The professional skills that AI cannot replicate, developed deliberately.
Seven two hour sessions for lawyers at any stage of practice.
Introduction
Artificial intelligence is now fast, fluent and confident. It is also, often, wrong. What it cannot do is the part of legal work that clients actually pay for: form a judgement, hold a difficult conversation, read a bench, notice what a client has not said, and stay clear headed when a case turns.
Those capabilities are usually left to accumulate by accident and over time across a career. This programme develops them on purpose.
The Human Practitioner is seven standalone sessions. Each one is two hours, live and online, capped at 20 participants so that the discussion is real rather than performed. You can take one, take several or take all seven.
At a glance
- Two hours, live and online
- Maximum 20 participants
- Standalone sessions: book one, several or all seven, in any order
- Short pre-work for some sessions, usually around fifteen minutes
- Certificate of attendance and a written competence mapping for your CPD record
- Two dates every month, on a rolling basis, from October 2026
- £175 plus VAT per session. Full programme £1,000 plus VAT.
CPD and your regulator
Neither the Bar Standards Board nor the Solicitors Regulation Authority operates a points system, and neither accredits training providers. No provider can award you points, and any that claims to is describing something its regulator does not recognise.
What both regulators do require is that you identify your own learning needs, undertake activity that meets them, record what you did and reflect on it.
Every session in this programme is built to be recorded as CPD. You receive:
- a certificate of attendance
- a written mapping of the session to the specific BSB Professional Statement competences and SRA competences it addresses, and
- a structured reflection prompt to complete afterwards and keep on file.
Three groups of competences recur across every session, because they are what the programme is actually about: communication, client care and relationships, and reflective practice. If you are building a CPD record that shows sustained development rather than a scatter of unconnected courses, that pattern is the point.
For barristers in the New Practitioners Programme, each session is two hours towards the minimum of 45 hours required across the first three years of practice.
The Seven Sessions
The sessions build in the order shown, so if you are taking several, that sequence will give you the most. Each one also stands entirely on its own.
Module 1 Building Your Judgement Advantage
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Judgement is the thing clients pay for, and the thing nobody ever taught you to examine.
What it covers
- Self-awareness as the foundation of professional judgement, not an optional extra
- Intellectual humility: the discipline of asking what you do not know rather than confirming what you think you do
- How you actually absorb information under deadline pressure, and what that costs you
- Adapting how you communicate to the person in front of you, whether that is a client, an instructing solicitor, a colleague or the bench
- The five motivational drivers that run your behaviour when the pressure is on, and the psychological needs sitting underneath them
What you take away
A diagnostic picture of your own drivers, a language and translation for the gap between how you see yourself and how others experience you, and an honest first read on where your pattern is costing you.
Competences addressed. BSB Professional Statement: 1.10, 2.5, 2.6, 3.4. SRA Statement of solicitor competence: A2a, A2b, A2c, A3b, C1b, C1c.
Module 2 Using and Recognising the Weapons of Influence
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Influence is operating on you, your clients and your opponents every working day. Most lawyers can neither name it nor see it coming.
What it covers
- Cialdini’s six principles applied to conference, negotiation, advocacy and the instructing relationship
- Where legitimate persuasion ends and improper influence begins
- Helping a client reach a decision without steering them into one
- Authority bias and its newest form: the confident, fluent, wrong AI output
- Recognising the principles when they are being used on you or on your client
What you take away
A dual lens. How to deploy each principle ethically and skilfully, and how to spot it operating on you before you have already conceded.
Competences addressed. BSB Professional Statement: 1.10, 2.1, 2.2, 2.5, 3.1. SRA Statement of solicitor competence: A1a, A1b, A1d, A2b, A5c, C1a, C2e.
Module 3 The Listening Practitioner
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Clients do not want to be accurately processed. They want to be heard. That is precisely what AI cannot give them.
What it covers
- The difference between hearing and listening, and what listening signals before you say anything
- The architecture of active listening: verbal cues, non-verbal cues, silence and the use of the speaker’s own language
- The trust account: what builds it and what quietly empties it
- Questioning that elicits rather than interrogates
- Reading the bench and opponents, and creating the conditions in which a client feels able to correct you
What you take away
Practised technique rather than theory. You will listen, be shown where you stopped listening, and do it again.
Competences addressed. BSB Professional Statement: 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5. SRA Statement of solicitor competence: B1a, C1a, C1b, C2b, C2c.
Module 4 Feedback, Conflict and Dyanamics
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Every stuck professional relationship you have is running a pattern. This session names it and gives you a way out.
What it covers
- Receiving feedback without the identity trap, including when it is public, immediate and delivered from the bench
- Giving difficult feedback clearly enough to be useful and carefully enough to be heard
- The five conflict modes, and why the adversarial default that serves you in court damages relationships outside it
- The Empowerment Dynamic, and the three reactive patterns it replaces
- A first introduction to the Three Circles of Concern, Influence and Control
What you take away
The ability to recognise a reactive dynamic early, before it has taken hold, and one concrete move out of it.
Competences addressed. BSB Professional Statement: 2.5, 2.6, 3.2, 3.4. SRA Statement of solicitor competence: A3c, C1g, C3a, C3f, C3g.
Module 5 Judgement Under Pressure
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Lawyers are trained to find the risk. Under pressure, that training turns on its owner.
What it covers
- Why critical thinking becomes catastrophising when it stops being deliberate
- De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats used as a personal discipline under pressure
- Why rigorous critical thinking is the precondition for creative argument rather than its enemy
- A worked legal scenario taken through all six hats in sequence
What you take away
A repeatable sequence for thinking clearly when a judgment, a client or a case has gone against you.
Competences addressed. BSB Professional Statement: 1.10, 2.5, 2.6. SRA Statement of solicitor competence: A2b, A5a, A5b, A5d, A5e.
Module 6 Resilience in Challenge
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The gap between the values you hold and the way you behave under pressure is where most professional regret lives.
What it covers
- Values under pressure: what you set aside, and what that reveals
- Tolerance of ambiguity as a professional skill, and the difference between uncertainty and incompetence
- The Three Circles of Concern, Influence and Control, mapped onto your own current practice
- Psychological safety for yourself: the conditions that let you admit you do not know
- Asking for help, and boundaries as a professional competence that protects client work rather than as self-care
- The imposter experience, and why this profession manufactures it
What you take away
A map of where your professional energy is currently going, and where it would actually produce a return.
Competences addressed. BSB Professional Statement: 2.1, 2.5, 2.6, 4.3. SRA Statement of solicitor competence: A2c, A3a, A3b, A3c, D1c.
Module 7 Becoming the Irreplaceable Practitioner
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Irreplaceable does not mean a machine cannot do it. It means you do it better because you understand how you do it.
What it covers
- What AI is and is not doing in legal practice, and the tacit knowledge argument
- The mentorship gap: how judgement gets built, and what happens when the tasks that built it disappear
- Creating psychological safety for colleagues and juniors as the contribution no system can make
- Integrating everything from the earlier sessions into a development plan you will actually use
What you take away
A written personal development plan, mapped to your regulator’s competences and ready for your CPD record.
Competences addressed. BSB Professional Statement: 1.10, 2.5, 2.6, 3.2. SRA Statement of solicitor competence: A2a, A2b, A2e, C3c, C3f.
What delegates have said
The Human Practitioner is new, but delegates on a variety of our earlier courses gave an average overall score of 90%. They also told us what they value in a session of this kind. Each comment below is in the delegate’s own words.
“Informed, focused, caused me to question my view on the issues”
“It was a well-rounded, suitably challenging and well executed training session”
“Excellent practical case studies”
“Open discussion about a tricky topic”
“Probably the best course I have attended in years’”
Book the full programme
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Full programme, all seven sessions: £1,000 plus VAT (£1,200 including VAT), a saving of £225 – which is more than one free session.
If you are interested in booking the full programme, get in touch with us by clicking the button below.
Pricing
- Single session: £175 plus VAT (£210 including VAT)
- Full programme, all seven sessions: £1,000 plus VAT (£1,200 including VAT), a saving of £225.
Let us know if you’d like to book all sessions upfront, or just the remaining ones if you’re already partway through the cohort.
Payment is taken at the time of booking, so your place is confirmed immediately. A VAT invoice follows by email.
For chambers and firms
We deliver the full programme, or a selection of sessions, to cohort groups inside chambers and law firms, either virtually or in person.
Cohort delivery is where this material does its best work. The examples, the exercises and the case discussion are built around your own practice areas and your own working relationships, and the group develops a shared language it can keep using long after the sessions finish. It can run as a series across a year rather than as a set of separate events.
Contact us to discuss format, scheduling and cost.
FAQ’s
Do I have to take them in order?
No. Every session stands alone. They are sequenced because the ideas build, so if you are taking more than one, that order will give you the most. The sessions will be repeated so don’t worry if you have missed one!
Who is it for?
Lawyers at any stage of practice. The material is written for all, but the competence mapping covers Barristers and Solicitors.
Is it recorded?
No. Nothing is recorded. People engage with this material properly only when they can be open and honest, and nobody is either of those things while a camera is running. It is the same reason each session is capped at 20 places.
What if I cannot attend?
Your place can be transferred to another date up to 48 hours before the session. Cancellations made more than seven days in advance are refunded in full. Inside seven days the fee is not refundable, but you are welcome to send a colleague in your place.