The demand for more flexible training products has caused a shift in the required skill sets of the law firm trainer.  The professional trainer's value is found less in the classroom and more in the well-crafted learning content that blends into the regular activities of the firm.

In the past, many law firm trainers were secretaries who were fairly technically savvy and decent communicators.  They could share their knowledge of firm practices with coworkers and provide value to the firm by bringing others "up to speed."  The role of trainer may have been formal or informal, but few law firm trainers actually set out to be trainers.  They became one along the way. 

Today, as firms adapt to changes in technology, "on-the-job" knowledge quickly becomes antiquated, and training needs to be updated.  What do you do now?  Go back to the secretarial pool to find the "new local expert?"  Add to the mix the pressure from your community to spend less time in the classroom.  If stand-up instruction isn't the preferred venue, what new training skill sets are required, and how are they leveraged in your firm?

Enter the learning professional.  This person is, by design, an information communication machine.  He or she is able to rapidly assimilate new technology and communicate that back to a group of learners.  Today, your firm needs to develop stand-up materials, printed materials and possibly video, and these materials need to agree with each other.  You need to provide consistent instruction across all your offices.  You need someone who can do all of the following:

• Work with subject-matter experts and boil key information down to just the bits that learners will need to know to do their jobs well
• Write content for reference cards or video scripts
• Produce courseware that anyone (with a little preparation) can deliver, in any format, to a learning audience

What you need is an instructional designer.

Transparent Instruction by Design
Solid instructional design focuses on finding the right answers and placing them where the firm community can access these solutions on their own, rather than relying solely on classroom instruction.  Knowledge that is placed at the learner's fingertips is a fundamental shift away from reactionary training and toward prevention.  Excellent training product, like really smart technology, is integrated seamlessly into the work flow of the firm.  In fact, if it's done right, learners don't realize they're being trained.

Good project managers trust a transparent training program to make project deployments run smoothly.  Support managers know their trainers are effective when they don't hear much from them, yet the number of calls for desk-side support is low.  They appreciate the value of instructional designers.

Trainers don't completely disappear, however.  There will always be the need for stand-up instruction in the classroom.  But the ability to stand and deliver is now a secondary requirement of the learning professional.  Well-designed content facilitates learning via any medium.

Evaluating the Expense
Some critical areas to consider when measuring the investment in an instructional designer:

• What are your firm's soft costs for inefficiency and mistakes?
• How many billable hours have you spent trying to "fix" a poorly created or formatted brief? 
• How many hours have your helpdesk and network teams spent trying to recover a document that was not saved in the right place or saved outside the document management system? 
• How much does it cost you to train a new hire?
• How long does it take before your new associates become profitable?  Do they leave you just when they are starting to make you money?  Do they run off to find "meaningful work" elsewhere? 
• How many hours of training could have prevented a secretary from jumping ship, (or being fired)?

Does a professional cost you more than promoting a secretary from within?  Of course it does.  So how do you justify the extra budget?  Where is the added value in the shift in professional requirements?  Essentially, with one person you are covering many necessary skills.  You will gain top-notch documentation for your user base and not have to tie up your applications team to get it developed.  You will have someone who can help ensure the successful deployment of a new software package.  You will have an instructional designer who can step into a classroom and deliver training on just about anything.  But most of all, you will have a professional who can help make your firm more efficient.  And time, as they say, is money.

About our authors

Ann Gerbin, Tony Hartsfield and Thomas Pullen are members of the Bryan Cave Training Team at Bryan Cave LLP.  Tony and Thomas are the co-founders of the Society of Legal Learning Professionals, an online community for the legal learning field.  Tony serves on ILTA User Support Peer Group Steering Committee.  They can be reached at amgerbin@bryancave.com, tlhartsfield@bryancave.com and trpullen@bryancave.com.