Continuing professional development

The case, par excellence of the box-ticking culture than modern risk management has become.

Once upon a time, somewhere, someone in a self-regulating professional trade body conceived the worry that by the daily practice of one’s professional calling in a live environment, an attorney might grow stale, out of touch and dangerously unlearned in the ways of her calling. A counter-intuitive idea, but there you have it: it is a good thing for people to challenge orthodoxy.

So was born “continuing professional development”, a stipulation whereby solicitors must periodically re-educate themselves on germane issues. It is not greatly onerous requirement: a few hours, spread over a year, is all you need. Law firms of any size organise breakfast seminars, brown-bag lunches and evening events, followed by networking, inviting their own staff and their in-house clients: a great marketing opportunity, and a chance to renew acquaintances over a salmon bagel.

The bacon sandwiches are great. If the room is suitably large and dark (Freshfields London has an excellently stuffy auditorium, by the way) there is scope for a few winks. It is a chance to catch up on Twitter, LinkedIn or to follow the cricket. In all other ways it is a total waste of time.

Of course, there is no practical means of ensuring that the ten hours an attorney spends “freshening up” is remotely vocational, useful, or even relevant to her practice area, much less such a seminar attendee has spent any part of the hour actually paying attention.

Anyone who claims to enjoy hearing an aged solicitor mumble into his beard for an hour about the transaction reporting regime under MiFID 2 in front of a text-heavy PowerPoint presentation is such a liar as to call into question her fitness and properness to be a solicitor of the supreme court of England and Wales. Heaven forbid you should take anything on board.