Why solicitors need to keep one step ahead of the law

Keeping up to speed with the latest legal practices is not a matter of choice for solicitors, as Liz Lightfoot explains

Lawyers like to work hard and play hard and when it comes to professional development, they have found a clever way to combine the two. The king of legal CPD events takes place next February on the slopes of Kitzbühel, the picturesque ski village in Austria, when immigration specialists from around the world will gather for a training "retreat".

For just short of £2,500 plus air fares, participants will get time on the slopes, luxurious accommodation and fine dining. And if they get up early enough for the sessions the bonus is 1.8 CPD points for every 50 minutes which count towards the obligatory 16 hours a year solicitors in England and Wales must accumulate as a condition of practice.

It might sound like collecting Tesco points but the points system is the profession's way of measuring the quality and time of the many different activities that help to keep them up to speed. The requirement in Scotland is 20 hours and Northern Ireland, which has abandoned the points system, expects 15 hours.

Continuing professional development is no optional extra for the people who interpret and apply the law and it has become even more important since Labour came to power with a heavy legislative programme. Eight new laws were passed every day last year adding a record breaking 3,071 to the Statute Book and up from seven a day in 2006, according to Sweet & Maxwell, the legal publishers.

Legislation has almost doubled under Labour – Tony Blair was responsible for an average 2,663 new laws a year compared to 1,724 for Margaret Thatcher, both of them barristers by profession. "There's been such a welter of new legislation – even laws prohibiting a nuclear explosion – that solicitors can no longer qualify and then trundle on for years on the back of it; they have to keep up to speed," says Geoffrey Negus, the spokesman for the Solicitors Regulation Authority which oversees the CPD system.

Solicitors have been expected to undertake a set number of hours since the mid Eighties. But it wasn't until 2004 that the Bar Council made 12 hours compulsory for barristers saying it would help to ensure a good service for the clients. Solicitors must earn at least a quarter of their points from training accredited by their regulatory body under the system which Negus describes as "lenient".

"They get CPD points for lectures given and attended, articles published and even for attending one of my free talks on dealing with the media," he says. Though career development and increased earnings may be a by-product of good CPD, the regulatory body sees its primary justification as helping to ensure a good service for the public.

Whatever the motivation, professional development is big business and there's plenty of choice. At the luxury end is the Kitzbühel retreat run by the Center for International Legal Studies, titled "Business and Investor immigration and employment issues for foreign executives". Laura Devine, the UK immigration lawyer who will co-chair the conference next February, says sessions are scheduled in the early morning and late afternoon, leaving the middle of the day free for the slopes.

"Immigration used to be a sleepy area in which lots of people dabbled but now it's a very specialist area and one where it's essential to monitor the day to day policies of the Home Office and the thrust of policy," says Devine. "A lot of lawyers like to ski and I love the way you can combine it with lectures and sharing ideas with people working in the same or different fields in many countries," she says.

Those on more modest budgets can get "four CDP points for free" by downloading introductory material from legaltraining.tv or pay a modest sum to take part in monthly CPD "webinars", where questions can be sent electronically to the experts hosting the seminar in a studio.

Today's lawyers will not put up with long, dry lectures, says Sarah Hutchinson, the director of business development at the College of Law. "There has been a seismic change in the way we train. The young lawyers coming up have a lower boredom threshold - they want to be involved and engaged. Of course, they need to understand about restrictive covenants, but they also want to be able to draw up a conveyance themselves."

A large amount of research suggests that people retain only about 5 per cent of a lecture six months later but between 20 to 25 per cent of an interactive session, she says, which is why the college makes good use of computer technology and workshops with simulated real life situations.

And it's not just the private colleges and training companies which have embraced modern teaching methods. Many university law schools now provide professional training and postgraduate qualifications tailored to the workplace, often in conjunction with firms offering bespoke courses.

The seminars and workshops provided by De Montfort university, which has joined up with Central Law Training to offer face-to-face training, have proved a good recruiting ground for the postgraduate qualifications it offers. "Some people think CPD is just collecting the points and ticking the boxes," says Kerrie Deakin, deputy head of the department of professional legal studies at De Montfort. "But when people get involved it can lead them to want to improve their expertise and increase their academic profile through a Masters qualification."

Most lawyers spend more time up-dating their skills than required says Negus, who adds that he cannot remember a time when a solicitor has been struck off for failing to complete the requisite hours. Though solicitors do not complain about the requirement to keep their skills up to date, there is widespread criticism of the "tick box" points system as a bureaucratic and tokenistic way of policing it.

All this might be about to change. In a report last year, the Solicitors Regulation Authority raised concerns that some of the training being undertaken was not relevant to the areas in which solicitors were working and promised to find a more flexible system of encouraging individuals to tailor their own career development.

The successful lawyer who went back to university

Nearly two decades ago Fiona Darby joined Hammonds LLP as a trainee solicitor, straight out of law school. Now she's back and this time as the in-house counsel and company secretary to the leading commercial law firm.

You might think that the successful commercial lawyer would be content with her achievements. But two years ago she sent herself back to university.

Working with the firm's senior management in a busy law firm with 11 offices in six countries needs skills and understanding beyond a mastery of the law. "A few years ago I heard that Nottingham Law School was offering the first MBA in the management of legal practice and I wondered why anyone would want to do that," she says. "Then I reached the position where I could understand how useful it could be and enrolled."

Since graduating from Reading University and Chester College of Law, Darby has taken every opportunity to update her skills, finding some courses much better than others. Being a part-time student for two years on top of her job proved challenging, not least because she didn't want to coast through, and was aiming for top marks.

Last July she graduated with a distinction in the MBA from Nottingham Trent University, which she says has given her greater confidence and a valuable conceptual framework in which to operate.

More information: www.dmu.ac.uk; www.ntu.ac.uk; www.clt.co.uk; www.cpdwebinars.com; www.college-of-law.co.uk