Lack of experience means that until new starters have been trained in essential practical skills, learning curve drags on, mistakes are made, and progress is slow. But in amongst all the demands of a busy legal practice, these bottom-line basics can easily be overlooked, forgotten or pushed down the priority list because there just aren’t enough hours in your day. Which means that graduates frequently resort to guesswork, trial and error and risky choices.

Now, there’s an easy way for you to avoid the pitfalls of these training constraints, with the New Lawyer Accelerator Program.

The New Lawyer Accelerator Program is a comprehensive training course, focused exclusively on teaching entry-level practical legal skills to new lawyers.

Through a series of innovative videos, the New Lawyer Accelerator Program delivers over 20 hours of specialist legal practical skills training all specifically selected to match the entry level of a new lawyer.

Graduates are guided through a carefully structured training sequence as they’re shown how to correctly undertake the typical ‘everyday’ tasks of a junior lawyer.

Including induction sessions to familiarize graduates with general law firm protocols like budgets, client file procedures and completing timesheets, each module is packed full of straightforward explanations, real-life examples and practical tips as your new lawyer is guided, step-by-step through essential basic skillsets like these and more:

• How to complete time sheets correctly; keeping track of billable hours & budgets
• The process to follow for preparing a brief to a barrister
• Organising, preparing for and attending meetings and conferences
• Opening and closing client files; taking files home; using original documents
• Practical tips for preparing for a court appearance or instructing a barrister in court
• How to handle telephone inquiries; taking instructions; communicating with clients
• Prioritising workload demands; how to organize information; working on your own

Plus, there are quizzes, checklists, precedents, guides, summaries to reinforce everything that’s learnt, so that graduates have the tools they’ll need to be able to perform at their best in your practice efficiently and effectively from the very start.

The program content has been designed so that all of the video modules:

• Relate to real-life situations
• Include plenty of practical examples
• Are interesting to watch & easy to follow
• Demonstrate practical skills that can be applied straightaway
• Deal directly with the types of tasks, problems and issues that are relevant to new lawyers

Informative slides, everyday case studies and real-life examples all help graduates to understand the topic under discussion and to make sense of how to apply new practical skills to their own work.

To make the training even more effective, each video training module is broken down into a series of short, bite-sized sessions so that:

• graduate lawyers are not overloaded with too much new information at once
• it’s easier for them to find time to complete individual sessions
• specific topics can be individually addressed
• attention and focus is maintained
• content take-up is maximised

Click here to see the full list of 20 modules.

The New Lawyer Accelerator Program doesn’t stop with the video modules.

The video training is supplemented with additional resources to assist graduates to remember what they’ve learnt, apply skills in their own work, and reinforce the core elements of the training,

The key takeaways from each module are summarised in the Top Ten Tips handout as a quick and easy reference tool.

Even more than that, there’s a comprehensive collection of checklists, precedents, guides and summaries that cover the skills that they’ve learnt. Here are just a few examples from the 100+ downloadable templates that are included in the New Lawyer Accelerator Program:

Designed to provide ‘hands-on’ guidance, these practical printouts are in convenient formats, straightforward to understand and simple to follow. So that once new lawyers have completed a module, they’ll always have these to refer to, adapt and use in their own daily practice.

Using a mix of 20 multiple choice and ‘true or false’ questions, the students will be able to reinforce what’s just been learnt and to test their knowledge of the topics covered.

Instant results provide immediate evaluation, so that they can check straightaway that they’ve understood the skillset before moving onto the next module.

The Start-up Stage begins right from day one.

There are 10 modules filled with practical basic training especially selected for the first two weeks that a new lawyer joins your firm.

The Start-Up Stage training includes 3 components so that graduates will have everything they need to put them on their feet:

1. Induction

For someone fresh out of university, almost everything about a law firm is new, different and unknown. Such high levels of uncertainty can create a lot of stress, which impacts on learning, retention of information and performance. Familiarizing new graduates with matters like law firms processes & protocols, WH&S factors, how to maintain a professional workspace, legal letter layouts and telephone style instantly decreases their levels of distraction, thereby creating ideal conditions for lifting concentration and performance levels right from day one.

2. The business basics of being in a law firm

The commercial side of the practice of law is rarely something to which graduates have been exposed. Which means that, usually, new lawyers only have an extremely limited understanding of how a law firm functions as a business. The concept of a budget is unknown. The training puts legal practice into a business context that newcomers can understand and relate to, by showing them how the overall financial operations directly link into their daily work. It includes clear and simple explanations about billable hours, budgets and invoicing and instructions for how to correctly complete timesheets.

3. The first round of typical tasks undertaken by graduate lawyers

New lawyers usually struggle quite a bit when they’re allocated their first tasks. Although their legal knowledge might be quite impressive, what’s missing is a solid base of practical skills. This can lead to a lot of guesswork, trial and error and mistakes. The start-up phase of the training puts in place the first layer of practical skills (which will be built upon and added to in the following two phases as work becomes increasingly complex).

It concentrates on the basics, like: handling telephone inquiries, preparing briefs, arranging conferences, file management and professional client communications. The start-up phase wraps up with an ‘everyday ethics’ training highlighting how ethical errors can strike down even junior lawyers anywhere, anytime, any day.

For an easy-to-read summary of topics covered in each module click here

By the 3 months stage, new lawyers will have had the opportunity to settle into their role, implement the basic skills that they learnt in Phase 1 and to become more accustomed to handling entry level tasks.

Which means that they’ll be ready to move onto legal work that is somewhat more complex. Along with that, they’ll be expected to manage a larger file load and take on some additional responsibility for themselves.

While being continually confronted by things they haven’t done before is what being new is all about, a graduate’s productivity and proficiency can be vastly improved if they’re provided with structure in advance. That’s why Phase 2 of the training concentrates on the typical sorts of tasks that are allocated to new lawyers once they reach this next stage of their learning curve. Preparing for & taking part in meetings and conferences; professional communications with clients, colleagues and the court; how to progress their client files efficiently and effectively; accomplishing confident court appearances; proficiency in workload management – these topics are all broken down into easy-to-follow, step-by-step guides for new lawyers who are still finding their way.

And since they’ve got someone to show them what to do and how to do it, it means that, instead of becoming stressed, distracted or overwhelmed, their work automatically becomes less disrupted, flows more smoothly and their capacity to concentrate on the substantive issues is increased.

For an easy-to-read summary of topics covered in each module click here

After 6 months in full-time legal practice, most graduates are gradually becoming more accustomed to the daily work of a junior lawyer. Since they’ve had an opportunity to undertake a range of tasks more than once, it means they’ve already got the benefit of learning from their own previous experience for a limited range of tasks.

However, managing multiple files, increased levels of responsibility and greater complexity of tasks can leave many new lawyers struggling as they try to cope with these additional demands.  The problem that they face is that they can no longer deal with their client files in the same way that they managed their university studies. The days of pre-set assignment topics, listening to lecturers and long-term due dates are gone forever, and graduates are often completely unprepared for what comes next.

Skills Level 3 is designed to:

• assist graduates to step into a suitable level of autonomy in their matters (not too much, not too little);
• walk them through the process for how to effectively step up to take charge of their own client meetings (from straightforward logistics, to preparing an agenda, effective questioning techniques and follow-up);
• teach them essential skills for pro-active matter management (in-built planning for unpredictability, coordinating input, updating senior lawyers);
• show them the best way to guide and inform clients when instructing a barrister in court (as well as proper preparation, what to do at the bar table and final follow up);
• instruct them in how to avoid burnout as they adapt to the lawyer’s reality of constantly changing priorities, urgent deadlines and competing demands (including risks of rushing; failing to alert senior lawyers to problems; ignoring priorities)

Since any sense of uncertainty is a definite disadvantage, removing so many unknown factors in advance means that graduates can feel less intimidated, giving them a confidence boost that certainly won’t go unnoticed by your clients.