The Training Deck Only Tells Part of the Story
Most law firms invest seriously in formal training. But if you ask lawyers how they actually learned to operate and lead, the answer is usually the same: they watched the people ahead of them.
Who spoke in meetings and who stayed quiet. How feedback was delivered when something went wrong. How decisions got made when there was no clear right answer. Those observations form an invisible curriculum that tends to matter more than anything in a training deck.
Julia Mercier, Sally Raggio, Director of Legal Education and Development at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati and Danica You, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Professional at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati will be taking up that question at the 2026 PDC Summer Conference in Atlanta. Their session, The Invisible Curriculum: What Lawyers Learn by Watching Their Leaders, takes place on Thursday, July 23 from 4:30 to 5:30 PM at the Loews Atlanta Hotel. It draws on experience advising lawyers through mergers, restructuring, and extended periods of uncertainty to look at how everyday leadership behavior quietly shapes culture.
The session introduces the Intent–Impact Coaching Model as a way to help leaders examine the gap between what they meant to communicate and how it was actually received. The goal isn’t transformation, it’s awareness. Attendees will come away with a clearer sense of where high-impact moments tend to surface, how different people interpret the same behavior, and how small adjustments can strengthen trust over time.
For those attending PDC this summer, it should be a grounded, practical conversation about something most people in law firms have noticed but rarely discussed directly.