Keep Your Legal Training Costs Down By Following These Methods The requirement in England and Wales for solicitors to have 16 hours Continuing Professional Development every year is set in stone.
However, how this training is obtained does have a certain element of flexibility attached to it.
The Solicitors Regulation Authority says that 25% of the time, ie four hours, must be obtained through accredited trainers.
What this means in practice is that 12 of the 16 hours can be obtained through non accredited training.
Whilst this can include accredited training courses, it can also include:

• Attending non accredited training courses
• Preparing non accredited training courses
• Writing Legal Articles
• Writing Legal Books
• Undertaking NVQ's in business and management
• Coaching and mentoring sessions
• Research resulting in written precedents or procedures

The Easiest Way To Save The Most Training Costs? One of the easiest ways of obtaining CPD for solicitors in practical terms is by attending courses.
Often firms can run an hour long course during a lunchtime break, providing sandwiches for the attendees.
The benefit to the firm is the reduced costs of staff attending a course on site, with both travel expenses and external course providers fees saved.
The benefit to the attendee is receiving focused and practical training that they can apply to their daily tasks as soon as they return to their desks.
However, a problem can arise if the people delivering the course have not had training in presentation skills themselves.
There are now specific "train the trainer" courses aimed at legal staff to ensure that they can provide relevant and focused training for attendees.
Whilst the cost of the course might amount to a few hundred pounds for each attendee, when the costs savings of delivering in-house legal training are assessed a firm can save many thousands of pounds over the course of the year.
By way of an example, if the 12 hours non accredited CPD training was delivered in house by one of a firm's fee earners to five solicitors each time, this would amount to a saving for each fee earner of at least £675 per annum based on the alternative cost of attending three half day courses at £225 each.
With five attendees this will save a small firm over £3,000 per annum.
In larger firms the costs savings will be much more significant.
Summary In times when all law firms are looking to cut their costs, carrying out more in house legal training can lead to a significant saving.
If the training is carried out by a solicitor that has attended a Train The Trainers course, there should be no loss in quality of the training received.