? Use your professional department personnel to assess and evaluate your firm's work environment. You may find a sensitivity training program is in order. Make an effort to assemble a diverse faculty panel when producing your in-house programs. On the non-programmatic side, mentoring relationships can be tailored to encompass special areas that your minority lawyers have identified, such as assistance in networking, both inside and outside your firm. In addition, internal communication networks among minority lawyers can be created and processed through your professional development department. Professional development opportunities also can include one-on-one coaching sessions in a variety of skill areas.

3. Develop Your Assets

Keep your lawyers, at all levels, developing, learning and refining their substantive knowledge and skills. Maintain their competitive edge through professional development.

Although this is the traditional venue of professional development, many firms define it too narrowly. Partners and senior associates must be offered the opportunity to continue to develop along with your younger lawyers. Once they have established a base of technical and substantive knowledge, senior lawyers benefit from focusing on training in key skills areas.

At K&L, in addition to training in substantive law, The K&L Legal Practice Institute offers a specific curriculum in each of the following areas: Practice Management, Client Development and Relationship Management, Legal Writing & Research, Professionalism & Ethics, and Lawyering Skills, which includes financial analysis and negotiation and presentation skills. These curricula offer a range of developmentally appropriate programs for first-year lawyers, through senior-level associates, and on to partners.

Consider the example of managing a practice. Under the Institute's Practice Management curriculum, all of our associates receive training in the skills they need to manage their practice. New lawyers study time and paper management and strategic filing and billing. Mid-level associates can sharpen their supervisory skills of younger associates by participating in programs on feedback and delegation. Those on the cusp of becoming partner take advantage of sessions that address leadership issues. In addition, the curriculum offers sessions for partners in 'Motivating Peak Performance' and 'Sharpening Your Mentoring Skills.'

Identify the skills involved in successful client development and invite senior lawyers to acquire and further refine their skills through participation in professional development programs. Keep your partners engaged and nimble by offering programs in 'Developing Competitive Written Proposals & Presentations' and 'Managing Client Expectations.'

Finally, many partners are motivated to sharpen their negotiation and financial analysis skills. By offering programs in these areas, you will enable partners to enhance the value that they bring to their clients' enterprises and, ultimately, to yours.

4. Support and Enhance Client Relations

The creative and thoughtful use of professional development programs can greatly enhance your firm's ability to attract and retain clients.

Your firm has probably developed a considerable amount of expertise in its professional development department. Why not offer the use of these experts as an added value to your clients? Your professional development team (or person) is expert at designing, developing and implementing programs. Have them work with your firm's marketing and client relations staff to ensure that client satisfaction surveys and client loyalty programs incorporate questions and discussions about professional development offerings that clients would welcome receiving. Organize client roundtables to seek your clients' views on what makes a good lawyer. Keep the meetings short, to the point, and scheduled with the clients' convenience in mind.

Showcase the talent of the firm by inviting clients to programs at your firm that feature your partners. Similarly, offer a CLE credit-worthy program to a client and present it at the client's offices. Required continuing education hours for both lawyers and accountants can be used as an effective hook in this instance. Businesses are often pleased to find innovative and cost effective (in this case, gratis) means of satisfying these requirements for their professionals. One caveat, be sure you have cleared the credits with the appropriate jurisdictions before advertising their availability to your clients.

In addition, your firm can regularly work with clients to ensure both that clients have the legal information they need to excel and that your firm has the client business information needed to provide a top-notch legal product. Periodic, wide-ranging meetings with client personnel often provide the most productive forum for information sharing, relationship scoping and problem solving. The meetings could be structured as a series of short, scoping, briefing and training meetings with appropriate client and firm members set up in a round table fashion. CLE credits are not the bait for engaging in these meetings. Rather, these meetings serve to provide the client with a customized view of your firm's people and resources while at the same time providing introductory training on relevant legal issues.

5. Ensure Institutional Continuity

Intergenerational excellence. This concept has been elevated from a strategic goal to iconic status at K&L. The phrase represents one of the firm's oldest and strongest traditions: the transfer of knowledge, culture and commitment to service from our most senior lawyers to our most junior. Those who have 'grown up' at K&L are eager and honored to carry on this tradition as they are elevated to partner. Many view it as a way of 'giving back.' You can imagine our delight at hearing those words.

Through mentoring, serving as faculty in formal professional development programs, and day-to-day on-the-job training, our senior lawyers teach their craft to our juniors, consciously and deliberately. Through these non-programmatic professional development efforts we believe we enhance our institutional continuity.

In an increasingly complex and competitive environment, law firms can no longer afford to view professional development in a conventional way. Use professional development to ensure not only that your firm's lawyers receive the necessary training to become excellent practitioners, but also to make certain that your firm thrives, generation to generation, by meeting its strategic goals and communicating its values effectively.

Susan Fried is chief officer of Recruitment and Development at Kirkpatrick & Lockhart LLP, a law firm with 10 offices nationwide and over 700 lawyers. She is responsible for the recruitment, professional development and retention of all associates and lateral hires. Prior to joining K&L, she was a corporate lawyer who worked in this field for 12 years.

Professional development. Bright-eyed law school graduates who need finely crafted orientation programs; seasoned practitioners who require CLE credits; law firm CFOs who need strategies to control the costs of outside CLE courses. Is this all it is? Absolutely not! Professional efforts and opportunities can be used to pursue many of your firm's most important strategic objectives. You simply need to remember to tap into professional development in order to use it to its full advantage.

1. Strengthen Your Core

Joseph Pilates and Nike, Inc. would tell you that the strength of your biceps and quadriceps are greatly diminished if you have weak core strength. This concept applies to law firms as well. Particularly in today's volatile legal market, a firm should deploy all available resources to strengthening its core.

Glue, fabric, core strength ' however you refer to it, today's law firm needs it in spades. Your firm's core values must not only drive the firm's strategy, but also must be communicated, shared and ultimately embraced by each lawyer as his or her own. Use your professional development efforts and opportunities to articulate these values and highlight their benefits to the members of your firm. When you produce in-house programs, weave the firm's values into each presentation. Show how these lofty and erudite concepts apply to the practice of law at your firm everyday.

If you are a multi-office firm, use the opportunity provided by your creation of professional development programs to assemble a faculty from several offices. Lawyers working together to develop and refine a program have the opportunity to get to know one another. Ultimately, bonds of loyalty and trust grow from such encounters and your firm's core is reinforced.

Non-programmatic professional development opportunities offer myriad ways to help you strengthen your core. Mentoring programs and relationships are a key way to transmit firm culture and values. At Kirkpatrick & Lockhart (K&L), we ask our mentors to model corporate citizenship, ethical practices and standards of practice among their other duties and functions. Be explicit about your values and train and develop your lawyers to embrace them. Your core will strengthen as your lawyers grow.

2. Advance Your Firm's Strategic Objectives

Involve your professional development department in the firm's strategic planning and employ the department to assist you in attaining your strategic goals.

Has your firm targeted a specific legal market to pursue? If so, gain expertise not only from a market research perspective, but substantively as well. Identify the key areas of substantive law needed to service the target market and focus your training efforts in those areas. Partner with your firm's marketing staff to determine specific client relationship skills that will give an edge to lawyers targeting this market. Decide if a select group of lawyers or all of your lawyers should be offered this focused training. Once educated and skilled, your marketing efforts can begin and your lawyers can lecture, teach and write in order to reach potential clients.

Do you want your lawyers to be adept in a certain area or at a specific skill? In addition to being excellent lawyers, what kind of lawyers do you want your professional development efforts to produce: aggressive rainmakers, professionals with the highest sense of legal ethics, flexible and creative thinkers? Your professional development efforts can help you achieve these goals.

Articulate the key skills and qualities you wish to develop and determine if they are best addressed through programs or mentoring and modeling. Custom designed programs are an excellent way to address certain skills, such as the expert use of your firm's technology. Watching more senior lawyers can help junior lawyers acquire additional skills and qualities that you seek to impart, such as the exercise of good judgment. Identify senior lawyers who possess these key qualities and make sure they are modeling these skills for associates on a day-to-day basis. At K&L, the concept of professionalism is of such import that currently we are designing an entire curriculum around it, a curriculum that will include both programmatic and institutional elements.

Do future firm leaders need to be identified and developed? If so, professional development can be extremely helpful both programmatically and institutionally. Leadership skills programs can be offered to a targeted group or to all senior associates. Institutionally, the department can help management provide the mentoring, coaching and opportunities within the firm where attorneys can gain leadership experience.

Do you need to increase cross-selling among your practice areas? Knowledge of firm resources and confidence in one's partners are key elements to cross-selling. Presentations by practice groups to practice groups can help satisfy the knowledge gap that can occur in a large firm. And such programs can enhance confidence among partners. Showcasing practices and deconstructing transactions allow partners to witness each other's talent and business acumen.

Are you determined to increase and support the diversity of your workplace? Use your professional department personnel to assess and evaluate your firm's work environment. You may find a sensitivity training program is in order. Make an effort to assemble a diverse faculty panel when producing your in-house programs. On the non-programmatic side, mentoring relationships can be tailored to encompass special areas that your minority lawyers have identified, such as assistance in networking, both inside and outside your firm. In addition, internal communication networks among minority lawyers can be created and processed through your professional development department. Professional development opportunities also can include one-on-one coaching sessions in a variety of skill areas.

3. Develop Your Assets

Keep your lawyers, at all levels, developing, learning and refining their substantive knowledge and skills. Maintain their competitive edge through professional development.

Although this is the traditional venue of professional development, many firms define it too narrowly. Partners and senior associates must be offered the opportunity to continue to develop along with your younger lawyers. Once they have established a base of technical and substantive knowledge, senior lawyers benefit from focusing on training in key skills areas.

At K&L, in addition to training in substantive law, The K&L Legal Practice Institute offers a specific curriculum in each of the following areas: Practice Management, Client Development and Relationship Management, Legal Writing & Research, Professionalism & Ethics, and Lawyering Skills, which includes financial analysis and negotiation and presentation skills. These curricula offer a range of developmentally appropriate programs for first-year lawyers, through senior-level associates, and on to partners.

Consider the example of managing a practice. Under the Institute's Practice Management curriculum, all of our associates receive training in the skills they need to manage their practice. New lawyers study time and paper management and strategic filing and billing. Mid-level associates can sharpen their supervisory skills of younger associates by participating in programs on feedback and delegation. Those on the cusp of becoming partner take advantage of sessions that address leadership issues. In addition, the curriculum offers sessions for partners in 'Motivating Peak Performance' and 'Sharpening Your Mentoring Skills.'

Identify the skills involved in successful client development and invite senior lawyers to acquire and further refine their skills through participation in professional development programs. Keep your partners engaged and nimble by offering programs in 'Developing Competitive Written Proposals & Presentations' and 'Managing Client Expectations.'

Finally, many partners are motivated to sharpen their negotiation and financial analysis skills. By offering programs in these areas, you will enable partners to enhance the value that they bring to their clients' enterprises and, ultimately, to yours.

4. Support and Enhance Client Relations

The creative and thoughtful use of professional development programs can greatly enhance your firm's ability to attract and retain clients.

Your firm has probably developed a considerable amount of expertise in its professional development department. Why not offer the use of these experts as an added value to your clients? Your professional development team (or person) is expert at designing, developing and implementing programs. Have them work with your firm's marketing and client relations staff to ensure that client satisfaction surveys and client loyalty programs incorporate questions and discussions about professional development offerings that clients would welcome receiving. Organize client roundtables to seek your clients' views on what makes a good lawyer. Keep the meetings short, to the point, and scheduled with the clients' convenience in mind.

Showcase the talent of the firm by inviting clients to programs at your firm that feature your partners. Similarly, offer a CLE credit-worthy program to a client and present it at the client's offices. Required continuing education hours for both lawyers and accountants can be used as an effective hook in this instance. Businesses are often pleased to find innovative and cost effective (in this case, gratis) means of satisfying these requirements for their professionals. One caveat, be sure you have cleared the credits with the appropriate jurisdictions before advertising their availability to your clients.

In addition, your firm can regularly work with clients to ensure both that clients have the legal information they need to excel and that your firm has the client business information needed to provide a top-notch legal product. Periodic, wide-ranging meetings with client personnel often provide the most productive forum for information sharing, relationship scoping and problem solving. The meetings could be structured as a series of short, scoping, briefing and training meetings with appropriate client and firm members set up in a round table fashion. CLE credits are not the bait for engaging in these meetings. Rather, these meetings serve to provide the client with a customized view of your firm's people and resources while at the same time providing introductory training on relevant legal issues.

5. Ensure Institutional Continuity

Intergenerational excellence. This concept has been elevated from a strategic goal to iconic status at K&L. The phrase represents one of the firm's oldest and strongest traditions: the transfer of knowledge, culture and commitment to service from our most senior lawyers to our most junior. Those who have 'grown up' at K&L are eager and honored to carry on this tradition as they are elevated to partner. Many view it as a way of 'giving back.' You can imagine our delight at hearing those words.

Through mentoring, serving as faculty in formal professional development programs, and day-to-day on-the-job training, our senior lawyers teach their craft to our juniors, consciously and deliberately. Through these non-programmatic professional development efforts we believe we enhance our institutional continuity.

In an increasingly complex and competitive environment, law firms can no longer afford to view professional development in a conventional way. Use professional development to ensure not only that your firm's lawyers receive the necessary training to become excellent practitioners, but also to make certain that your firm thrives, generation to generation, by meeting its strategic goals and communicating its values effectively.

Susan Fried is chief officer of Recruitment and Development at Kirkpatrick & Lockhart LLP, a law firm with 10 offices nationwide and over 700 lawyers. She is responsible for the recruitment, professional development and retention of all associates and lateral hires. Prior to joining K&L, she was a corporate lawyer who worked in this field for 12 years.