Reed Smith

Delegation Skills for Associates

Background

Reed Smith LLP is a global law firm headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with more than 1,500 lawyers in 30 offices throughout the United States, Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

CareeRS is Reed Smith’s firmwide, competency-based career development program. It is designed to ensure that the firm provides the best legal representation to its clients, while at the same time providing lawyers and staff with the transparency, development opportunities, feedback and support they need to help them achieve their individual career goals at Reed Smith.

Training Need

When trainees qualify to become Associates, the promotion comes with a number of challenges. One of these is with delegating. Although lawyers will have delegated before there is not the requirement for them to do so to junior lawyers. This is based on the principle that the work has to be done at the right level, to match clients’ expectations.

The training needed to give lawyers a practical tool kit of ideas on how to delegate successfully.

Activity

We designed a 2.5 hour in-person training workshop. The focus was on key delegation situations. These scenarios were discussed and delegation skills introduced on the basis of these needs.

This was a highly interactive session with everyone involved in one group or neighbour discussions.

The agenda included:

  1. Challenges of delegating.
  2. Context of delegating; key supervisory skills.
  3. Impact of personality on delegation.
  4. Delegation styles.
  5. Contracting for delegation.
  6. The feedback equation.
  7. Personal actions.

Outcomes

Every lawyer was involved in the session. At the close each participant suggested their key actions to implement in order to develop their delegation skills.

Feedback

“Thank you for the interesting and valuable workshop last week as well as the pdf workbook. Really enjoyed your training.”

“Thank you very much. The training was very useful and I will definitely recommend it to others.”

Client Comments

“I just wanted to say that we received really positive feedback for this session :)”