Larry Bodine Law Marketing Blog

From Law360:  As the demand for continuing legal education grows, a standoff is brewing between law firms and course providers that want credit for business development training and the regulators who maintain that the aim of CLE is not to churn out rainmakers.

For most attorneys, taking a certain number of hours of CLE classes every year is a fact of life, an unavoidable element of maintaining a license to practice law. Luckily, CLE comes in many venues and, nowadays, different types of media.

But with respect to the content of those classes, there is one area that CLE regulators have yet to embrace: the business side of running a law firm — including marketing, rainmaking and client development.

As the legal business changes, a growing contingent of CLE providers and law firms are calling for state bar associations to recognize the need for these skills by allowing business development courses to come under the umbrella of CLE accreditation.

In October two heavyweights of the CLE industry — the American Law Institute-American Bar Association Continuing Professional Education partnership and the Association for Continuing Legal Education — got to work drafting a model rule they hope states will adopt to do just that.

But that's easier said than done. On the other side of the CLE industry is a patchwork of regulators — made up of state supreme court commissions and bar associations — that decide on a case-by-case basis what programs qualify for CLE credit.

Providers are free to offer courses without getting them certified, and some do, but that tends to affect attendance levels, they said.

Each of the 49 U.S. jurisdictions that mandate CLE has a different standard for the types of nonsubstantive law classes it approves. About two-thirds give credit for law practice management courses, Belasco estimated. Almost all will allow some marketing content if it comes in an ethics course, providers said.

“It's how strictly or how broadly a jurisdiction would define CLE,” said Jill McCall, director of the ABA Center for Continuing Legal Education, which runs about 300 CLE programs annually. “And that's the fun part: Everybody has different rules.”

For more on this story, please see http://www.law360.com/topnews/articles/208530