Virtual training: Why you should create a web-based academy for clients

14 Jun 2013Feature

A virtual academy for clients ?offers greater flexibility and ?customisation than traditional ?training methods, ?says Phil Gott

The race is on to find new ways to offer value to clients and profit from new business models. Clients are placing increasingly higher demands on legal service providers, while seeking to drive down costs. Moving into the growing market for training could be one of the easiest ways for law firms to start profiting from packaging their knowledge and expertise in different ways.

Taking advantage of this will require not only fresh thinking about delivering legal advice but also looking at training in new ways too. This opportunity presents itself not only because the market for legal services is changing, but because the world of training is changing too. If law firms simply continue to offer training in the traditional way, they will fail to reap the potential rewards and may create an expensive rod for their own backs.

Evolution of client training

For many years, most large and many medium-sized law firms offered impressive programmes of seminars and events for both existing and potential clients.

The fact that these have primarily been the remit of marketing and business development staff belies their true purpose: to win more clients and business, rather than as a service in their own right. There is nothing wrong with this. Where they are well-designed and have a clear business development purpose, they can be worthwhile for law firms, even though they are usually offered free of charge.

Unfortunately many such seminars are little more than knowledge dumps or 'death by PowerPoint', with insufficient real thought given to designing them to maximise follow-on business development opportunities. If their effectiveness were to be measured, the results would most likely be disappointing.

Corporate counsel are increasingly asking law firms to provide not only open seminars but also bespoke in-house training for their staff. The main broad areas of provision include:?

training for in-house legal staff - such as updates on new case law;?
legal issues for non-lawyers - for example, training to help managers recognise and minimise the risks of claims related to employment law or health and safety regulations; and
sector-specific training - such as ?for claims staff in insurance companies on how to process particular types ?of claims.?

This client demand for training from law firms is even extending into areas beyond the scope of law, such as soft skills.

The move towards providing more training should largely be seen by law firms as positive, but it does hold some hidden dangers too. In reality, creating and delivering good-quality live training is time intensive (and therefore expensive).

Who is going to cover the costs? There seems to be a continuing expectation by buyers of legal services that law firms will not charge for these value-added services (an expectation ?that is often encouraged when firms ?pitch for new work). That may be fine when the service to which the training is added is a high earner but, with clients squeezing down legal fees, bundling expensive training with new work can make it unprofitable.

The answer, as with legal services themselves, involves providing a base level of standard services at minimal (or zero) cost to clients and using this platform to position the firm's higher-level services (including bespoke training), which are then charged at a rate to cover the firm's costs and generate a profit.

Virtual client academy

This is where a virtual academy for your firm could be the answer. A virtual academy is designed to deliver high-quality online learning. It can be offered to clients free of charge or at minimal cost and can subtly lead on to bespoke training and the firm's other services.

This is not an option that is only available to large law firms. Today's technology is a great leveller, and a ?virtual academy can allow small and ?niche firms to be seen to be punching above their weight.

Very few firms have yet gone in this direction. Perhaps one reason for this is that the technology is still relatively new. Law firms have not historically been seen as fleet-footed and most have probably not yet seen the potential this can offer.

Perhaps there is also a need to get over the misapprehension that giving away knowledge will limit opportunities. Giving useful information away builds trust, positions your people as experts, and opens up opportunities for further ?fee-earning services.

In terms of the costs of creating a virtual academy, this will, to some extent, depend on the number of targeted users and how exactly the firm wishes to use the academy. A professional virtual academy, branded for your firm and with ready-loaded content, which your firm can edit and add to, can cost less for a whole year than putting on a single client seminar. ?Yet, the reach and benefits extend much further than any single seminar.

New ways of learning

There's a growing trend among law firms in terms of delivering training: webinars. As the name suggests, webinars are seminars delivered over the internet and, in their current form, are an abomination ?to be avoided.

Webinars typically involve showing the head and shoulders of a presenter (or just bullet points on a screen with a voice over) and a rudimentary way to ask questions and interact with other learners.

The advantages of webinars are cheapness and convenience, but they are almost universally dull. This is because they take the traditional form of training (the trainer in a classroom) and use technology to attempt to recreate the same experience.

Instead, technology should be used to deliver new ways of learning. This is what a virtual academy does. Basically, it is a website containing various types of learning content (such as slideshows, videos, written material and quizzes) on a range ?of subjects.

You could start from scratch and have a virtual academy built for your firm, but that would be very expensive and, as there are ready-made options available at relatively low cost, there would be little point in reinventing the wheel (see box: Choosing a virtual academy).

Live vs. online learning

Both live and online learning have their advantages and disadvantages. Figure 1 highlights the main points to be aware of.

In reality, it is not a question of either live or online training. Each has its place and a virtual academy can provide your firm with a platform for offering all of these training services.

There are some other ways that your firm may be able to maximise the value it gets from a virtual academy.

Make it available to both potential and existing clients. This is a good way to get prospects to start using your firm's services; they are then more likely to transition into fee-paying clients.?
Invite your contacts in other professions to develop content for your academy. They will be grateful for the opportunity to raise their profile with your client base and you will get some ready-made content. At the same time, you will enhance your firm's relationship with these potential introducers of new work.?
Use the academy for both internal and external learning. Online learning is a cost effective and convenient way for your lawyers and business services staff to learn. So, maximise the benefits from your investment and use the academy within your firm, in addition to offering it to your clients and prospects.

Pitfalls to avoid

Sub-standard quality.Your virtual academy should not become a dumping ground for lengthy documents, PowerPoint presentations from live training, or poor-quality videos taken from the back of a training room. All of the content in a virtual academy should be of a high quality and fit for the purpose of online learning.
Complexity. There has been a massive growth in recent years in the use of learning management systems packed with all kinds of whizzy tools and features. Steer clear of them. Like a Swiss army knife, by attempting to solve every problem, they end up doing nothing well. Simplicity wins out.
Neglect. The content of a virtual academy needs to be kept fresh, with new content added and out-of-date content removed. Someone will need to take overall responsibility for this and subject experts in various fields will need to commit some time to maintaining content in their areas of expertise.

How to start

Because a virtual academy can cost less than a single live event, that can be a good place to start. Simply try out a single virtual event and see how it goes. If it proves successful, consider how you can leverage the benefits. There should be no need to make a major commitment.

There are five steps to getting started with developing a virtual academy:?

find out more about virtual academies;
win the support of your management board to run a pilot;
get one of your practice areas on side (choose one led by a partner who is attuned to new approaches and who has a keen interest in business development);
set up a pilot on a single subject - be honest with your clients and contacts that it is a pilot and monitor the feedback; and
extend the virtual academy at a pace that matches client demand and the willingness of partners to contribute.?

A virtual academy holds considerable potential and minimal cost or risk. It is an opportunity available to firms that are willing to grasp it. ??

Choosing a virtual academy

Can it easily be branded with your firm’s logo and colour scheme so that it looks like a natural extension of your website and promotes a professional image?
Is it sufficiently flexible to incorporate different types of learning content, especially video, which is a particularly engaging medium?
Can it automatically deliver different content to different users based on their needs and preferences, rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach?
Is it easy to administer (e.g. adding users, editing content and producing learning log reports), without any need for special IT skills?
Can it be used effectively on smartphones and tablets, as well as PCs?
Is there a discussion forum through which users can ask your experts questions and discuss issues with other learners, to encourage a sense of community and social learning?
Is learning activity automatically logged for users who have CPD requirements to meet?
Is the cost reasonable, without long-term commitments?

Phil Gott is the founder of Firm Academy (www.firmacademy.com)