How to get the most out of mandatory legal education

The 31 March deadline for completing your mandatory education is fast approaching and lawyers still have work to do to comply, writes Bulletpoints CEO Jonathan Seifman.

Digital • 11 March 2014 • Careers

How to get the most out of mandatory legal education

The 31 March deadline for completing your mandatory education is fast approaching and lawyers still have work to do to comply, writes Bulletpoints CEO Jonathan Seifman.

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In our 2013 research, which involved interviewing over 100 lawyers across Australia about how they do their mandatory education, we found that over 65 per cent of lawyers leave it until March to fulfil their CLE/CPD requirements.

Anecdotally, a lot of legal professionals tend to make quick decisions to get their CLE/CPD points. A lot of these decisions don’t necessarily result in the best outcomes in terms of attending courses that actually enhance learning and skills. Many of them are done because they “tick the box”.

One law firm told us: “We only ever think about CLE compliance in March. On the day we decide we need to do something about it, whatever brochure that lands on our desk that looks OK, that’s the CLE event we usually attend”. This story is scarily quite typical.

However, these courses cost money and time. So, if your firm is going to spend time and money on completing CLE/CPD requirements, why not at least try to achieve some good learning outcomes at the same time?

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Time to get off the CLE/CPD treadmill and make a change to the way things currently get done?

Here’s a few interesting observations about what’s happening in the mandatory education space:

We’re seeing a lot more courses being done online. There’s now a range of excellent online modules and videos that will satisfy CLE/CPD requirements, and these are increasingly popular.
The hottest topics to be done through online courses and videos are the mandatory topics of Ethics, Professional Skills and Practice Management. Lawyers are still tending towards going to face-to-face events to learn about areas of substantive law, but are increasingly happy to do the mandatory topics online.
There’s been a spike in the prevalence of in-house training – where law firms with more than 5 lawyers are happy to bring an in-house trainer to their site to run a session with all their lawyers in the room.

Now there’s also a new way to find and book your mandatory legal education options in one place. Bulletpoints is a revolutionary new service that aggregates CLE/CPD courses from over 25 different providers and allows busy lawyers to compare and choose the course that suits them best.

No need to sift through dozens of brochures any more. Let Bulletpoints do the work for you.

Lawyers Weekly has partnered with Bulletpoints to deliver this new service to its readers directly from the Lawyers Weekly website.

Copy and logo supplied by Bulletpoints. For more information visit www.lawyersweekly.com.au/cle.

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