Why Give Away Your Expertise To Enrich CLE Providers When You Can Earn Money To Put On A CLE Yourself?

My own litmus test for accepting a speaking opportunity of any kind is “If they get paid, I get paid.”

No lawyer would ever draft a complicated special-needs trust for a client for free, or offer a complimentary, two-hour consult on compliance with immigration law to a small business owner. And rightly so. After all, a lawyer’s time and advice are his stock in trade. Yet many of these same lawyers don’t think twice about giving away their time, advice and valuable substantive expertise for free to continuing legal education (CLE) providers who profit off lawyers’ free labor.

Sadly, most lawyers (myself included until recently) have been duped into believing that the prestige and “exposure” gained from the “privilege” of participating on the provider’s platform will yield business and other lucrative opportunities down the line. So let’s debunk that whopper, pronto.

Speaking at a CLE program does not, I repeat DOES NOT lead to referrals or clients. Think about it. For starters, CLE programs are attended by lawyers and not potential clients who might actually hire you. So right from the get-go, the “exposure” that CLE providers promise is already severely limited.

Nor are you likely to gain referrals from lawyers either. That’s because lawyers take CLE for one of two reasons. Either they’re forced to do so to satisfy mandatory CLE requirements — which means that they select programs based on cost, schedule or vendor without any attention to content. Or, more likely, they want to learn a new practice area so that they can handle the cases themselves — which means that they won’t be sending you referrals. Either way, the CLE provider gets paid for the course, and you get… nothing.

Now, it’s true that some CLE providers are non-profits and other CLE programs — often those sponsored by vendors — are free. Although if you participate in one of these programs, you’d still be giving away your expertise — but it’s more akin to providing a pro bono service to a needy client than working for free for one unwilling to pay. My own litmus test for accepting a speaking opportunity of any kind is “If they get paid, I get paid.”

Meaning that if my participation enables a provider to turn a profit, I expect a piece of it. Not the full price per se, but at a minimum, a 50-50 split which seems to be the minimum share for online teaching platforms like Udemy.

Moreover, lawyers often don’t realize that when they provide CLE for free, they’re not just giving away time and expertise, but also money. And I don’t simply mean lost opportunity costs, but also money that you’d otherwise earn by packaging expertise into a CLE program and selling it on your own.

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A number of attorneys have created their own self-sponsored bootcamps that are priced between $999 and $2800 for intensive programs. Others may offer shorter programs or annual updates.

In this day and age, lawyers no longer have to depend upon middle men to produce and promote their content. With social media and online payment systems and platforms for offering online content, lawyers take their work directly to the other lawyers and reap the concomitant benefits, and cut out the costly CLE middlemen entirely.

Many lawyers assume that they won’t earn much revenue from providing their own CLE because there’s so much available that’s low cost or free. But at least one data point suggests otherwise. One online course platform, Udemy, reports that its instructors earn an average of $8000 per course. Granted, that’s not a fortune, but it still covers a few months of rent and in any event, it’s certainly better than losing 20 hours of billables otherwise wasted on preparing and traveling to a free CLE. Moreover, many Udemy courses sell to the general public for $15 or $20 whereas, as I’ve already mentioned, a lawyer can command a much higher admission fee when selling CLE.

At the end of the day, you may simply decide that creating and selling your own CLE doesn’t pass your cost-benefit test. Fair enough. But at the same time, you should evaluate your participation in free CLEs under a similarly rigorous analysis — because you’ll find that the only one who benefits when give you give away your expertise is the for-profit company collecting admission. It certainly isn’t you.

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