Law firm training · Guide

A step-by-step guide to design a soft skills simulation

This guide helps law firm learning teams build a BeSavvy simulation course for the soft skills lawyers need on live matters — giving difficult feedback to juniors, holding a line in a contract negotiation, staying steady when a deal collapses, and protecting the one hour of the day that actually moves the file forward.You'll learn what a simulation is actually made of, work through four course-ready stories grounded in legal practice you could build this week, and see which blocks train which skill.

What a simulation is made of — course, simulator, and the two kinds of block inside it.
4 legal soft-skills story ideas written as courses you could build this week: supervision, contract negotiation, deal collapse, matter prioritisation.
Which blocks train which skill, and what to have on hand before you start.

Definitions

Before we get into how a course is built, we need to make sure that we speak the same language. So let's spend some time reading through the definitions and understanding the connections between them.

Ten terms carry the whole guide. The first five are the hierarchy you have just seen; the rest are what you fill it with.

Course

The top of the hierarchy — a collection of simulators that follow one course story from start to finish. Each simulator is a chapter with its own simulation story; together they train a skill across the moments where it is actually used, rather than teaching it once in isolation.

Simulator

One chapter of the course, and the thing a learner opens and finishes in a sitting. Its simulation story is a sequence of interactive blocks that recreate a small part of real work: run the conversation, make the call, defend the plan. Closer to a flight simulator for behaviour than a course video or a multiple-choice quiz.

Block

The unit a simulator is assembled from. Every simulator is an ordered list of blocks, and every block is one of exactly two kinds — an exercise block or a story block. A typical simulator runs to between three and twelve of them.

Exercise block

A block where the learner does something and is assessed on it: hold the conversation, write the message, delegate the work, make the call. Exercise blocks are where the skill is practised, and the only blocks that generate feedback and a score.

Story block

A block that carries the narrative and hands the learner what they need in order to act — the brief from the partner, the client email that just landed, the mark-up file on the junior they are about to speak to. Nothing to submit and nothing scored, but without them the exercise blocks are disconnected and mean nothing.

Story

The course story — the shared facts that stay fixed across every simulator on the course — the client, the matter, the team, the names, the signing deadline, and what has already gone wrong. One canon keeps the generation agent consistent and stops contradictions between simulators.

Characters

The people who appear in the narrative: the partner, your juniors, opposing counsel across the table, the client who blames your firm in public. Defining them once gives every conversation a consistent voice and role across the whole course.

Playbook

A collection of critical pieces of knowledge extracted from the materials you provide — your supervision standards, your negotiation playbooks, your competency framework. It guides the agent when it builds the simulators and when it judges what the learner did. It is not the facilitator playbook your PSL team has written.

Goals

Every course and every simulator has a list of goals. These are the outcomes that the learner is measured against and what your reporting rolls up to.

Feedback

What the learner gets back after every exercise block: what they did, what it cost them, and what a stronger version would have sounded like. Graded against your playbook and the simulator's goals — not against a generic rubric.