Extract from The Successful Firm Project’s article “New Partnership Makes Legal Tech Education Accessible for All Firms”
There is a common objection that arises when attorneys are encouraged to engage in technology training: time devoted to training is time spent away from logging billable client hours.
Bonnie Beuth is a founding member of the Legal Technology Core Competencies Certification Coalition (LTC4), a legal technology certification program focused on application-agnostic and workflow-based training for lawyers. Legal professionals from around the globe formed the group in 2010 to develop learning programs focused on helping firms address skill gaps among attorneys while remaining conscious of time constraints.
“The only way to get an attorney into training is to only teach them what they need to know and to make it really short. They are not going to engage in something that is going to impact their billable hours,” Beuth says.
Instead of focusing on extensive application-based training, LTC4’s nine learning plans give firms a roadmap for how to educate attorneys on specific technology topics. For instance, an LTC4 learning plan focused on ‘Working with Legal Documents’ further breaks the topic down into 14 short workflow competencies. The learning plan then outlines the specific skills for training teams to cover within the workflow to obtain competency. To learn how to update and share an existing document, training teams are instructed to focus on the specific steps to navigate all of the applications used in that workflow.
