Training lawyers to use legal tech tools is no easy feat. It requires breaking old habits, overcoming mindsets stuck in dusty archives, and often even fear of technology, all in a rollercoaster of zero attention span.
In this post, you’ll find three (3) practical tips to rock the next innovation training at your law firm.
1. Make it interactive
If you spoke in front of more than three people in the past five years, you’ve probably experienced this: within twenty minutes, people get bored and check their phones for emails. And it is all down way from there.
The only way how to get people off their phones is to give them something else to play with.
Quick Fix
- give your audience a demo to code along
- be visually engaging, bonus points for each meme used
2. Have lawyers teach lawyers
This is probably the most counterintuitive point; but it is true. If you want to effectively show anyone anything, you have to speak their language. In this regard, IT professionals and lawyers both speak their own distinctive dialects of Klingon.
There is no way that your local IT department will alone manage to make a good interactive training for your legal employees, simply because they are playing a different sport.
Making IT guys train legal guys is the equivalent of asking the construction company that built a shopping centre to teach your fast food staff. They may be able to explain how to pour concrete but are likely a lot less dexterous with BBQ sauce.
Often, this means giving a demo first to a selected group and then recruit one of them to spread the love.
Quick fix
- make training teams multidisciplinary
- the instructor should be a user of the same tool in the same context
3. Show how the tool fixes a problem
There is an inherent mistrust of lawyers towards anything new… until they are shown that it is not anything new, and that someone they respect has already used it on a real world matter and no one got hurt.
Lawyers believe in showing battle scars.
To succeed, put some of yours at display, too. Tell a story of an issue that was fixed, and make your training tangible.
Quick fix
- Client testimonials
- Demos of actual final product
- Honesty about stuff that did not work
Final provisions
The above tips are useless, if you do not put your heart into the presentation. Just try to relax and enjoy yourself – the audience will appreciate your point of view and your energy.
In other words: you’ve got this! ☘️
- Did I forget something?
- Do you have any tips on how to retain lawyer attention longer?
Let me know down below in the comments!
-Attorney@Code
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