What's The Point of CLE? Let's Talk About It!

What you learn in law school is not preserved in amber from the date you receive your J.D. That's what CLE is for!

Mandatory Continuing Legal Education is how the profession acknowledges that the law does not stand still. What you learn in law school is not preserved in amber from the date you receive your J.D. CLE reconciles the facts that the practice of law is both rapidly evolving and self-regulating. (CLE is also the thing that nobody seems to mention during law school — students might be surprised to learn that the pie-eating contest of legal education stretches out indefinitely before them.)

The advent of mandatory CLE inevitably led the growth of an industry to provide it. As requirements for becoming a CLE provider have become less stringent, technological advances have revolutionized how lawyers can access information about educational opportunities. Thus the explosive growth of competing CLE providers, offering a bewildering variety of choices in terms of subject matter, format, price, and quality. If you are Googling around to try to figure how to meet your annual (or biennial) requirements, expect to be confronted by a vast but fairly random and haphazard set of options. The information overload of the CLE seeker creates a “search cost” issue — how much time, energy, and money are you willing to spend in researching your options?

We are looking to the ATL audience to help us get an empirical grip on the CLE market. How do attorneys — especially those whose employers aren’t providing free CLE — find and use CLE programs? How do you weigh the price against the relevance or interest of a CLE program? Out of expediency, do you find yourself taking courses that are unrelated to your practice? Please share your experiences and insights by taking our brief CLE survey here. Thank you!