On April 27th, legal industry analyst Jordan Furlong will be delivering the keynote address to The Future is Now: Legal Services. The topic the has chosen is one which is vitally important to us here at Hey legal: Reinventing Professional Development for Lawyers of the Future

In preparation for the conference, Jordan has written a paper titled “Towards A New and Better Model For Lawyer Formation and Ongoing Competence.” and released an excerpt on his blog. He says:

What do I mean when I talk about “lawyer formation?” I think that term can best be understood as the process by which a person becomes a competent, confident, and independent lawyer

Jordan outlines that one of the issues with lawyer formation is that it ends too soon. he proposes:

3. Mandate comprehensive CPD for lawyers in their first five years. One consistent shortfall in lawyer development across all jurisdictions is that new lawyers are credentialed and licensed too early. Most first-year lawyers are unprepared to carry out the tasks that clients and employers require of them, poorly trained to handle the basics of business management and client relations, and unready to handle the intense emotional disruption of the shift from academic to working life on their own.

Here at hey Legal, we have recently started on an initiative to assist young lawyers and trainees at the beginning of their careers, with the aim of improving the profession as a whole.

Jordan writes of his ideas for lawyer formation:

A program like this would not be cheap to develop and deploy; but it would be much less costly than losing thousands of lawyers to discouragement and depression every year, not to mention reducing the professional insurance costs of under-developed lawyers mishandling their own affairs and those of their clients. 

The Hey legal team understand that many excellent young lawyers are being lost to the Scottish legal profession, and we want to help change that. You can assist is in this challenging task by completing our Traineeship Survey 2021, where we seek to understand the barriers candidates and firms face when it comes to traineeships.

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