Essential Legal Training for Your Internal Clients

Why is Legal Training Essential for Your Internal Clients?

It is an incontrovertible truth that the performance of the internal client can directly impact what the internal legal team can deliver to the business – from speed, outcomes through to cost.

This reflects the fact that in-house legal team’s performance is the sum of many parts – all of which need to perform efficiently, and in sync, if optimal performance is to be achieved.

As we all know, the quality of our internal clients can range from “they seem to be working against us” through to “they are a pure joy to work with” – and everything in between. More of the latter is our goal!

So, it is incumbent on in-house legal teams to regularly deliver legal training to their internal clients in ways that ultimately help the legal team perform on behalf of the Business.

GLS covered how to improve internal client relationships (see GLS On Building Effective Internal Client Strategies), so this Blog will instead focus on the “why” and “what” of internal client training. 

Why Legal Training for Non-lawyers is Needed?

If you want to go “fast” – go by yourself. If you want to go “far” – go as a team. So, working effectively with your internal clients and other stakeholder business units is critical. 

Implementing this principle will determine how effectively your in-house legal team can deliver sustainable and adaptive, optimized performance.

Your internal clients are an important “part” of the in-house legal team, although they are not often thought of as such. Frequently, they are often miss-characterized as simply being the “boss” - which is not helpful.

There is an all-too-often tendency to follow the sub-optimal, if not careless, directions of a “Boss” – because, well, they are the Boss. However, this does not progress the strategic objectives of your Business.

In actuality, although at times forgotten, it is the interests of the Business that sits atop of the totem-poll, and everyone in the organization should be working collaboratively towards those interests.

However, it is an incontrovertible truth that the performance of internal clients can substantially enhance or detract from what the internal legal team can deliver to the Business.

So, like any performance-based team – everyone, including the internal client, needs to understand their role – both in terms of how to do it effectively and what happens if they do not. 

This is particularly true in the case of the internal client where perceived (and often real) power dynamics can obscure the reality that successful legal team performance is a “team game”.

This is where internal client training delivered by the legal team comes in – a structured, systematic program/course of training to ensure the internal client is doing its bit for the team.

Yes – it can be difficult, but in-house teams have been “mixing the vegetables into the pasta” served to the internal client for a long time now – and they largely do not notice a thing. 

Essential Types of Internal Legal Training:

At GLS we choose to break-down the types of internal client training that is needed, into the three different categories:

a. Process Training: training that helps the internal client understand the key legal team processes and protocols that will in turn help them deliver optimal internal client support.

b. People Training: training that helps the internal client develop essential “legal domain” skills that will make them more effective in their roles as the internal client.

c. Platform Training: training on specific project/transaction/document type/compliance issues that will enable the outcome that the internal client/Business is looking to achieve.

As you consider the training needs of your internal clients you can choose to slice and dice the types of training however you want – we simply offer our “PPP Approach” to you as a reference.

Essential Training Topics for Optimal In-house Performance:

Below, we set out the training topics applicable to each of the “PPP Headings”. GLS consider these to be essential training that should be conducted by all legal teams annually. 

Process Related Training:

▪️ A Legal Department Introduction: an overview of how your legal department operates, what it does and does not do, and the team within it.

▪️ Legal Department SLAs: an overview of SLAs for identified service types – informing the internal client of the service commitments that make you a dependable partner.

▪️ How to instruct the Legal Department: an overview of the most effective ways of instructing the legal department and how it improves your ability to service the internal client’s needs.

▪️ How to Get the Best out of your Legal Department: practical tips on how your internal clients can get the best performance out of the in-house legal team. I.e. what the internal client can do to enable the legal team to better serve the internal client.

▪️ Group Legal Policy: an overview of how legal and compliance risk management has been set inside your organization and the key attributes of that policy that the internal client should know.

People Related Training:

▪️ Contract 101s: an overview of the key commercial contracting concepts such as liability, indemnities, termination, IPR, reps & warranties etc.

▪️ Basic Legal Drafting: an overview of basic tips/concepts that are essential for most people to be able to engage in effective legal drafting. 

▪️ Preparing Schedules: key guidance on how internal clients should prepare the commercial schedules within legal contracts – being where disputes often arise.

▪️ Cost Reduction Strategies: training tips on how to limit the costs that are incurred when their matter involves retaining external legal counsel.

▪️ Negotiation Skills: a 101-training session on the strategies and golden rules for effective commercial negotiations when negotiating as a team.

Platform Related Training:

▪️ Self Help Resources: training on the availability of, and how to use, the self-service / self-help resources that the legal team has made available to empower the internal clients.

▪️ Essential Project Briefings: proactive briefings on specific projects – looking at how they should be prosecuted, key issues (for success and how to avoid failure), project docs, etc.

▪️ Regular Compliance Training: pro-active workplace training for the corporate domain on key compliance topics (e.g ABC, Data Privacy, Confidentiality, Dawn Raid, ESG, etc).

▪️ Early Dispute Detection: workplace training on how to identify the early warning signs of disputes and how to effectively respond.

▪️ Crisis Management Training: how to respond in the face of crisis events, including data breaches, cyber attack and force majeure scenarios, amongst other things.

Resourcing Your Internal Client Program

It might seem an overwhelming thought that you need to be developing and delivering all of the above training courses for your internal clients. Indeed, doing so could quickly become a full-time job.

Obviously, we appreciate the resourcing constraints faced by many legal teams – most teams might not be able to deliver all of this training in any one year if they did it all by themselves.

Fortunately, there are plenty of strategies that you can use to develop an effective internal client training plan that more effectively leverages your available time and budget. 

These include:

▪️ GLS Legal Ops Modules: taking both free and commercially available GLS training modules to assist you to efficiently meet your training needs (See Full GLS Training Menu Here).

▪️ Law Firm Training: look to your regular law firms and participating in the host of training sessions they frequently offer. Whilst not always relevant – compliance topics are usually helpful.

▪️ Sequence & Digitize: as you deliver the above topics, record the training sessions to create your own “digital library” so that you can reduce your future training work loads.

▪️ GLS Knowledge Centre: resources such as the GLS Knowledge Centre offer a wealth of online training resources that you can incorporate into your internal client training agenda.

▪️ Self-Authored Training: depending on the size of your team - after exhausting the above– spread the workload out amongst your team members. 2 training sessions per in-house lawyer per year is more than do-able!

We would go so far as to say – that you could, in just a few hours, utilizing the above strategies, pull together a significantly useful training agenda for your internal client audience.

Conclusions:

Achieving optimal legal team performance is a complex task that involves contributions from a wider team that includes personnel  from outside of the legal department (eg your internal clients).

The contributions that our internal clients make can significantly impact the ability of the in-house legal team to perform, and a high-performance legal team (and client) recognizes this.

Proactive development and management of your internal clients’ training is needed to improve their contributions to your legal team’s performance, and to reduce unnecessary workloads and costs.

It is helpful to think of these needs in terms of People, Processes and Platforms – but this is by no means the only way to categories internal client training needs.

It is not unreasonable for an in-house legal team, through adaptive and collaborative strategies, to deliver most of this training in any one year.