This asynchronous, cohort-based online course, developed in collaboration with a practicing attorney SME, teaches first-year associate attorneys to differentiate billable and non-billable hours and to track their time effectively.
When Time Is Money: Practicing Effective Legal Timekeeping
*Note: in order to fully access this course, you will need to create a (free) account on Eduflow Academy using your email address and enroll. If the course is listed as full, please contact me using the contact form here and I will open up additional spots through the LMS. You can also experience parts of the course using the screenshots included below.
Overview
Audience: first-year associate attorneys at a large private law firm with several branches
Responsibilities: instructional design, collaboration with SME, action mapping, course outline, eLearning development, management in LMS
Tools Used: Articulate Rise 360, Eduflow LMS, Genially, Padlet, Miro, Google Suite, Zoom
Problem & Solution
Big City Law Practice (a fictitious client for this concept project) was receiving reports from more senior billing attorneys (in charge of the billing for individual cases) across multiple branches of the firm that their assigned first-year associate attorneys were submitting erroneous billable hours entries.
The consequences of this problem were significant for all stakeholders:
The associate attorneys lost additional billing time by failing to record relevant information about their work in the moment and then needing to go back and recapture it. Some attorneys may have felt frustrated at the lack of support/coaching for this essential business aspect of law, impacting their decision about whether to stay on with the firm long-term.
The billing attorneys likewise lost billable time because of the need to carefully review (and often strike down) the time entries of their associates.
The firm may have suffered reputational damage among its clients when they received invoices including ineffective/unclear time entries for work on their cases.
The firm as a whole lost out on revenue because of all the reasons above.
I began by conducting analysis into the source(s) of the problem. Given the nature of this concept project, I was unable to perform direct audience analysis with a population of first-year attorneys. Instead, I reviewed data from large-scale surveys, like the Law Student Survey 2018: The Mindset of the Millennial Law Student, which found that “when asked whether law school had provided adequate professional training in the business of law,... the majority of law students surveyed responded ‘Not at all’ (66%).” Similarly, a 2015 LexisNexis survey found that 95% of senior attorneys reported their associates arrived lacking practical skills.
This data suggested that at least part of the problem was due to a skill gap -- associates were submitting erroneous entries because they had never received training on how to do so in law school.
While the client is fictional, I did collaborate with a real SME, a litigation associate at a large private firm. In an initial interview, she further expressed that the problem went even deeper: many associates simply did not know the difference between billable and non-billable hours.
Understanding the problem: screenshot of notes from first interview with SME
Based on this analysis, I proposed launching an asynchronous online course for first-year associates. Running it asynchronously in an online environment would be important to allow for participation among the many new associates across several firm branches in different geographic locations.
I also suggested a cohort-based model for the course, grounded in research presented in the Eduflow Academy course Designing Social Learning Experiences. A cohort-based approach would allow the learners to support each other through discussions and peer feedback (rather than further burdening the time of billing attorneys) and would make an easy addition to the existing onboarding program for first-years, given that they are already treated as a cohort for mentoring.
My SME agreed to this proposal, and we moved on to design and development.
Process
Kickoff Call with SME & Action Mapping
I scheduled a kickoff meeting on Zoom with my SME, during which I interviewed her to develop an action map.
We began by identifying the key performance indicator (KPI) by which we would measure students’ progress: utilization rate, which measures individual attorneys’ billable productivity. A different KPI, realization rate, measures the entire firm’s billable productivity, but was not as useful for our purposes of allowing individual attorneys to see how they’re performing over time.
We then identified and sorted the actions that learners would need to be able to do in order to meet that goal.
After the call, I sent the first draft of the action map to my SME for her approval. She suggested adding a section on tracking non-billable hours. The final draft of the action map incorporated that suggestion.
Final draft of action map, featuring the KPI in the middle surrounded by supporting actions
Course Outline
Once I had obtained approval from my SME on the action map, I used it to outline the course. This part of the process was highly iterative as I made a series of decisions about learning design, relying on learning theories and principles like:
Backward design and constructive alignment to ground the course in action-oriented learning objectives and design assessments that could evaluate the learner’s performance on those objectives
(Social) constructivism to embed continuous opportunities for interaction between learner and learning material as well as learner and learner
Cognitive load theory to chunk content into smaller units and lessons across two weeks, as well as offering multiple modalities as entry points to learning
It was also iterative based on helpful input from my SME, which I solicited after I had a complete draft.
At times, I needed specific course content from my SME based on her expertise. To respect her time, I kept these requests as succinct and easy as possible.
Lastly, I obtained my SME’s signoff on the final draft and headed into development.
Screenshot of first draft of course outline with SME feedback in comments
Screenshot of email from ID to SME requesting specific information for course
Development
Originally, I had intended to develop the course fully in Articulate Rise 360, believing that the streamlined layout would be a good fit for the asynchronous format I had in mind. However, I soon ran up against some of the constraints of the platform -- namely, that it is just not built for a robust social learning experience. For example, in order to hold online discussions, I would have had to embed a link to an external Padlet (itself not exactly a platform meant for discussions).
I did in fact build the course in Rise, gaining valuable experience with its many interactive functions, like tabbed interactions, flash cards, and drag and drop activities. But instead of clumsily embedding other poorly-suited platforms within Rise, I decided to export Rise to a different LMS with greater potential for social learning: Eduflow.
Screenshot of embedded Padlet (within Rise) to facilitate discussion in original draft of course
Screenshot of tabbed interaction as originally developed in Rise; this was eventually exported to Eduflow as a SCORM package
This still presented some technical challenges, as I realized that currently Rise does not allow users to export a single lesson from a larger course; users can only export a course in its entirety. But I wanted to intersperse the Rise portions of the course with Eduflow functionality, like asynch discussion boards and peer review activities.
Screenshot of a submission and peer review flow from the course on Eduflow LMS
Troubleshooting with another instructional designer confirmed what I suspected: I would need to create each lesson as its own “course” within Rise and export all of them individually. It was labor-intensive but ultimately worth it, as the new version of the course offers learners the best of what both Rise and Eduflow have to offer.
When sourcing images, I either licensed images from Adobe Stock or identified images with Creative Commons licenses. The course does not contain many pictures/ graphics of people, but for those that do, I was intentional about including a diverse mix of skin colors, genders, and ages; it was important to me to avoid representing the practice of law as overly white or male in a course for new attorneys.
Screenshot of interactive Rise scenario exported into Eduflow with Eduflow accordion function underneath
Screenshot of labeled graphic interaction exported from Rise featuring young female attorney of color
Results & Takeaways
The Kirkpatrick model of training evaluation offers a useful way of evaluating the success of this course, if it were ever to be implemented at a real law firm.
Level 1, Reaction: The final activity of the course, before learners receive their certificate of completion, is a course evaluation survey, which poses a mix of closed- and open-ended questions about both learner engagement and learning material.
Level 2, Learning: The summative assessment, which requires learners to produce a written evaluation of the effectiveness of their own timekeeping system using at least two previously-learned evaluation strategies, is designed to assess learners’ proficiency in tracking their time at the end of the course.
Level 3, Behavior: This level can be evaluated using the KPI from the original action map—an individual utilization rate of at least 80%—at the end of associates’ first year, a meaningful measure of their consistency in implementing timekeeping skills over time.
Level 4, Results: Realization rate, which is already an important KPI to most firms, provides a means of assessing the overall impact of the course on the firm’s bottom line. The firm’s realization rate at the end of the pilot year could be compared to the realization rate of previous years, prior to course implementation. Assuming the realization rate would be better, that could be at least partly attributed to the increased efficiency in time tracking among both associate attorneys and their supervising billing attorneys.
As an instructional designer, I had two main takeaways from designing and developing this course:
I learned in greater detail about both the affordances and constraints of Articulate Rise 360 as an authoring program. I feel quite confident in my ability to continue to use this tool moving forward.
Relatedly, the development stage reinforced for me how important it is to select an authoring/hosting platform that fulfills the goals of the course (rather than forcing a square peg into a round hole).