Junior Associates Will Not Go Quietly Into The Night

New associates continue to arrive at their firms with limited practical legal skills. To be sure, it’s not their fault. But nonetheless, there they are, and they don’t know what they are doing. Biglaw clients have become wise to this. The clients have figured out that young associates initially contribute little more than menial (or inefficient) labor, framed as “training.” And training is not something clients want to pay for. Billing out new labor at a profitable rate is yet another rapidly disappearing aspect of the law firm business model.

If the billing isn’t making junior associates anxious, emerging technologies should be. Entry-level work is increasingly done better and more cheaply by software or real people housed offshore.

However, the robots work both ways. Savvy and innovative associates can seize on new technologies to actually make greater contributions and increase their inherent worth to both their bosses and all the way up the value chain to clients themselves. Firms used to be able to leverage hordes of junior associates; now juniors can leverage Practicawl Law Connect a unified transactional law research platform that fully integrates the vast resources of Thomson Reuters.

Every lawyer knows the information is out there. The right template exists. The wheel has been invented, and it’s rolling around somewhere, just waiting to be found. In a lot of ways, the difference between an experienced, efficient attorney and a wasteful first-year is knowing where to look. Practical Law Connect can level that playing field. With an intuitive interface and smart resource curation, associates can find what they’re looking for without getting lost.

RELATED: Learn more about Practical Law Connect

Imagine for a moment, a new associate is given a shot to work on (say) her first buy- side agreement. She has a lot to learn, and she must have a working draft by the end of the day. She could begin her morning by talking to a sympathetic senior associate who has the experience to help start the process. If she’s in luck, the senior associate might had saved a similar document in the DMS a few years ago.

But when the document is retrieved, it turns out it’s actually from 2007, so it needs updating. Oh and by the way, although the junior associate needs a buy-side agreement, this model agreement is sell side, so serious edits and revisions are in order. It will take her hours of research before she’s finally ready to start writing. She spends the rest of the afternoon and evening drafting the document, and by the time she looks at the clock, it’s almost midnight.

By contrast, if the junior associate has access to Practical Law Connect and needs such a buy-side agreement, she can go to Practicak Law Connect’s Corporate and M&A practice area and drill down to Draft and Negotiate Acquisition Agreements. There she’ll get direct links to state-of-the-art examples of the precise document. Of course, she’ll need to adapt and tailor the agreement, so all the possible clauses and alternatives are there as well, categorized in a completely intuitive way:

Practical Law Connect is much more than a collection of boilerplate documents: It seamlessly integrates a range of Thomson Reuters resources — including Practical Law know-how, Westlaw primary law content, forms and secondary sources, as well as other time-saving tools such as Business Law Center, Company Investigator and Drafting Assistant Essential – organized by task-based menus, with the most relevant information prominently displayed.

Practical Law Connect’s page design also eliminates the need for multiple search queries, as associates can efficiently move through the menus to select a task. Key resources hand-picked by Practical Law attorney editors are featured in the center of the page so you can go directly to what you need to complete your work.

With Practical Law Connect, the draft is ready while midnight is still hours away, and the junior associate’s time spent putting together the agreement will not be largely written off at the end of the month.

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The deal process is a complex, time-consuming task for even for seasoned attorneys. But for juniors it can be a bewildering and burdensome, with too many steps, too many systems and too much content to sort through. But with the resources within Practical Law Connect, they can access thousands of up-to-date, relevant documents created by highly credentialed and experienced attorneys whose sole job is generating content, including checklists, how-to guidance and annotated precedents. In Practical Law Connect, these resources are organized the way associates actually work, with the best practices available on one platform, in one view.

Client pressures on legal spend, combined with new technologies being applied to many repetitive and menial tasks, threaten to render many lower-level attorneys obsolete. But those who innovate can win by demonstrating real value to their employers and clients from the very start of their careers.  And who wants to spend their time on repetitive and menial tasks anyway? Go here for more information on Practical Law Connect. You’ll be tempted to share the info with the firm’s partners.