Continuing legal education (CLE) provider Lawline.com has launched LearnLawline, the easiest way to search, learn, and share CLE. The short video clips harvested from their large database of CLE courses provide answers to as many as 30 questions per course.
And the information is available to everyone — for free!
Wikipedia of CLE meets the YouTube of law
Have a legal marketing question? You’ll probably find the answer among the 15 video clips from CLE course, Death of a Salesman: Ethical Concerns and Legal Marketing. Like, “what qualifies as “advertising” and what are the ethical rules that govern advertising?” A five-minute video provides the answer.
The video segments can be accessed by drilling down into the course and practice area categories or by simply entering a query in the search box.
It’s about learning not just earning
Online CLE providers have proliferated over the past couple of years. The business model and marketing plan are straightforward. Reduce overhead by producing online only programs and pass the savings along to attorneys by offering low-cost CLE. Marketing efforts generally focus on the cost savings.
Over the years, Lawline.com has grown while maintaining their high quality programming, competitive prices and engaging in strategic partnership, like the one with Solo Practice University. But with an inquisitive mind and burdened to innovate, David Schnurman, Lawline.com’s president is again pushing the envelope. He wants lawyers to learn, not just earn (credits).
E-Learning for lawyers
I went down to the Lawline.com campus (I was struck by the campus like learning environment during my participation in a social media CLE course there a year ago) to preview the new site and chat with marketing director, Jeff Reekers and David.
What brought about this groundbreaking development?
It has been in my head in one form or another for some time now. I am obsessed with organizing information to make it more accessible for others. I believe every course has at least 10 to 15 “golden nuggets” of information that is hard to find. Until LawlineLearn the only way to see them was to watch the entire program. Now you can go right to the golden nugget and watch that clip and hopefully get your question answered. I made it free for everyone because it just felt right. Today the power of education is making it more accessible not locking it behind a pay wall. MIT is a great example you can watch any class online for free but if you want to earn credit and get a diploma it will cost you $180,000.
How did you manage the herculean task of examining and classifying each segment?
Hard work and some good programming.
Your faculty must be thrilled with the increased exposure.
We are so excited to offer this opportunity to our faculty. They volunteer their time because they love to teach and to get more exposure. In addition to attorneys watching their courses it is now available to everyone for free. Most importantly, I think the biggest part of LearnLawline is all the videos are easily embeddable on outside websites. In addition, you can tweet the videos in one click and share it on Facebook, Twitter and other social media websites. In essence we are creating a social media platform for our faculty members to share their expertise.
What is your vision for LearnLawline?
We are in talks with other CLE providers to open up their content and put it on LearnLawline. We are also in partnership talks with law schools and others in the legal industry to bring them into the LearnLawline website. I believe this site will not only be a resource for attorneys, but for law students and the public as a whole.
Released in Beta, LearnLawline prompts, “What do you want to learn today?” Hop over and submit your question, and let them know what you think.
