Will the apprenticeship model come to Minnesota?
by Michelle Lore Associate Editor
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Attendees at a roundtable discussion this past summer concluded that increased competition among law firms will create new demands for lawyer training, according to the Association for Legal Career Professionals.
A handful of large national firms — including Drinker Biddle, Howrey, and Ford Harrison — have already formed apprenticeship-like programs for training new lawyers. The fledgling associates’ salaries are generally less than what they’ve been in the past, but in return the associates have no or lower billable hour requirements for their beginning years. Mentoring by partners, hands-on work assignments, shadowing more experienced lawyers and in-class training are other key components of the programs. When new associates do work for clients, the firms either don’t charge for it or they charge a lower hourly rate.
“Their experience just may be the beginning of a formal institution of an apprenticeship within the bar,” said California attorney Ed Poll, a nationally recognized law firm management consultant.
Some in the legal community hope the model takes hold locally.
“I don’t know if that will catch on but I think it’s probably a good idea if it does,” said Alan Haynes, director of the Career & Professional Development Center at the University of Minnesota Law School. “I think that might be workable for people.”
“It’s more in line with other professions and other industries,” she said. “This coincides with the whole legal profession undergoing change; this is a part of it.”
Client demand
The trend among some large firm towards an apprenticeship training model is in large part client driven.
Poll explained that clients are objecting to paying full bore for what is, in effect, on-the-job training for new associates.
Some law firms’ response is to hire new associates at a lower salary and then put them through intense training programs in areas such as trying cases, interacting with clients and the business of law, he said. “These are formalistic, detailed, hopefully well thought out, programs of instruction that the firms are providing that law schools do not.”
The two-year apprenticeship program at the 650-plus lawyer firm of Howrey, for example, involves:
• Attending in-class education sessions;
• Trailing a partner to court hearings, client meetings, depositions and negotiations; and
• Client work on mundane or smaller tasks where the client is billed for the associate’s work but at a lower rate.
“It puts the investment back on to the law firms,” said Poll.
Haynes said that the trend towards apprenticeship-like programs is something that people are undoubtedly going to look at for the future.
“Everyone has to figure out how they are going to position themselves in the new market and being able to say that we want you to be successful here and here are the things we’ll do in order to make you successful, I think that’s a good move.”
Aware but not on board
While the trend towards formal apprenticeship programs has not yet hit the Twin Cities legal market, large local firms are keeping an eye on it.
Bryn Vaaler, professional services partner with Dorsey & Whitney’s Minneapolis office, pointed out that the movement among some firms towards an apprenticeship model resembles the current system in the United Kingdom.
“We are aware that some American firms have decided in this economy to take a step towards the British model,” he said. “We’ve certainly looked at that but like the vast majority of firms we have not decided at this point to … go the pure training apprenticeship route.”
Vaaler added that management will, however, be watching those firms that are tentatively moving in the direction. “Who knows what will happen in the future,” he said.
To some local legal insiders, the formal apprenticeship model is really just a step up in the professional development area that most local firms engage in already.
Ann Rainhart, director of legal personnel and professional development at Faegre & Benson in Minneapolis, said that while the firm is watching the apprenticeship model unfold in other markets, it has no plans to make a formal change in the way it currently develops its lawyers.
“When you look at the market in the Twin Cities as compared to the coast firms and some of the bigger markets, the way that [we] staff our matters and hire our lawyers, and train and develop our lawyers creates really an apprenticeship model already,” she said. “I think that’s why you hear less about it here — not that it might not come to the Twin Cities in a more formal way.”
Similarly, Vaaler said that Dorsey & Whitney has an internal training and professional development program for its new lawyers that is “second to none” that gets its lawyers up and running and serving clients as quickly as feasible.
Win-win
Despite the potential for reduced pay during their first years of practice, legal trend watchers predict that most new graduates will appreciate the apprenticeship training model.
“In their heart of hearts they know they aren’t capable yet,” said Poll. “This is like an internship where they are still getting compensated and thereby enabling them to begin repaying their student loans.”
The expectations of today’s new lawyers are different than in the past, particularly in terms of mentoring, advice, involvement and being engaged with their firm Standke said. “This [apprenticeship] system kind of falls into, in general terms, what this generation almost would expect to see or want to see anyway,” she added.
Experts say the new model is good for legal employers as well.
Poll predicts that the investment by firms undergoing this new model is going to be even greater than they anticipated.
Not only will they have a client who appreciates not paying for new associate training, he said, but they will have a better lawyer who is able to bill more time at a higher rate sooner than otherwise would have been possible. “At the end of the process, the law firm will have a really qualified lawyer.”
