Continuing Legal Education

CLEs, Con­tin­u­ing Legal Edu­ca­tion classes, are both a bane and a boon to lawyers, for the same reason—you’re out of the office. Maybe you’ll learn some­thing you want to know, maybe it’s manda­tory, but in any event, you’re out of the office.

It’s a bane—you have to check in, prob­a­bly, to see if anything’s on fire. And if it is, then you have to go back, or deal with it on breaks, or hus­tle back to the office. It can be a test of how impor­tant or orga­nized you are.

But it’s a boon, too. Because you’re out of your office. You don’t have to answer place­hold­ing inquiries from clients and other callers just try­ing to go down their list. You don’t have to work on another end­less report—it will still be there to work on while you’re gone. And in some states, there’s a test at the end—so you actu­ally have to pay some atten­tion, which makes your office less inclined to inter­rupt you.

There are non-legal things that you learn, or prior learning’s rein­forced, about being a lawyer and prac­tic­ing law at these things.

You can always tell the younger lawyers, the ones who are brand new to practice—they’re still wear­ing suits, or busi­ness casual. Maybe they had to go into the office, first, to assure the part­ner they work for that yes, they were using the firm’s money to spend six hours away from bill, bill, bill. Or maybe they still think that other lawyers give a flip what you look like at these things, aside from hav­ing taken a shower and brushed your teeth. It’s not uncom­mon for younger lawyers to treat these things as a slightly high-brow hook up scene. The older lawyers? We’re in jeans, baggy sweaters, or sweatshirts—whatever our default, week­end non-office casual means. A day out of high heels and panty­hose, or trousers snugged tight with a belt and some­thing other than clogs—what a boon.

Prac­tic­ing law is a lot like high school, espe­cially at CLE gath­er­ings. You run into peo­ple you don’t really like, but you have to deal with. You learn to be friendly, or at least polite and some­what inter­ested in how they’re doing. It’s net­work­ing, but it’s also re-establishing the grounds of civil­ity. And the top­ics of con­ver­sa­tion? It doesn’t really mat­ter. Lawyers talk—they get paid to. We can find some­thing to talk about if it’s in our pro­fes­sional interest—even if it’s just a mut­tered grum­ble to your neigh­bor at the back of the room at how bor­ing the class is, or how inaudi­ble the old coot of an instruc­tor is. It usu­ally ends in your exchang­ing busi­ness cards afterward—and then back in your car, when it’s over, you write down where you met them, what they look like, what they do for a liv­ing. Not that you’ll call them for lunch—but if your client needs some­one who does what they do, then even that ten­u­ous con­nec­tion is enough to get you in their door some­times. It’s quid pro quo at the clear­est, most trans­par­ent level—but we all agree that’s what it is, so there’s no tak­ing it per­son­ally when the inter­est is opportunistic.

That’s not to say lawyers aren’t also friends. They are, and at CLEs you’ll see cliques of lawyers who know each other whose group you’ll only grudg­ingly pen­e­trate if you’re an outsider—unless, of course, just like high school, you have some­thing they need. But for the most part, it’s a polite ‘hail-fellow-well-met” kind of polite jovi­al­ity. A few of my best friends are lawyers. But not most. We tend to slip too eas­ily into “law-talkin’ stuff,” as some non-lawyer friends are likely to have it. My friends who are lawyers have lives out­side of work—we com­mis­er­ate briefly in front of our spouses, but leave the pro­fes­sional con­sul­ta­tions and con­cerned inquiries for work hours, mostly—work is still work, even if it’s a plea­sure to dis­cuss it with some­one who not only under­stands in a gen­eral sense, but wishes you well.

CLEs are like high school in another way—there’s always a cer­tain amount of note-writing, note-passing, and atten­tion on things other than what’s being taught at the front of the room. Some of it’s bore­dom, some of it’s billing, and some of it is sheer worka­holism, billing needs aside. Most lawyers, lit­i­ga­tors at least, always bring other work. You can’t imag­ine how much time you waste at court wait­ing around for your case to be called. When you’ve been doing it more than two years, you could care less about the pro­ceed­ings in front of you—you have dis­cov­ery to draft, let­ters to write, records to review. Not in court, but at CLEs, where you can hide these things under the tables, and the seating’s so jam-packed that it’s impos­si­ble for the folks at the front of the room to pos­si­bly tell– everyone’s check­ing their phones and black­ber­ries, or using their lap­tops to type up let­ters or use the wi-fi. Just about the only things they’re not doing is mak­ing calls or dic­tat­ing right in the room. Even attor­neys have some sense of deco­rum. (Try not to be shocked.)

We might be billing while we’re pre­tend­ing to lis­ten, but at least we pretend—we don’t whis­per while the teacher’s talk­ing, and we only pass notes to our­selves, in the form of post-its on top of doc­u­ments, let­ters, and drafts to be dealt with by us or our assis­tant (if we’re so lucky to have one) when we get back to the office. (Unless, like the guy sit­ting in front of me as I type this, you bring a huge stack of med­ical records, when the sem­i­nar binder is only one inch thick. Yeah, buddy. Real sub­tle.)

CLEs are also like law school. You can get up, come and go to the bath­room or the cof­fee machine. It’s on your head, and in your dis­cre­tion, if you miss some­thing while you’re gone from the room. And there’s food. At least hot caf­feine and water—at the bet­ter places, soda and con­ti­nen­tal break­fast. At the best places, chicken and tuna sand­wiches, pasta salad, super­mar­ket bak­ery brown­ies. Lawyers may pre­tend to be gourmets, and hell, some of them are, but free food is free food, and it’s not a free lunch, not really. If you’re stuck in a con­fer­ence room on a rainy Fri­day for six hours lis­ten­ing to some dinosaur ram­ble on about cor­po­rate forms when you’re a lit­i­ga­tor, just because it’s required? The brown­ies help. The diet coke, too.

And the diet coke? Well, the lawyers read­ing this site know that’s a whole ‘nother story. You want to learn how to reduce a lawyer to tears?  Hide the aspartame-sweetened caf­feine.  That’s an edu­ca­tion all in itself.