Miscellaneous

New Site Offers Free Video ?Nuggets? of CLE

By Robert Ambrogi

At the ACLEA annual meeting last summer, I gave a plenary talk, “10 Ways Technology is Rewiring Lawyers’ Brains … and What it Means for CLE.” Several times during that talk, when I wanted examples of online CLE sites that were engaged in social media, that were transparent about their products and pricing, that understood the concept of delivering value, and that highlighted consumer feedback and ratings, I kept coming back to one provider, Lawline.com. Again last month, I wrote about this company when it became the first CLE provider to offer video courses via a mobile phone.

Now it has unveiled another feature that shows it to be a step ahead of the social media curve. This time, it has launched a completely free e-learning website for lawyers, Learn.Lawline.com.

Borrowing from the hundreds of hours of video content Lawline has created, the site breaks up these videos into mini lessons that answer specific questions. Rather than sit through an entire CLE course, you can spend just a few minutes watching the segment that speaks to the particular issue you’re interested in.

Perhaps you want a quick refresher on what constitutes an employee at will.  Or you want to hear about the jurisdictional issues in setting up an online business. Or maybe you want to review the qualifications for an H1-B visa. There are hundreds of these to choose from.

Of course, Lawline is a commercial enterprise, so it is not giving away all of every course. Rather, it has extracted from each course what it describes as the “golden nuggets” of information. Depending on the course, this can range from five short clips to more than 30. If at any point you decide that you want to purchase the full course, you can, of course, do that.

Each “nugget” includes social media tools that allow you to share or e-mail the clip or embed it in a web page or blog post. Also, each short video is shown on a page that includes the relevant slides from the course presentation.

“I made it free for everyone because it just felt right,” Lawline.com CEO David Schnurman said in an announcement of the new site. “Today, the power of education is making it more accessible not locking it behind a pay wall.”

I could not agree more.

Full post as published by Lawsites on March 16, 2011 (boomark / email).