Effective Digital Training For The Next Generation Of Hotshot Lawyers

Law schools are good at a lot of things, but it’s no secret that preparing new attorneys for the realities of day-to-day legal practice usually isn’t one of them. Think of the very first time you were told to help with trial prep or review a closing set — chances are you had no idea what that even meant. Every year, a new crop of associates enters the workforce with little to no practical work skills, through no fault of their own.

Law firms traditionally haven’t fared much better in the formal training department. The legal industry has long relied on formulaic, hour-long CLE lectures that leave lawyers unengaged and are usually more about earning credits than actually learning anything. Meanwhile, the rest of the business world has turned to digital learning to find new ways of making training more effective.

Finally, someone is changing the game. Following the lead of the corporate world, the folks at Hotshot are bringing digital learning to the legal industry, and the results are a resounding success.

Hotshot focuses on the hard-core legal and business skills that associates need to succeed, and presents them in a way that results in actual learning (and is engaging and enjoyable in the process). Try Hotshot, and you’ll never look at your boring CLE lectures the same way again.

How It Works

Hotshot focuses on delivering short, interactive digital learning exercises as opposed to hour-long, one-sided lectures from talking heads. Log into your Hotshot dashboard and you’ll see content broken down into six main topic areas (with more to come) that focus on legal, business, and tech skills: Accounting & Finance, Civil Litigation Basics, Excel & Data Analysis, M&A Basics, Securities Offerings, and Venture Financing.

The six topics and their relevant subtopics are listed down the left panel, with their corresponding courses appearing in the middle (currently 132 of them). Click into an individual course, and you’ll see the various topics that make up the course broken down into short animated videos, presenting the basics in easily digestible chunks.

Each individual video is under three minutes long, and entire courses generally take less than 15 minutes if you were to watch the entire thing in one sitting. In addition to the videos, you’ll find interactive quizzes where you can test yourself without having your results reported to anyone, as well as comprehensive course outlines that present a handy summary of everything (just like in your law school days), complete with time stamps so you can easily go back to the relevant portion of the video if you want to review something again.

The system is intuitive and easy to use, and designed for lawyers to be able to hit the ground running — you don’t need any training to learn how to use this training. The courses present the crucial concepts that lawyers need to understand a concrete way that explains not just the basics, but also how they apply in actual legal practice. Simply put, Hotshot is the easiest, most effective way to quickly get up to speed on the things lawyers need to know in day-to-day practice.

Better Ways to Learn

Hotshot lends itself to effective learning in a variety of scenarios. For the junior associate or anyone being thrust into a new area of practice, Hotshot is ideal for just-in-time learning — quickly get up to speed on basic topics exactly when you need to. Were you just handed your first closing or assigned to your first securities litigation? Now there’s no need to panic, because Hotshot has you covered.

Firms are also capitalizing on Hotshot to institute flipped-classroom learning rather than traditional training lectures. In flipped-classroom learning, attorneys are assigned the videos first, meaning they can show up to training sessions having already learned the basic information. The actual live training time can then be used to focus on practical skills, discussions, and group exercises.

Enterprise subscriptions come with practical learning exercises and hypotheticals that can be printed and used collaboratively during training sessions.

With Hotshot, firms can make much better use of the time set aside for training. No more tedious lectures that result in minimal learning. Attorney time is valuable, and it’s much better spent focusing on practical skills that translate directly into legal practice.

Business Training for Lawyers

Hotshot isn’t just about the law. It also is a great resource for fundamental business acumen training for lawyers. Increasingly, lawyers are being asked to handle finance matters that go far beyond the limits of their legal training. With this in mind, the folks at Hotshot have developed courses built around lawyers that provide business fundamentals with no expectation of the user having any finance background. From financial statements to valuation models to the basics of using Excel, Hotshot does a great job of covering the business-related topics that most law schools fail to address.

Driven largely by client demand and a number of early law firm clients that are major players in the VC arena, Hotshot also offers an entire section on Venture Financing. This is a blend of business and legal topics that explain the basics of the VC process and of raising money. Along with the training materials you’ll find for the other topics, the Venture Financing section also includes interviews with high-profile venture capitalists.

If you’re one of those lawyers who’s notoriously scared off by numbers, Hotshot has you covered, too. There’s an entire suite of courses just on Venture Math, where you can practice your calculations in a safe space.

The same is true for other accounting and finance topics — Hotshot lets you play with income statements using actual Excel formulas, so you gain the confidence you need to perform calculations in your actual matters.

Hotshot is constantly growing and adding to their content based on client demand, including requests from both firms and companies that lawyers be educated on the industries of their clients. Over time, you’ll see more industry overviews, starting in the financial services sector.

In terms of pricing, Hotshot is transparent as can be. They incorporate simple pricing calculators based on the number of lawyers and topics a firm or law school wants to cover, and also offer single licenses for solo lawyers or law students who want to learn but don’t have an organization footing the bill.

Hotshot has revolutionized the legal training landscape, one short video at a time. When you need the practical skills that will get you through day-to-day practice, you need Hotshot.