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CPD is no longer a ‘compliance exercise’
The ways that lawyers are viewing continuing professional development is shifting, with more practitioners seeing it as an opportunity.
Jerome Doraisamy
Speaking recently on The Lawyers Weekly Show, LawCPD director and co-founder Sarah Mateljan (pictured) said that it is the duty of legal education providers like LawCPD to continually evolve to meet the needs of practitioners.
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“Otherwise, I don’t think you’re doing your job,” she posited.
The myriad environmental and marketplace changes over the last decade, she noted, have forced education providers to change their offerings, and LawCPD – which has recently launched a new platform and has made upgrades to its various courses to include new interactivity and features – is no different.
“The way that lawyers view continuing professional development is always changing. I think we are now moving from a space where people see it as a lot of people sometimes see it as a compliance exercise, but more and more people I’m finding are actually seeing [it] as an opportunity to take some very limited time each year to really develop their skills and build their career in a way that’s meaningful,” she reflected.
“That has been a really encouraging thing to see.”
Continuing professional development has “been around for a while now”, Ms Mateljan mused, and the legal profession has reached a point, she said, where lawyers are overcoming their “initial reluctance” to get involved and attain their points, given how busy they are day to day.
Now, she said, they are “trying to view it as an opportunity to do more – not just to get the 10 points ticked off, but to actually use it, to build their skills in particular areas, to stay up to date changes in the law, to take their career in a new direction”.
“A lot of people learn things out of interest that they wouldn’t otherwise get to do in their day-to-day practice, which really expands the way they think about things,” she explained.
LawCPD has received, Ms Mateljan detailed, “a lot of positive feedback” from lawyers across the board who say they are increasingly focusing the accruing of their points on what they do “in the core of their practice” so as to broaden their expertise. Moreover, they are sharing those positive experiences with others, which, she said, has the effect of deepening their appreciation for the value of time.
“Lawyers are smart, and they know that if they need to do this 10 hours, then they should spend it well,” she surmised.
“That’s the trend that we’re seeing emerging.”
Such a trend is aided, Ms Mateljan added, by the mainstreaming of hybrid working.
“I think it’s exciting that we are moving to a place where we can acknowledge that people can work productively and learn effectively, both in person and remotely, and that is going to give people a lot more space to do what they need to do both at work and in their personal lives.
“We might actually start to see some movement towards this balance that the profession is always striving for,” she concluded.
The transcript of this podcast episode was slightly edited for publishing purposes. To listen to the full conversation with Sarah Mateljan, click below:
