Technology is changing the way that solicitors are training and continuing their professional development. Polly Botsford reports.They say you only start learning once you have left school. This maxim has been put partially into practice with the concept of continuing professional development (CPD) and work-based learning.

Since it was first introduced in the mid-1980s, CPD and other elements of professional training have come to be viewed less as a points-accumulation exercise and more as a legitimate way of developing skills as a lawyer.

As attitudes have become more positive, the training itself has evolved. CPD and other types of work-based learning have moved on, both in content and form.

It is not just about legal technical skills anymore but also about business skills and compliance issues; and CPD is being delivered using more diverse methods, moving away from board-and-chalk lectures to interactive learning and web-based training.

Training in general has also become more meaningful because the nature of the lawyer’s employment increasingly demands it. ‘These days, roles are evolving and there are an awful lot of new demands on solicitors so they need training to be prepared,’ says Joanne Gubbay, head of practice learning and development at international law firm, Ashurst.

Firms are now looking at what the demands of the job are and then identifying the training needs accordingly. Thankfully, this imperative has changed both what is being learned and how it is being taught.

Though training is still delivered by the same types of providers (in-house and externally), there has been a distinct trend towards greater interactivity in teaching, moving away from static lectures to more dynamic case studies and discussion-based sessions.

For instance, Ashurst says that for its training on the new Companies Act it abandoned a lecture-based approach and offered case studies. Lawyers were given certain scenarios and then had to work out what their approach would be under the new legislation.

At another international firm, Hammonds, business skills training includes business simulations, such as simulating the financial cycle of a business over one or two years, using actors to play key client roles and getting lawyers to analyse what a client’s concerns might be at any point in that cycle.

Nor is interactivity just a buzzword. Sarah Hutchinson, director of professional development at the College of Law, says: ‘There is a huge amount of research which demonstrates that, if you sit and listen to a lecture, six months later you will be lucky to remember 5% of it. If you read it, you may retain 10%. If you are interactive, then this figure shoots up to 20% to 25% retention.’

Gubbay agrees: ‘Information gathering should not just be a one-way process. It is about learning by doing, not just listening.’ Also, training that is specifically designed to reflect what happens in reality is quicker to pick up on changes affecting lawyers in the real world.

This is why Fiona Cunningham, head of the professional division at Nottingham Law School, says the emphasis is now on ‘experiential learning’ – learning and experience going hand in hand. For instance, the school has started offering training in telephone advocacy, which reflects the fact that many court hearings are now being held over the telephone. It takes different skills to persuade a judge over the telephone than are needed in person.

Running in tandem with greater interactivity is the arrival (with what feels like the same impact that the railway had in the 19th century) of online, web-based training – or e-learning – which can yield huge benefits to firms in terms of cost and efficiency. E-learning first steamed onto the scene a decade or so ago, but has really gathered pace in the past few years, particularly since customer demand for improved software has led to what the industry calls ‘rapid e-learning’, (by which is meant that courses are much quicker to build, not that you have to learn faster).

There is also greater scope for recording the results of e-learning with in-built tracking systems so that firms can more easily monitor employee performance and compile their training records to ensure employees are CPD compliant. Indeed, a company called Orkell provides online training packages for professional bodies in a range of service sectors, which enables individuals to complete training and feed their results straight to the professional body which regulates them.

Online, web-based training is a broad term covering many different services and has itself undergone considerable change. It starts with the simple, such as ‘listen-again’ services, where a lecture that was originally delivered in a traditional format is available online afterwards for those who have missed it or want to revisit a particular aspect.

It also means offering various DVDs and videos (such as the College of Law’s well-known LNTV – the college currently makes 76 new half-hour programmes each year) which, instead of watching them on a TV screen in a designated room with your colleagues, you have delivered to your desktop where you can view at your convenience.

Today there are also more sophisticated renditions such as interactive online tutorials (sometimes called i-tutorials or e-tutorials) and web-based seminars, or ‘webinars’, where a seminar is delivered live over the web, even with live Q&A sessions where viewers can ask questions of the speakers in real time by email, SMS or phone. Webinars have appeared only in the past year or so but have taken off in a big way.

Tim Kevan, chief executive officer of CPD Webinars, a new provider which claims to have been the first to run a webinar at the beginning of 2007, says that ‘take-up has been massive’. This is in part because of the ability to engage directly with the speakers, despite distance in time and space.

This a huge advantage over static videos and seminars, which are limited by the fact that they are often a ‘talking head’ delivering a monologue. Podcasts have come into play too, so that lawyers can easily download a lecture or seminar to digest on the train on the way home.

There are a huge number of providers of online training, including the well-established players such as LexisNexis and PLC, which have both introduced online products to tie in with their vast knowledge databases. LexisNexis has introduced five streams of webinars which link up with its online know-how service.

PLC meanwhile has joined forces with the College of Law to create a series of interactive online programmes launched in February where lawyers have to read text, watch video, and respond to scenarios, as well as pass a test at the end. The programmes then feed back into the regular PLC service.

For time-poor lawyers scattered across the globe in far-flung offices, the benefits of online training are obvious: there is no need to get on a train – or a plane – and attend an all-day conference. There is also flexibility – you get to choose when to complete your training, and you can also interrupt it if a client intervenes (or if you need a cup of tea or a sandwich).

Tim Lewinson, who runs Legal Training TV, which offers a number of on-demand products alongside its new line in ‘live events’, says: ‘There is great value attached to having things at a time which suits your schedule.’ For firms, particularly those with offices nationally and internationally, online delivery enables them to standardise training across offices.

Richard Jones, general manager of the Clifford Chance Academy, the firm’s learning management headquarters based in Amsterdam, says: ‘We currently have 40 different e-learning courses available across the world. E-learning means we can get the equivalent classroom training out to everybody.’

But this is also about cost – online training is good for the travel budget and is less disruptive to fee-earning time. New training providers such as CPD Webinars are competing with the more established providers by offering their online talks on a ‘per office’ basis rather than per user, which could mean huge cost savings for some firms.

This may be something more for the long term, but law firms can also develop their own online courses, thus reducing the reliance on (sometimes) expensive external providers. Most of the big City law firms have already gone a long way toward developing their own sophisticated e-learning packages (Clifford Chance is looking at introducing internet games theory into its e-learning).

But with new, more manageable and affordable software, there are signs that doing it on your own will be possible for smaller firms too – a sort of democratisation of CPD provision. Steve Burnard, product specialist at Adobe, the software company which has brought out new software Connect Pro for online training, employs the term ‘power to the people’. He says that the new technology means ‘what used to take 30 man-hours now probably takes only one’.

For most firms, however, online is not the only fruit in the training bowl, as research carried out by the College of Law last year shows. Hutchinson explains: ‘It showed that 75% of firms said they were going to integrate e-learning into their strategy within the next two years, but no one thought it would eradicate [traditional face-to-face training] completely.’

Cunningham agrees: ‘We use technology, yes, when it adds to the learning experience, but not for the sake of it.’ This is where ‘blended learning’ comes in – that is, using e-learning in conjunction with face-to-face training. Hammonds, for example, has e-learning packages which the firm uses before and after their classroom-based training as preparation and follow-up.

Some law firms and training providers are steering clear of the e-word, at least for the moment. Vicky Weber, manager of public courses and conferences at JSB, which provides in-company training and public courses, says they are not considering online ‘in the immediate future’. She says that the format their clients prefer is Q&A focused, in areas where they need clarification. ‘The face-to-face environment suits knowledge-transfer better,’ she adds.

Lucy Scott-Moncrieff, who runs Scomo, the innovative firm of self-employed lawyers, believes it is good for lawyers to get out of the office to attend a training conference and voices concern at the low level of sophistication of some online products. It is not only the online juggernaut which is challenging old ways of doing things – the content of training is different too.

Content tends to be split into legal or technical training and skills-based training. Whereas, once upon a time, the emphasis was on the former with the latter catching up, now they are equally weighted.

Suzanne Fine, global head of knowledge and learning at Linklaters, says: ‘We cover both technical and business skills because this is what our lawyers need in order to deliver a proper service to their clients – they need to be able to partner with their clients.’

Gubbay agrees: ‘Solicitors are much more managers of the business than just lawyers – managing finance, managing people – so we need to equip them with these business skills.’ There is also high demand from firms for training in client-winning skills, communication skills, and research and written skills.

Training content has become less generic and more tailored to firms’ house styles. And with good reason – lectures with content that does not apply to you are a huge disincentive to listening. As Hutchinson astutely says: ‘If it is relevant, you will stay awake.’

There is new content too – compliance training on subjects such as money laundering or the new Solicitors Code of Conduct has grown considerably in recent years (and not only for lawyers, but for a number of professions and sectors).

Most firms agree that this is where online packages are ideally suited. Steve Madge, head of learning and professional development at Hammonds, says: ‘There is a huge amount of information, and a big risk is that lawyers just won’t take it in all at once. With e-learning they can digest it in bite-size chunks.’

This is also an area where monitoring of training becomes important, to demonstrate and record that lawyers have completed it, and where online products can help to achieve this.

Training is now an essential rather than an extra – if only to meet the expectations of the new generations of lawyers, as Fine explains: ‘Young people joining us are more and more focused on their future careers. One question we are repeatedly asked during recruitment is what do we offer in terms of future personal development? The best law firms are answering that question.’

And with new, improved and cheaper training options out there, answering it has just got a lot easier.

Polly Botsford is a freelance journalist