Sorry I haven’t posted for a few days.
Anyway, one of my goals is to help attorneys and other legal professionals understand how the world of not-for-profit CLE works. I thought one thing I might explain is how an idea becomes a program, at least when I am responsible for creating one. This will take a bit of time to explain, so I will do so in several posts over the next few days.
The first step is the idea. An idea comes to me in a variety of ways.
- Our director of curriculum assigns it to me (along with a bunch of other seminars or as an individual topic.) Our director of curriculum manages the balancing of our courses and what the different teams are doing. He is responsible for looking over what we have done in the past, deciding what we should repeat, etc. Since we do hundreds of courses a year, it is a lot of work.
- My own research. I get ideas from various places, I read legal and other news a lot, and of course I am very into technology, so I often think of ideas involving law and technology.
- Someone outside my organization comes to me with an idea. Most frequently that someone is an attorney, but he or she may also be a professional of some other kind. I have gotten calls and emails from professors, psychologists, doctors, detectives, FBI, CIA and Secret Service, Accountants (forensic and otherwise,) electronic discovery experts, other technology experts. One of the most interesting experts I encountered was a retired FBI polygraph expert. He had been involved in Watergate and numerous other important cases. We created a course on conducting and using polygraphs together. Anyway, you name it, people want to speak for us. I imagine larger organizations such as the ABA get approached even more than do attorneys at my company. There are definite benefits to speaking for a CLE organization in terms of getting your name out in the legal world.
- Another staff member comes to me with an idea. I get ideas from my program managers (both of whom happen to be new attorneys,) customer service, assistants, you name it. The folks on the front line, especially customer service and registrars are in a good position to let me know what attorneys are asking for in terms of courses or books.
- A friend comes to me with an idea. Since I am an attorney, I guess it isn’t too much of a surprise that I have friends who are attorneys. Sometimes a friend will turn to me and say, “hey, we are getting a lot of cases on x. You should do a course.” And sometimes I do.
- Sometimes I get ideas from random places. Once I decided to do a seminar based on a conversation two actors had on the show sex in the city (prenups as it happened.) Other times a random news story on local news or cnn.com will catch my attention.
Next I have to decide, who, how, when. To decide these things I have to look at a couple of issues.
I’ll address that soon. If you happen to have an idea for a course, feel free to drop me a line. My email address is jnfere(at)gmail.com.
