CareeRS is Reed Smith’s competency-based career development program. Its purpose is two-fold: to provide the firm's lawyers with the transparency, development opportunities and support they need to achieve career satisfaction and success at Reed Smith, while at the same time allowing the firm to provide the best legal representation to its clients. The CareeRS program has three key components: Competencies, Development Options including a competency-based curriculum, and CareeRS Advisors.
“CareeRS succeeds in articulating the link between personal development and career progression. Within a supportive framework, it provides a set of firmwide objectives along with the tools to assess performance against those objectives in a way that is consistent across Reed Smith. Lawyers at all levels now have the opportunity to discuss their expectations against the firm's expectations at the various stages of their careers.”
Associate, London
Competencies
Today, being a great lawyer and succeeding in a global, diverse firm requires more than simply possessing excellent legal knowledge and skills. It also requires being a well-rounded business professional who works effectively as part of a team, interacts well with clients and colleagues, is a good firm citizen, can lead a team through a case or deal, and develops and manages ongoing client relationships. Reed Smith's clients demand this, our business requires it, and the firm's new competency model shows how these capabilities apply at each stage of one’s career. The competencies “wheel” depicts the competency areas within which all Reed Smith lawyers are expected to develop. It shows the qualities that make up the “complete package,” the well-rounded Reed Smith lawyer. Going forward, the competencies will be used for all career-related decisions, including recruitment, compensation, assessment and promotion.
“The CareeRS program represents a major investment in the future of this law firm. By taking a focused, milestone-oriented approach to professional development, CareeRS will equip our associates with both the competencies and the confidence to build on Reed Smith's legacy of excellence.”
Partner, Philadelphia
“I am a big fan of our 'competencies.' They articulate in a qualitative way what it takes to be a successful lawyer at Reed Smith, no matter in which office you might sit. Success these days of course requires great legal skills. But we all also have to be smart business people and very attuned to our clients' businesses globally. These competencies will help ensure we all have and keep developing those skills. Not only are they good for us, but they are also good for our clients, ensuring a uniform approach to service delivery, to relationship management and to lawyer development across the Reed Smith network.”
Partner, London
Development Options
To help associates progress against the competencies, CareeRS provides a wide variety of development opportunities, from training programs mapped to the nine core competencies, to on-the-job development, pro bono opportunities, client and intra-firm secondments, online resources, and more.
A new feature launched with the CareeRS program is the competency-based core curriculum, which encompasses training on the competencies in all four quadrants: Legal Skills, Citizenship, Business Skills, and Clients. The curriculum offers tailored programming geared to the unique requirements at each associate level, including each level’s own “Academy.” The junior, mid-level and senior associate Academies are designed to both orient associates to the competency requirements of that level and provide training in areas key to that level—a broad range of workplace and client-service skills for junior associates, people management and self-development for mid-level associates, leadership and matter management for senior associates.
“Law schools do a nice job of teaching us to think like lawyers but they don’t always teach us the specific skills that we need to service our clients or manage our careers. This great program does both.”
Partner, Philadelphia
CareeRS Advisors
To support associates as they use the competencies and apply them to their own performance, each associate is assigned a “CareeRS Advisor”—a partner who is ready, willing and able to advise the associate on navigating the competencies and how to best utilize the many development opportunities available to them. The CareeRS Advisor program guarantees that every associate has someone he or she can turn to for career development advice. CareeRS Advisors are approved by the practice group leaders and are specially trained on how to advise associates regarding the competencies, in particular, and career development, in general.
“It is so important to have CareeRS to provide guidance on what it means to be a lawyer, moving up through the ranks, and what your ultimate goal is. At a traditional law firm, you would start work at the firm, work as hard as you can, and maybe eventually become partner. You wouldn’t have a clear idea of why you want to do that or what you have to accomplish in order to get there. At Reed Smith, the CareeRS program helps answer questions like 'Do I want to be a partner?' and, 'If so, what paths can I take to achieve that goal?'”
Associate, New York
To learn more about our CareeRS program, read 'Responding in the fight to keep the best lawyers,' published in the Law Society Gazette, 02 June 2011.