Legally on the Move: Professional Training – Nadine Stanton – E01

Transcript

Welcome to Legally on the Move, Professional Training, a brand new miniseries from the Legally Speaking podcast sponsored by Clio. I’m Rob Hanna and in this exciting new series, we’re coming to you live from BMA House in London, where senior leaders from across the legal profession are gathering to explore a critical question. What really makes high performing teams in law? From leadership and communication to resilience, trust and psychological safety,

We’ll be speaking to experts and industry voices about what it takes to build teams that perform at their best in today’s legal world. So let’s get into it.

Welcome back to the Legally Speaking podcast. Please let us know your name, title and organisation. Yes. So my name is Nadine Stanton. I’m the chief executive of Professional Training Limited. You absolutely are. And we’re at your conference today. Professional Training Conference. Absolutely fantastic. Firstly, thank you so much for having us. Such a great energy, positivity of the day, just enjoying every moment. So how did you decide on the central theme for your conferences and indeed for today’s conference?

Yeah, so I felt that in the conference space and there are lots and lots of conferences out there that it was really important to just have one key theme and really work on that one key theme all day from people inside the industry, outside the industry and so on. And how we came up with the theme is basically what we see in lot of law firms is that high performance, while that is what they want to achieve, isn’t across the board what we see in practice. So some teams are performing and even if they do perform,

They don’t necessarily sustain that performance. So we thought that was really important theme to explore. Yeah. And I think it’s been fair to say there’s a lot of people keen for that theme today as well. Why do feel it’s important to have speakers from both inside the industry, but also outside of the industry? Yeah, I just think it’s really important to have a different lens on the topic.

to get some fresh thinking, get some fresh innovation, to get some fresh ideas because there’s so much synergy actually between competitive sport and business. And so that was one of the things I thought was really important rather than just getting a lot of people agreeing and saying the same thing. I thought we’d give just a bit of a different dynamism to the whole event. Yeah, absolutely. And we’re early into the day, I mean, MWigs, MBE, incredible.

keynote earlier, I spoke to a lot of people that came away with so many ideas, inspired, pumped up, ready to go forward. So I think the quality of the speakers and the general set up today is brilliant. What do you think makes a good delegate experience? I’ve been in the training industry for 20 something years and the law probably overall for about 30 years, it’s actually putting the delegates at the heart of it.

So one of the things that was really amazing about Emma’s keynote speech was she actually got the audience involved because you’ve got a team of really bright, capable people. So it’s actually getting the energy, providing that context. So again, that’s our workshops are all getting those round tables and getting the delegates involved. And I think that really makes for a good delegate experience to have them totally at the heart of everything that you do. So everything that we’re sort of putting on is to get them in some shape or form, whether it’s questions, pair work, greet work, whatever.

they are involved. So the day hopefully for everybody goes really quickly. And I think once people feel like they’re seen and heard and have that level of interaction, know, that ultimately they feel valued and everyone here today feels like, you know what, I really feel seen here. It’s a great safe space, we have open conversations and people actually go away and then take action on things and indeed new friendships, collaborations, business opportunities, you name it. At the heart, you obviously are a training organisation. So what made you decide to pivot into the conference space?

If I’m honest, I felt like there was a little bit of a cap in the market. So I’d been to a particular conference a couple of years ago and I felt that rather than pulling on this one theme and having the delegates at the heart of things, it tended to be more of a broadcast, more of sort of lots and lots of panels. And I felt that because we were experienced in training, we knew what delegate engagement looked like, we could lift and drag that into the conference space. And it was at the time, it felt a bit of a risk.

Certainly we hadn’t done it before, but sold out last year, we’ve sold out again this year. So yeah, really happy that we’ve actually pivoted to do this, to showcase what we do on the training arena. And it’s working, know, and it’s clear to see, know, life isn’t necessarily about luck, it’s about the more risk you take, the more luck you have. And as a result of you taking that risk, I think A, we’re all the better for it, for conferences like this, and B, clearly it’s working. ⁓ Community is something that’s very important to you. Why?

Because I think at the heart of community, we can all start to explore and have that safe, going back to that psychological safety piece, that safe space to think about in our own business, either individually or our teams, what’s working, what’s not, what we can do differently. So building that community to be able to explore that, and we’re putting on the theme today of high performing teams, but it could be anything. I think it’s really at the heart of these, and actually what happens with it, we found with our business, why we’re kind of growing so quickly, is because

Building a community sells itself. People want to be part of that community. I know that’s very much what you do. You’ve built a community. People want to be part of it. That’s how we met. absolutely. So I think the community piece for me is actually far more compelling than a sales environment. Yeah. I think when people come together, like you say, feel part of this community, opportunities, collaborations like this one.

Nadine’s referring to the lawyers retreat where we first met out in Ibiza, where we did our first interview at a yoga studio. we might, and you know, today we’re recording at BMA House here in London. So we must continue to do these quite cool, slightly different alternative venues for our future interviews together. Just before I let you go, because I know it’s a super busy day you’ve been hosting. It’s been a great start. I’m very excited for the rest of the day. What do you hope that this year’s conference goes out and achieves? What’s really important to us?

is going back to the heart of the delegate experience is that every single person who’s part of that audience comes away with a palpable, a marginal gain, a palpable takeaway where they think, actually that’s working, our business needs to do more of that or we could tweak that, that’s what I want to do. So it’s not just about, yes, I’ve gone and heard a load of talks, yes, I’ve joined in a few things. It’s actually about having that space to learn something new.

But more importantly to carry that forward, to disseminate that information because it’s all about bringing it forward. So really, really important that people come. It can be from anything, from the networking opportunities, the sitting next to a colleague they didn’t know, from one of the speakers, anything where they think that was a good use of a day. Really glad I did that.

Yeah, and I’m delighted I’m here doing obviously the media, but also learning and just soaking up the information. And for the conscious watchers, they would notice this interview started with a busy room behind us with people networking. I must let you go because everyone has scuttled off now to start some of the work sub sessions. Just before I let you go, where can people find out more about professional training and where can they potentially get involved for any future conferences that you might be hosting? Shout out any websites or any social media handles. Yes. So ⁓ we’ve, interestingly, we’ve already booked next year’s conference, which is on the 17th of March, 2027.

And the theme we’re going to be exploring next year is actually about managing change. And that can be the ITs changed, the personnel have changed, the office politics have changed, the culture has changed, the personnel have changed. Change affects everything. So what a brilliant topic to do ⁓ the conference on. ⁓ We’ve got our website, professionaltraining.co.uk. Do have a look at that. But I think the other thing that people might, your listeners might be interested in is that I personally run about once a month.

community-based for L and D, HR, head of people webinars, which are hugely popular. And again, it’s the same for where it’s interactive, cameras on, you know, not just a case of me broadcasting on a topic, but actually genuinely hearing from those delegates what their experiences are on a particular topic. So all of those are on our website. If you’re interested in doing any of those, by all means hop on and we’d love to see you.

Well, I would encourage people to absolutely do that. And just like to say thank you so much once again for inviting the Legally Speaking podcast to your conference. We’ve had an absolute blast as far, excited for the rest of the day. But from now, from all of us on the show, over and out. Thank you for listening to this week’s episode. If you like the content here, why not check out our world leading content and collaboration of the Legally Speaking Club over on Discord.

Go to our website www.legallyspeakingpodcast.com. There’s a link to join our community there. Over and out.