Why more big law firms are outsourcing associate training

An increasing number of law firms are questioning whether senior associates and partners are the best people to train associates on foundational skills.

When Abdi Shayesteh arrived at King & Spalding as a New York corporate associate in 2007, he had a scary realization: Law school didn’t teach any of the tasks he was being asked to complete.

“Your success depended on luck,” Shayesteh recalled, noting that he was lucky enough to have a senior lawyer down the hall to show him the ropes. “But not everyone has that same access,” he said. “I had this fantasy of a place you can go and practice on fake clients, make mistakes and get feedback.”

Twelve years later, Shayesteh realized that dream when he launched AltaClaro, a training platform where law firms pay for associates to meet with instructors and complete mock assignments. That year, the firm signed up three Am Law 200 clients. Today, it works with roughly one-third of the Am Law 200.

Since the onset of the pandemic, other third-party purveyors of young lawyer training and coaching services have reported a similar increase in demand for their services. According to providers, the bump in demand from Big Law is due to a few factors. In the short term, the pandemic created a need for virtual lawyer training that some outside providers were already well-equipped to deliver.

But beyond adjusting to a few turbulent years, law firms are also adapting to generational changes in the way associates prefer to learn. Osmosis alone doesn’t cut it for young associates nowadays, who tell The American Lawyer in annual surveys that they want specific, hands-on instruction for the tasks they’re being asked to complete.

Many partners, meanwhile, didn’t ask for the extra work of training a more hands-on generation of young lawyers—per this publication’s annual junior partner surveys—and don’t want to pass the cost of remedial training sessions onto clients.

“The clients we serve don’t want to pay to train associates at $800 an hour,” said Josh Hollingsworth, Barnes & Thornburg private equity chair. “We view this as supplemental to the training we provide. The hours that our young associates bill need to bring value to clients, and we need to provide more training to justify that.”

The Status Quo Meets COVID-19

Niki Khoshzamir began her Big Law career at Kirkland & Ellis a year before Shayesteh started at King & Spalding. Though she practiced IP litigation instead of M&A (and lateraled to Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr the next year), Khoshzamir had a similar experience. She recalled it for law students when she taught at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law years later.

“The actual tasks, there was no training on that,” she said. “Law students taking my class would say, ‘How do we learn?’ I used to joke, ‘With pain and tears, like the rest of us did.’”

Hollingsworth noted that M&A associates are in greater need of practical training due to law school’s relative focus on litigation, but Khoshzamir said practical litigation training was scarce at the beginning of her career, too. In 2015, she founded PracticePro, a company that helps bridge training gaps between law school and practicing law by training law students on practical skills and offering customized training for lawyers at law firms.

“Right after the pandemic started, the initial cancellation of in-person events gave rise to an increased demand from law firms as well as corporate legal departments who were seeking out training,” Khoshzamir said.

Increasingly, she began working with law firms to teach entry-level skills to associates and business development to junior partners. For instance, a new associate mastery course takes litigation associates through a checklist that includes every step in the process of filing a lawsuit and taking it to trial.

More recently, law firms are outsourcing certain aspects of associate training to get associates back up to speed after several years of remote work.

“Basically all third-year corporate associates are behind, we think, because of remote work,” said Hollingsworth, one of AltaClaro’s first clients. “Our associates in their second and third years who experienced remote work are where we expected them to be only because of AltaClaro. I think now, we’re seeing first-years are ahead substantially because of AltaClaro.”

Making training interactive

AltaClaro’s mock assignments start by showing associates the task in a video, then having them mark up a document and finishing by reviewing it in a live session with an instructor—a practicing Am Law 100 attorney with 10 or more years of experience, Shayesteh said.

“When firms purchase videos and plop associates in front of them, educational science shows us the efficacy of that is very low,” he added.

Lawyer coach and legal marketing consultant Jay Harrington, who focuses mostly on business development, time management and productivity, said the group engagements he gets from Big Law firms increasingly look to spread out training over multiple sessions and focus on small-group or one-on-one instruction.

“Training back in the day was a quarterly session, someone comes in and does an hour-long presentation,” Harrington said. “Now it’s an understanding that you need to get more immersive and experiential if you want it to stick. The ultimate goal is to design something that gets them to take action and put principles into practice.” (