Reinforcing Electronic Discovery Training

When I speak with other litigation support trainers, the question of knowledge retention often comes up. How do we effectively reinforce electronic discovery concepts and litigation project management best practices so that our case teams can apply them in a meaningfully consistent way?

Training Magazine published an article highlighting how to reinforce training. Here’s what’s worked and continues to work for me… Of course, I’ve taken the liberty to paraphrase so that it makes more sense for our industry. What’s worked for you? What didn’t quite work?

1. Partner Buy-In – When I was in the law firm environment, it made a huge difference in training participation, retention and use of the litigation support software, when the lead partner expressed a desire for everyone on the team to become proficient in the application to support the matter.
2. Podcasts (& short videos) – Creating your own podcast and/or short video is remarkably easy to do these days. It’s your voice or someone on your team reviewing what was covered in your training class and making the information (and your soothing, reassuring voice) available to your case team, when you’re not. It’s custom and focuses on the features that your team actually uses. Another great reinforcement benefit of podcasting is to simply read an article on the latest e-discovery trend or technology or case summary stopping here and there to provide your expertise and insight. I did this a lot when I was involved in corporate and sales training for an e-discovery service provider. I could send links to articles on law.com all day to some of my sales people but they’d only forward them to clients. However, if I sent a link to a podcast on our internal learning management system, they’d listen… and learn. It’s convenient to listen to a podcast walking down the street, waiting to meet with a client, on the subway, or in your car on the way home at the end of the day.

 

The article also suggests e-mail reminders w/ links to resources within your firewall, online discussion groups, “home work” projects (I can tell you, this typically doesn’t work in litigation when folks are busy and they’re always busy.) and finally getting “managers” involved to the extent that they are empowered to facilitate some of the follow up training themselves. I like that idea although, as a litigation support trainer, I might flip the idea: empower the firm’s “corporate” trainers to deliver small learning modules that are not case specific for new hires and refreshers. This will help the litigation support project managers to focus on case specific training while taking advantage of a firm resource.

What else do you do to reinforce learning?