The College of Law's Centre for Best Practice provides specialist management training for lawyers and other professionals involved in legal practice and legal service delivery.
With close links to the practising profession, regulators, professional and legal sector associations, educational institutions, quality systems organisations, and specialist consultants both in Australia and overseas, the Centre has a unique capacity to assist lawyers and legal practices to improve their individual and organisational skills, knowledge and systems to provide more effective and efficient services to their clients.
And, in support of the College’s expanding role as the leading school of professional legal practice in Australasia, and new corporate status, the Centre is the College’s main vehicle for developing and supporting policies around the Australian legal service sector, with an emphasis on the effective and efficient delivery of legal services – eg practice development and management, service delivery, business models, regulation, compliance, risk management, career development, “best practice” and “quality”, ethics and professionalism
Centre News
Centre for Best Practice Forum on Management Training needs for new law practice principals 27 June 2011
What impact (if any) will the National Legal Profession reform package have on the role and responsibilities of law practice principals? How does the “partnership” concept work in the 21st century? Where does the balance lie between regulatory requirements, new practice models, and what some commentators see as a changing economic landscape? How is it best to prepare and train new principals for these challenges?
These are some of the issues that were discussed at this Forum on the 27th June. A panel of legal practice experts and an invited audience commented on a range of issues raised in two key-note presentations. You can find more details here
The College of Law rolls out training module to combat depression
Depression is one of the X factors affecting the legal profession. In a two-part coverage, Cameron Cooper discusses initiatives that Freehills is pursuing to help employees, while Greg Dwyer, Director of the The College of Law's Centre for Best Practice outlines the College's latest strategy to combat depression in the legal profession.
Read the full article from the Australian Law Management Journal here.
College’s Centre for Best Practice collaborates in CLEAA Good Learning Forum
On 28 October 2010 The Centre for Best Practice and CLEAA (Continuing Legal Education Association of Australia) jointly presented a half-day Good Learning Forum as a prelude to CLEAA’s annual conference.
Titled CLE: secret weapon for success and satisfaction in law or just another compliance event? the Forum brought together learning and development professionals and legal sector educators from Australia and New Zealand. As the facilitator Ben Richards stated at the start of the Forum, the challenge was to answer the question: “What are we doing well and what aren’t we doing well in CPD? In an ideal world, in a utopian world where you have, for instance, universal stakeholder buy-in, if we could design any system what would it look like?”.
A video podcast of the Forum can be found here.
The College provides the Legal Practice Management Course to meet the Law Society of NSW Guidelines for solicitors with an unrestricted practising certifcate who wish to become a partner, legal practitioner director, sole practitioner or in-house solicitor on the record. Assisted by the College's strong links to the profession over many years, a focus on practical training, access to materials and specialist practitioners involved in quality management and in-house practice, the College's LPMC is well regarded by participants. In 2010 over 95% of evaluations from delegates agreed or strongly agreed that the College's tailored courses were a useful learning experience.
With 10% discounts available on LawCover premiums for certified practices, LAW 9000 is the only nationally available legal practice specific management framework. Having worked closely with SAI Global and QL Inc on both the initial framework and the 2010 revision, the College offers public and in-house courses for practices who want to find out how LAW 9000 can help them to work more effectively and efficiently, improve client satisfaction, and reduce legal service delivery risk.
One of the key elements of the LAW 9000 framework is a robust internal audit process, so practices can monitor and review their systems and ongoing compliance with the Framework. This short course is intended either for staff who want to train as internal auditors, either in preparation for certification, or in practices which are already certified.