Lately I’ve been thinking about CLE programs.  I no longer am required to take them (thank goodness) but they were a regular feature in my life when I was practicing.  I’m only familiar with New York’s requirement, but I assume other states’ programs are not terribly dissimilar.  I’m sorry to say that I generally found CLE requirements to be a thundering waste of my time – not to mention the fees for classes that functioned as a waste of my firm’s money.  I realize there’s been a decades-long debate about this issue, but I’ll throw my hat in and speculate whether there’s anything that could be done to improve them. 

My first problem with CLE – and this I gather has always been the complaint – is that the classes were generally of no use to me in my practice.  I was a specialist; almost all of my time was spent on securities litigation, with the occasional sprinkling of corporate.  That meant I lived the latest case law and proposed legislation/rulemaking on a day to day basis.  The majority of CLE programs in the area were simply pitched at a level that was far too introductory for me – if I actually needed, say, an hourlong course on the latest Supreme Court decisions in the field, that would have been a flashing red light that I was committing malpractice on a day to day basis.

Aware of this, I sometimes selected CLE programs that were outside my field: electronic privacy, IP, employment, antitrust.  And these were interesting, and new to me – but they were also entirely irrelevant to my work.

My other problem with CLE – and this is perhaps a new complaint – was, frankly, the political bias.  I was a plaintiff-side litigator in a highly politicized area of law.  I found that, at least in my area,  CLE programs tended to consist mostly, if not entirely, of defense-side speakers (sometimes with a smattering of government).  As a result, I found most of the discussions to be heavily slanted in the defense’s favor, both in terms of their interpretation of existing law, and their recommendations and commentary.  This wasn’t always true, of course, but it was true enough on a regular basis to be frustrating.  The occasional panel with one plaintiff-side attorney was rarely enough to counter what was an overwhelmingly defense-side spin.  I used to fear that to the extent some lawyers found these programs novel, they were receiving a very distorted picture of the law – one that they would then carry through to their own practice.

I imagine there are a lot of entrenched interests in maintaining the current system, but I wonder if there might be some ways to make the CLE requirement more meaningful.

First, I’d propose a some option of self-certification, whereby attorneys with a certain number of years of experience, who attest that they specialize in a particular field, are able to fulfill the requirement by certifying that they have read/studied a specified amount recent legal developments in their area of practice – caselaw, new regulations, new publications and updates, etc. 

Second, I’d propose a balance requirement.  At least for fields where attorneys tend to specialize on one side of the “v,” any program featuring more than one speaker would be required to devote 50/50 time, or 60/40 time, or even 70/30 time, to each side.

I imagine that there are a zillion reasons why these proposals are impractical and unlikely to be adopted, and I know these issues have been discussed in various fora before, but it seems to me they can’t render the requirement any less useful than it is now. 

I’d be curious to know how others experience CLE.  Am I too harsh in my assessment?  Do others get more out of it than I did?