Driving forces behind next gen learning

I read an interesting article recently by Brie Stampe and Tami Schiller of TravellingCoaches.com. In this article they talk about next generation learning in legal offices.

Among the highlights of this article was their identification of the driving forces affecting next generation learning, especially in the legal community. The authors specifically identified three such forces: technologies, law firms, and users. In this post I will discuss the technologies that they wrote about.

Next Generation Technologies

Innovation in learning models will be driven by the new kinds of technical competencies that will be essential for legal staff and lawyers. The authors see consolidation and commoditization of legal-specific software as more and more applications move to the cloud and the number of third-party applications in use increases.

As a result, less time will be needed in formal training on custom desktop applications, but there will be an increase in the training needed on workflow, business processes and leveraging technology for the practice of law.

It is also likely that less technical, consumer-oriented devices, i.e. smartphones, iPads, etc., will replace the current technologies that we find in the workplace. So training will have to be developed to support these non-standard tools.

Another technology that will find an expanded role in the legal office is the knowledge management system. The authors see the increased roles of these systems as providing opportunities for entirely new forms of learning due to the increased access to information.

In my next post I will discuss Next Generation Law Firms.

Click here to read the entire article.