Reinventing the legal apprenticeship. Learning through human interaction remains critical as the sector embraces AI Publishedyesterday Unlock the Editor's Digest for free Since the 13th century, when law apprentices worked alongside seasoned professionals, legal training has involved learning by doing. But as AI automates everything from document review to contract drafting - "grunt work" that once helped hone young lawyers' skills - firms may need to rethink the way they develop legal talent. Even before the advent of AI, the training of newly-minted lawyers has been undergoing a series of transformations. From the mid-1990s, for example, rapid growth in the size of law firms prompted increasing professionalisation of functions such as hiring and human resources management. Even so, talent development often remained the responsibility of senior partners or practice group leaders and the way junior lawyers connected with mentors could be highly informal. "You had networking evenings with drinks and dinners. And in the office the next day, you'd be working closely with a partner," recalls Nathan Peart, executive director of the associate practice group at Major, Lindsey & Africa, the legal recruitment specialist. Since then, much of this informality has disappeared as firms have grown and expanded their global footprint, making it harder to continue relying on partners to manage functions such as human resources. "Now you have dedicated training teams whereas in the past it might have been under a couple of people," says Peart. As well as giving new recruits instruction in skills such as negotiation, firms also started developing ambitious programmes to prepare young lawyers for management and leadership roles. At Latham & Watkins, for example, what it calls its Latham Academies cover skills such as business development, project management and team leadership. Debevoise & Plimpton even offers new hires a mini-MBA, a three-week full-time business and finance education programme with a curriculum developed in partnership with Columbia Business School and finance training provider Training The Street. Today, as AI transforms much legal work, talent development is undergoing yet another shift. This involves both introducing new AI-powered forms of training - such as real-time simulations - and ensuring lawyers know how to apply AI tools to their work. However, Peart says that firms remain keenly aware of the need for human skills such as EQ, or emotional intelligence, a term that covers traits such as empathy and capabilities such as relationship development and the management of emotions. "EQ is going to be the differentiator," he says. "There's a human element in a lot of what we do, and AI can't replace that." Lesson from the past: the details still matter. When Jane Rogers thinks back to 2004, when she became an associate at Ropes & Gray, she remembers that doing due diligence for the firm's clients meant sitting in conference rooms working through boxes of paper documents, none of which had been catalogued or indexed. "Now you have an AI tool that can go through 10 conference rooms full of documents, index them and provide you with output," says Rogers, who is now a London-based partner at Ropes & Gray. As a member of the firm's management committee with a focus on talent development, Rogers has watched many changes take place in the way junior lawyers learn their trade. "When I joined Ropes & Gray, we had a corporate department and a litigation department," she says. "I was in the corporate department, and that meant I took any kind of assignment that came in. It was a very broad-based experience." Lessons in leadership. This article is part of a series examining common management challenges, highlighting how executives can use lessons of the past to deal with the challenges of today. However, by 2010, when she relocated from the firm's Boston office to London, Ropes & Gray, a firm with its roots in Boston, was expanding globally while also increasing its range of legal specialisations. With young lawyers moving into technically diverse areas such as asset management and tax or regulatory compliance, training demanded a more structured approach, says Rogers. Today, the biggest disruption is AI and the way it is transforming work in the sector. Yet Rogers sees the traditional methods used to develop legal professionals as equally relevant - perhaps even more so - in the age of AI. "While many things have changed, many have stayed the same," she says. "And learning by doing was and is still the single most powerful developmental tool we have." She believes that this is because, fundamentally, the role of lawyers has not altered. "We're here to understand our clients' businesses, to create value for them and to provide judgment," she says. "That's going to become more critical." Even so, as she looks back, Rogers points out that routine tasks - including working through the boxes of documents AI can now take on - helped young lawyers build a skill that remains essential to their work: attention to detail. This has become even more important now that lawyers need to be able to verify AI-generated output and assess its quality. "That attention to detail was absolutely a skill worth learning," she says. "And we're going to have to make sure we're still teaching it." Today's challenge: fostering a healthy AI scepticism. As AI takes on many routine legal tasks, some wonder what will replace those tasks as a means of training young lawyers - and debate whether AI tools will even remove the need for junior associates. Siobhan Handley, chief of staff at Orrick, sees it differently. "There's this idea that AI is eliminating certain parts of what you would expect your most junior talent to be performing," says Handley, who oversees talent and human resources strategies at the firm. "We don't think that way. We think these AI-native associates - the most junior - are best equipped to make this transformation." Familiarity with AI tools is also changing the way new recruits think about their roles, she says. "They see the value they bring in terms of thinking and judgment, as opposed to finding the information." Even so, designing training programmes for young lawyers who are AI natives comes with challenges. Handley argues that the technology's ability to produce responses that are biased, misleading, incorrect or fabricated means fostering a certain distrust of AI. "We have guardrails, but it doesn't stop hallucination altogether," she says. "So it's risky to not have a view towards AI that includes a healthy scepticism." Moreover, having growing numbers of AI natives at the firm means ensuring that training programmes are sufficiently sophisticated to engage a generation of young lawyers who became immersed in the technologies before even graduating from law school. Here, AI itself can offer solutions by creating new forms of experiential learning. For example, Orrick is using an AI-powered deposition simulator to train its associates. Developed by legal training provider AltaClaro and legal transcription provider Verbit, DepoSim uses AI agents to play the role of witnesses, opposing counsel and court reporters. But while this and other simulation tools rely on AI, Orrick is using them in combination with training by humans. Handley argues that young lawyers still need the personal interaction that was part of a traditional legal apprenticeship. "But rather than learning through what some might call drudgery, you now have a partner and an associate reviewing an AI product together." She points to the way Orrick uses a negotiation simulation tool to train associates. "They're using that tool, but in groups," she says. "They sit with the experienced partner and assess where it's right, where it's wrong and where it could be improved. To me, that feels like the apprenticeship model."

CHARLOTTE, N.C., April 5, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Training The Street Further Extends Global Reach with Acquisition of The Marquee Group, Canada's Leading Provider of Financial Modeling Training and Consulting