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26 January 2018 / Melissa Hardee
Issue: 7778 / Categories: Features , Training & education , Profession
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Shattering the training myth

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Melissa Hardee explains why training shouldn’t just be for trainers & trainees

A commonly held myth in law firms is that selecting, arranging and delivering training is the exclusive province of those in learning and development (L&D) or human resources (HR), and that it is not something that management or the fee earning population need to worry about.

The reality is somewhat different. Training involves a range of people in a firm: supervising someone’s work and giving feedback is ‘training’; fee earners who give a talk on a new legal development are delivering training. Practice areas may decide the legal technical training that should be undertaken in their group, in addition to deciding how to keep their lawyers up-to-date with legal developments.

The problem is that lawyers, although highly skilled and knowledgeable about the law, are rarely skilled and knowledgeable about training—although they may assume they are. With this in mind I set out to write The Legal Training Handbook and, later, its companion publication The Legal Training Toolkit (both available from the

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