It’s the end of January 2018, which is about the time that all those unrealistic New Year’s Resolutions come crumbling down. Now is the time to get real! By that, I mean set realistic goals and formulate a step-by-step action plan for achieving them.

And, if one of your goals is to lead your firm into technological competency, then I have already outlined the steps for success! Read on…

Here are the 5 steps that a law firm must take in order to lead attorneys and staff to tech competency in 2018:

1. Buy a learning management system (LMS): Now, when a “to-do” item starts with “buy,” I know it can seem like a pitch. (insert eye-roll) But trainers around the globe will tell you that, in order to manage each individual learner’s progress in your firm, you need a robust tool that can assess benchmarks, formulate learning plans, store and launch materials, report back to you on progress, and serve learners when and where they want to learn. Imagine trying to do that all yourself… for each learner in your firm. Unless you have a 2-person firm, you will go mad. (There is no Excel spreadsheet in the world that can “nudge” your learners on a regular basis with email alerts, telling them that they have another training waiting on their desktop, and then run that training, assess the results, and bump the learner to the next level.)

With that in mind, I obviously recommend the SavvyAcademy LMS. It is a powerful – yet affordable – learning management system fully loaded with training materials designed especially for law firms. And you pay by the user, not by the entire size of your firm. If you’re curious about SavvyAcademy, contact me for a free demo!

2. Protect your firm with security awareness training: If you’re an IT pro working at a law firm, you are likely having nightmares about ransomware. But your visions probably aren’t filled with the shadowy, hooded figures trying to hack into your system. Instead, you’ve probably got “Susan” or “Bob” from accounting haunting your dreams. You keep imagining your firm’s naïve users clicking on a “pizza coupon” and exposing the firm and all its clients to cybercriminals.

Using your shiny new LMS, you need to require that absolutely everyone in your firm takes security awareness training. You should be able to load any security awareness training program onto your LMS and conduct trainings in tandem with fake phishing campaigns, which will test the efficacy of your trainings, pinpointing the people and topics that need to be given extra attention.

Savvy Training & Consulting is an authorized provider of the world’s best security awareness training program, KnowBe4. Their training rolls out in three easy steps: 1) Train your users, 2) Phish your users, 3) Use the results to train and phish again. One law firm that we trained using KnowBe4’s platform went from a 20% fail rate to 4% in just four weeks.

3. Protect your firm with compliance training: It’s the era of the #MeToo movement (which I whole-heartedly support). If you think that your firm doesn’t have a problem with “soft skills,” think again. In just about every organization across the country, there exists at least one person who thinks sexual innuendo is “fun,” bullying is a “great way to get work done,” and taking a few bucks out of the office kitty is “what I deserve.” Wouldn’t you rather train everyone to handle themselves appropriately than fight a headline like this?

Savvy is an authorized partner with Vado, a company that understands learners are turned off by boring videos, irrelevant interactions and memorization. The Vado trainings start with compliance laws but go beyond by teaching people how to behave toward others, and teaching them how they can expect to be treated in return. Courses include: Preventing discrimination and harassment for employees, Preventing discrimination and harassment for managers, Preventing discrimination and harassment for California/Connecticut managers, Anti-corruption and anti-bribery, Code of conduct, The legal aspects of interviewing, and more. Best of all, we can seamlessly load Vado courses onto the SavvyAcademy LMS so that you can easily incorporate compliance into all of your existing learning paths.

4. Make sure your team is using Microsoft Office 2016 properly: You went to the trouble of upgrading Office 2016, but is your firm using it properly? Likely, you have many folks who are doing things the “old way” because they haven’t learned new skills on the new system. And those people are slowing everyone down. I suggest that you invest a little bit more in one-on-one training to get those people up to speed. (Read my recent article on the benefits of floor support.) A small investment today in training will be like the gift that keeps on giving as your team’s efficiency improves.

5. Use all of your expensive systems more efficiently: Why stop at Office 2016 trainings? You have invested significant dollars in many other office-wide systems. Think: document management systems, PDF systems, and more. If people aren’t using them properly, it’s like throwing part of your money out the window. Let me give you an example: I recently chatted with a firm whose paralegals were saying that they were too busy to fix corrupt documents; they didn’t have time to do their legal work. These paralegals were asking the firm to hire someone whose sole job would be to fix corrupt docs. All in (including benefits, orientation, etc.), that would have cost the firm approximately $80,000. Instead, the firm decided to train the paralegals to properly use the systems the firm already had. Suddenly, the existing paralegals had enough time to get all their work done. This firm went a step further and even tied trainings to the paralegals’ annual reviews. And, you guessed it: Savvy provided the trainings.

If you would like to discuss any of the steps below, or receive a free demo on our LMS, KnowBe4 or Vado, don’t hesitate to reach out! Doug@SavvyTraining.com, 303-800-5408