General Counsel for Microsoft Wants Better Skills Training for Young Lawyers
This post has been viewed 3,120 times.
As the National Law Journal reports, Microsoft’s GC Brad Smith told the audience during his keynote address at yesterday’sNALP conference that law schools need to provide students with more real world legal skills training during the third year. And he urged recent grads to take jobs that offer the best training opportunities since the first few years of practice are so formative: “If you don’t get good training in the first four years, you will dig yourself into a deep hole.”
“Go where you think you’ll get good training in the first four years,” Smith said during a keynote speech Wednesday at NALP’s annual conference, which drew more than 1,000 law school career-services professionals, law firm recruiters and legal employers to Seattle for four days. “If you don’t get good training in the first four years, you will dig yourself into a deep hole.”
The profession has plenty of room for improvement when it comes to helping young lawyers thrive, he said, and law schools could offer more real-world training in the third year.
“As a profession, we’ve invested less in training, especially since the Great Recession,” Smith said.
Smith has tackled the training deficit with a number of initiatives. His Microsoft Advocacy Clinic, for example, gathers 15 promising young litigators from the company’s outside law firms to work together on projects. The clinic takes place every other year.
In a separate pilot initiative, the company has set aside $50,000 in legal fees to be matched by outside law firms. The firms identify promising first-, second- and third-year associates who would benefit from exposure to a wide array of legal matters they typically wouldn’t be a part of, such as depositions.
“We’ll pay for half the cost of the associates to participate in that type of exercise,” Smith said. “We must push the envelope.”
Continue reading here.
Tags:
