The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/21494
“Tomorrow’s learning professional understands when to guide the learning experience and when to allow for self- discovery and experiential learning.” shareable and most important, accessible by others at their moment of need. Social media are here to stay. Tomorrow’s CEO belongs to the Millennial Generation that replaced face-to-face conversation with text-based conversations. For these future leaders, social media have proved to be effective and efficient tools for informal communication and relationship building, and eventually for business benefits. Today, even within the legal industry, we begin to see business uses for social media. From the recent report by the National Center for State Courts, Future Trends in State Courts 2010 — The Role of Social Networking Tools in Judicial Systems, courts are adopting the use of blogs, Twitter and Facebook to enable a direct dialogue with the legal community. Courts can post summaries of rulings, procedural information, key dates and changes to room assignments, eliminating calls to the court or clerk’s office. Legal professionals are already recognizing the benefits and value of Web 2.0 communication. With lawyers and legal staff directly benefiting from these tools, both professionally and personally, how do we leverage social media tools to promote learning? The next generation of legal technology users will demand that we have an answer to this. Within corporations, community tools such as blogs, wikis and discussion forums are utilized to overcome the same challenges we are facing in the legal profession: obsolescence of skills and knowledge, skill shortages due to constant change and the loss of knowledge that staff take with them when they leave. For inspiration on how law firms might address these obstacles, we turned our attention to our knowledge management peers and we discovered several stories about a large global law firm that has built a successful knowledge management community using social media tools. The firm is reporting success with a program that includes a full online social platform that utilizes blogs, wikis, social bookmarking and tagging. If they can do it, so can most law firms. Learning from Peers and Experts Peer-to-peer learning should be built into both formal and informal learning programs. Learning will begin to stick through shared experiences that take place during the context of the work day. While we believe strongly in the power of using social media tools to share expertise, as learning professionals, we 56 www.iltanet.org Peer to Peer will want to identify our technical experts early on and forge relationships with them based on mutual goals and trust. The law firm of Butzel Long has done just that through a unique program that allows Butzel team members to identify an expert to answer questions without having to wait for a special class, interrupt a colleague or risk receiving inaccurate information. To assist in strategically developing the skills of an ever changing workforce, in 2006, the Butzel Learning and Development team collaborated with the firm’s legal secretaries to define a competency model that incorporates knowledge, skills, abilities and other attributes that lead to exemplary job performance. The program provides a progressive — or cascading — approach to development. The model is currently composed of eleven competencies, each having three distinct stages of development: • Learning: In this stage, the legal secretary seeks to gain knowledge and awareness of the skill through e-learning, classroom instruction and/or on-the-job training. • Competency: In this stage, the legal secretary has acquired the requisite skill and now possesses sufficient knowledge and experience to complete the task without guidance. • Mastery: In the final stage, the legal secretary possesses extensive experience, applies best practices and can support the learning of others. Regarding the design and implementation of the model, the firm’s Learning and Development Manager, Kurt Maaske, had this to say: “What we found is that a legal secretary displayed a propensity to acquire knowledge in certain skills. By focusing our efforts in assisting our secretaries to master those skills — Styles, for example — the overall benefit to the firm was substantially greater than focusing on developing a wide range of skills, which had been our approach in the past. While it is critical for the firm to have access to a wide range of skills, we found it was not imperative that each secretary possess every one, nor was it practical to assume they could.” The true benefit with this approach has been identifying and recognizing subject matter experts (SMEs). These SMEs now support the learning and development of their peers by teaching instructor-led classes, coaching new employees and