In the past few years, an ever-increasing number of law firms have followed the lead of major corporations and started developing university-style learning programs.  But what goes into such a program?  It certainly involves a lot more than slapping a firm logo on a schedule of classes.

A firm university might be described best as a proactive, comprehensive software education program offering multiple learning modalities that directly address the needs of specific user groups and firm practice areas.  Five key elements would include:

• Blended Learning
• Skills Assessment
• Learning Management System
• Management Support for User Education
• Learning Team Expertise and Enthusiasm

Blended Learning
Blended learning is a multimodal strategy for education that employs different approaches to deploying instructional material.  In addition to traditional classroom demonstrations or hands-on workshops, training programs now have many e-learning options.  Instructor-led webinars can be given live or recorded for users to access at their convenience.  "Just in time" or one-on-one coaching sessions delivered in person or in an online meeting environment are especially helpful for attorneys. 

Recorded video, animated or graphic tutorials can be an excellent addition to a firm's e-learning repertoire.  As with recorded Webinars, the advantage of such tutorials is that they can be viewed at the user's discretion.  The challenge is in getting people to complete a tutorial in the absence of some kind of direct incentive or without an instructor hovering nearby.  Tutorials work well in conjunction with a skills assessment program if they incorporate scoring that reflects how well a user performs in the interactive portions of the lesson. 

Other blended learning resources include written instructional materials such as quick and full reference guides, the firm's knowledge management system, the helpdesk and, most notably, a software program's onboard help.  If you teach your users how to fish for information in the Help menu, you won't have to field as many late-night calls to feed them answers to their "how-to" questions.

Another consideration in providing a complete comprehensive blended learning program is mentoring.  Assigning new employees to a mentor can ease their transition into the firm environment and help support the education they receive in the training room their first few days.

Skills Assessment
Although controversial among users, many firms have started implementing skills assessment as a means to encourage and ensure professional development for their support staff personnel.  From the HR perspective, skills assessment can be a valuable tool for screening applicants and evaluating software proficiency of new hires and current employees to make appropriate recommendations for job placement and, if necessary, request additional instruction. 

Among the clear benefits of skills assessment are increased user knowledge of the firm's software as well as improved employee work performance, which in turn leads to greater productivity, better document quality and enhanced client service.  Assessment is perhaps the best way to measure how well your users have learned the material they've been taught in class and calculate the return on your learning investment.  Different kinds of evaluative processes can be used including simple in-house surveys, user interviews, home-grown tests or vendor-based assessment tools which may or may not be tied to tutorials.

Apart from the inherent difficulty in getting busy people to do the assessments, the biggest obstacle will be overcoming your employees' fears about what their test results might mean.  No matter how positively you market a skills assessment program, they will wonder whether or not their scores will be used against them.  HR and IT can do a lot to alleviate their concerns by providing adequate opportunities for people to prepare for testing, including "freebie" (nonscored) tutorials and live classes - even study halls as appropriate.  Incentives for getting user buy-in can be in the form of bronze, silver and gold certification, especially when associated with tangible rewards ranging from movie tickets or gift certificates to bonuses or salary increases - all tied to assessment results. 

Learning Management System
Some firms don't think investing in learning management system software should be at the top of their financial priorities.  But an LMS of some kind is essential in putting together a well-organized firm university.  You need a structure or foundation upon which to grow the other elements such as skills assessment, class offerings, etc.  The simplest LMS might be an Excel spreadsheet or an Access database, but a number of vendor solutions are available.  Some are SCORM-compliant; some integrate with PeopleSoft and other products to facilitate populating user information into the underlying LMS database.

A good vendor-supplied LMS should calendar learning events, send out invitations, monitor wait-lists, send reminders to users and allow them to register or cancel without requiring an act of Congress.  HR and the learning team can collaborate to create custom learning paths in the LMS, monitor completion of courses, establish prerequisites or require a supervisor's approval before a user can attend.  You also can allow users to access the LMS themselves and follow their own progress.

An LMS can host your course catalog, list individual course offerings and provide links to tutorials and documentation.  It may even be able to send out post-class surveys or evaluations to assess the material presented and the instructor's effectiveness in delivering it.  Along with tracking CLE or continuing education credit, some LMS programs can generate certificates of completion that provide quite a nice accolade for users to display proudly at their desks.

Your Learning Team and Management Support
One would expect your instructors to be expert in all of your applications, but they also need to be enthusiastic about the teaching process and energetic in selling the firm university concept to the users.  Nevertheless, the success of your education program will depend largely on how much support you have from management.  No matter how talented your learning team is or how much cheerleading they do, if the "powers that be" don't back your efforts, you'll be lucky to get your firm university off the linoleum.

Planning Your Own Firm University
The first step in putting together your learning program is to analyze your firm's software education needs.  To do this, you need to meet your users and find out what they know and don't know.  As with informal skills assessment, you can do surveys, interviews, etc. to gain perspective.

Next, research your firm's practice areas and develop appropriate learning paths.  What are your target user groups?  You should also consider current and future learning situations.  Are you looking at a means for dealing with event-based training challenges such as software rollouts, updates and upgrades?  Contemplating ways to revamp your new hire classes?  Hoping to implement a continuing education program?

With your research in progress, start putting your plan in writing.  Outline and submit your proposal for classes, learning paths, skills assessment, etc.  Consider preparing a mission statement.  A goal-oriented timeline is helpful, but be flexible as it's bound to change.  Make a "wish list" of tutorials and other e-learning tools to submit to management.  Start investigating applications that might make it easier to organize your educational endeavors.

Consider giving your firm university a name and custom logo, but don't expect those elements alone to carry your efforts to success.  Promoting your firm university requires an effective, comprehensive marketing strategy.  Even before you hold your first classes, you need to get the word out about your new learning program.  Use e-mail, posters or the firm newsletter to get people excited.  Go to staff and department meetings to promote your educational opportunities. 

Getting Bodies into the Classroom
If your classes are fun, brief and task-specific, word-of-mouth will do wonders for attendance.  Games or incentives also boost interest.  The traditional "Field of Dreams" approach ("If you feed them, they will come . . .") works well, but you can provide other rewards such as CLE credit, movie tickets, etc.  You also can try to get management to make some courses mandatory, but this is likely to have limited success in the long run.  You really want people in class who are excited about learning.  Nothing brings a group's energy down faster than someone who resents being there. 

Attorneys in particular are very slippery.  They will procrastinate, offer mondo excuses and challenge any edicts.  Rather than wrestle this 'gator, consider offering them one-on-one instruction and alternative e-learning courses.  Since "time is money" for attorneys, any live classes for attorneys should be short and to the point.  Nevertheless, if you target their productivity concerns specifically, you'll see attorney attendance rise dramatically.

Overall Keys to Success
As noted above, management support for your university program is crucial, but you need HR, IT and helpdesk support as well.  Some parting advice:  Offer well-developed, quality courses that are fun as well as educational and be consistent in providing regular classes so people see continuing education as a form of ongoing support.  Avoid burnout for your instructors and students by breaking day-long seminars into smaller sessions (ideally, less than an hour in length).  Without question, you're going to face challenges.  You'll need to evaluate your results frequently and be prepared to make changes in your strategy.  When frustration ensues, be patient, enthusiastic and hang in there.  Persistence really does pay off.  With luck, there will be a day when those who thought styles were either fashion sense or nonsense thank you for providing valuable information on how to produce a better document.  That's when you'll know you're a graduate of your own firm university.

About our author

Kahlee Brighton recently joined the international law firm of Greenberg Traurig, LLP as its Technical Training Developer.  For many years, she has been an advocate, strategist and innovator of educational technologies for law firms, including the development of firm university learning programs.  She has been a speaker at ILTA webinars, conferences and regional meetings.  She also has authored a number of published articles and white papers on various software education, customer service and applications topics.  She can be reached at thelastword@earthlink.net.

Copyright 2007.  Kahlee Brighton.  All rights reserved.  Printed here by permission.