As autumn rolls around each year, many lawyers scramble to enrol themselves in the bare minimum of CLE courses mandated by their Law Society. Seminars are suddenly booked out, bums appear on seats and online CLE providers see a spike in download rates and traffic.

All this last-minute activity seems to suggest that many lawyers do not take their formal continuing education seriously – is this ‘tick the box’ mentality around CLE requirements holding the profession back?

The legal industry is changing faster than ever before and even the most experienced lawyers must learn new tricks to stay competitive, according to Terri Mottershead of Mottershead Consulting.

Ms Mottershead says learning has to be “your number one priority” as a law firm: “If you get that right, then everything else should follow.”

She adds: “The bottom line is that organisations don’t actually innovate; people are the ones who innovate.

“Focusing on [learning] will make the organisation as a whole – all of those people together – more agile and more flexible and more able to change.”

Linda Baxter, the director of CPD at the Leo Cussen Centre for Law, says it is essential that lawyers remain ahead of any developments, particularly with the growth of online information services available to clients.

Angie Zandstra, the director of practitioner education at The College of Law, agrees, saying the “information asymmetry” between lawyers and clients has gone.

These days clients can find legal information online for free before they even arrive at their lawyer’s office, she says. This “do-it-yourself law” is a real threat to traditional practice.

“When people go to a lawyer they expect something much more than what they could find out on their own,” she adds.

Lawyers need to hone their practical skills, or as Ms Zandstra puts it, focus on “the work that other people can’t do”.

“That goes for the way that CPD operates,” she continues. “The days for us of lawyers just coming here to get information about changes in the law [are] gone as well.”

Whether in-house, online or delivered face-to-face by educational institutions, CLE should develop the skill sets lawyers need to modernise, according to Jan Christie, the president of the Continuing Legal Education Association of Australasia (CLEAA).

Rush hour

Lawyers are by no means indifferent to the benefits of self-improvement but the current “prescriptive” system promotes a poor attitude to education, according to Bulletpoints CEO Jonathan Seifman.

All Australian lawyers must complete 10 CLE points per year, with additional units required in NSW, Victoria and Queensland for accredited specialists.

Each point equates to one hour of learning in the form of seminars, conferences, webinars or podcasts. Lawyers can also join committees, publish papers or deliver seminars to gain CLE points.

With the introduction of the Legal Profession Uniform Laws in July, Victoria and NSW have seen some regulatory changes, but the CLE requirements are similar.

“I don’t want to tar the whole profession with one brush,” says Mr Seifman.

“There are some lawyers out there that are very committed to education […] and who do take this seriously.”

However, he adds, the “mad scramble” as the 31 March deadline approaches is concerning.

The impetus behind Bulletpoints, an online aggregator of CLE programs, was to encourage lawyers to take courses as needed during the year, according to Mr Seifman.

“My hope was that lawyers would think it was so easy to do a course […] that by the time February and March come around they wouldn’t panic and scramble for their points,” he says.

“In reality we haven’t seen that,” he continues. “We’ve still seen the trend towards cramming.”

Mr Seifman says around 80 per cent of Bulletpoints’ sales happen within a six-week period.

“That’s because lawyers kind of wake up in February/March and realise they haven’t done their hours,” he says. “Anecdotally, I think a lot of lawyers aren’t actually doing the courses they purchase, they are just purchasing them,” he continues.

“Or if you are subscribing to an online video, you hit play – you get a bit of other work done while the video is running in the background.”

Ms Zandstra says many lawyers go above and beyond the 10-point requirement, completing courses worth 40 points or more at The College of Law.

“If you went into firms and asked how much they are investing in professional development, it is far more than ensuring that people do 10 CPD units,” she says.

However, she said there were lawyers who put in only a token effort and that “having a points-based system may encourage that”.

Should CLE be compulsory?

A “really fraught question” in the CLE/CPD industry is whether the 10-point system needs to go, according to Ms Christie.

Many common law jurisdictions around the world are radically changing the CLE/CPD requirements, but Australia has not made significant changes in the last two decades.

The UK, for instance, has decided to drop the required 16 hours of training per year.

Under the new regime, the onus is put back on the individual to maintain their competence to a satisfactory level.

Lawyers and law firms must declare that they have considered their CPD needs when renewing their practising certificates.

The changes are being phased in and will be up and running by November 2016.

The hope is that this will alter the behaviour of lawyers and encourage genuine, ongoing learning, says Mr Seifman. Around one in 20 lawyers are audited every year under the Australian model, he explains.

“And if you haven’t done the prescriptive hours that you were meant to do, you get in a little bit of trouble and you have to make up the hours.”

In the UK, the auditing process is much more complex. The regulator will consider the lawyer’s experience and specialty and the lawyer will need to demonstrate that they have improved year-on-year in that field.

“There is a balance between making sure that lawyers educate themselves but not being too prescriptive about how they do it – and I don’t think Australia has quite hit that balance,” he says.

Ms Christie’s personal view is that some regulation around fundamentals is important, particularly in ethics and practice management training.

“In terms of pure compliance, I have no issue with the way we do things now. But I would love to see a general push within the profession as a whole towards embracing professional development more,” she says.

Ms Mottershead, on the other hand, would like to see Australia follow the UK’s lead. She says the changes in the UK were undertaken following a very extensive review of the delivery of legal services.

“That sort of review in a modern sense – a comprehensive, national sense – has not been undertaken [in Australia],” she says.

Ms Baxter says compulsory CPD “provides a structure and removes ambiguity, thereby assisting with planning resources and setting expectations”.

Ms Zandstra adds that The College of Law does not focus on satisfying the 10-point requirement, although lawyers who take their courses will accrue CLE units.

“What there is in the market is a whole lot of CPD point-driven seminars and that is not really where we see the future,” she says.

The future of continuing education, according to Ms Zandstra, lies in practical legal training that produces learning outcomes, which are relevant to lawyers’ practice and clients. New Zealand has taken the opposite approach to the UK. “In New Zealand and in parts of Canada it is very much about the development of a learning contract,” Ms Christie says.

The New Zealand Law Society requires that lawyers complete 10 hours of CPD activities per year in addition to maintaining a written CPD plan.

Education download

A strong theme in the CLE/CPD industry is the creation of online platforms for information sharing and learning.

Ms Christie says that what can be done now through technology is “only limited by your imagination”.

But the volume of learning materials available online, and the uncertainty around the quality of information, means technology is really a “double-edged sword”, she continues.

“Just the sheer amount of stuff that’s available is quite daunting. [Technology has] brought with it an expectation around quality of training and quality of development. People have high expectations of what will be provided to them,” she says.

Mr Seifman says that there has been an increasing trend towards lawyers doing their CLE online rather than physically attending courses.

“A lot of the conference providers who do live conferences have a live streaming option, which is great for those lawyers who work in the suburbs and the country,” he says.

“And they can participate [online] – they can ask questions, they can have the experience of being there without having to travel. I think that’s great.”

Ms Mottershead says there is a move towards information being delivered (as British author Richard Susskind puts it) ‘just in time’. In the future, CLE providers will offer fewer lengthy lectures and more short, on-demand courses, she says.

Ms Zandstra says CLE/CPD providers, such as The College of Law, are now looking beyond the replication of face-to-face learning through podcasts or live streaming.

Using the internet as an ‘information dump’ through a lecture or seminar is not “really what we would call online”, she says. “We see online as being far more interactive. It is all about learning something practical.”