For any lawyers out there that listen to Pink Floyd, they have been given a bum steer.

While the great English band made their name by warbling about needing no education, that statement is far from true for lawyers.

Every year, lawyers throughout Australia need to earn a minimum amount of CLE points (or Continuing Professional Development (CPD) points in some states, such as Queensland), in order to continue to practise law.

With CLE courses available in everything from conveyancing to case management, how do service providers keep the content of courses fresh, interesting and relevant?

“We are the peak professional body and the content for our courses comes from practitioners, which is not always the case with our competitors,” says Noela L’Estrange, the CEO of the Queensland Law Society (QLS), a body that has around 11,000 members. “We actually have a learning and development strategy… and that is the platform on which all our offerings are made.

“We are catering for the development of professionals from the time they are admitted through to when they are very senior practitioners. Partners can tell war stories to young lawyers, so we are offering the collegiality of sharing the information from the practice base.”

The QLS has the highest proportion of members from rural and regional backgrounds of all the state and territory law societies, with around one third of its members from outside of Brisbane.

That means, when developing CPD programs, it needs to make its services available to lawyers in rural and regional areas.

The QLS has 14 video conference facilities scattered throughout the state that are available to members of its affiliated regional law societies. Mackay, Rockhampton, Cairns and Mount Isa are four areas that offer QLS members the chance to access CPD courses via such facilities.

New world order

Two of the biggest changes to the legal profession over the past five years have been the adoption of new technologies and social media and the globalisation of Australia’s legal market.

Such changes have expanded the choice for consumers with regard to how they access legal advice and who they choose to provide that service. It has also provided lawyers with a greater choice with regard to how they complete their annual CLE requirements.

“There is no question that changes in technology and the way lawyers utilise technology is forging major change to the whole area of continuing education and professional development,” says Neville Carter, the group managing director and principal at the College of Law (COL). “The challenge of so-called online CLE – by which most people mean podcasts – started to hit four or five years ago, and I think it is fair to say the providers have shown an uneven approach in responding to it,” adds Carter.

He has overseen the rollout of digital technology at the COL and the organisation can now boast that around 35 per cent of its CLE courses are available through online technologies of various kinds, and this is a figure that is only growing.

Carter believes that to remain relevant today CLE providers need to embrace new technology or face the consequences.

“I would not say we are up to date [with technology], no one is up to date,” he says. “The whole field of CLE is lagging behind the sorts of models that the new technologies should be enabling and we need to address that and all the other providers need to do so as well.”

Carter believes that, with lawyers utilising new technology much more readily, to remain relevant CLE courses must also be open to using new and innovative ways to transmit information.

“By some combination of those new technologies there will be a new style of CLE program more in keeping with the way the new generation of lawyers are used to receiving and giving their information than today’s programs offer,” he says.

“That will be the dominant change.”

Touchy subjects

The legal profession has faced the external forces of globalisation and new technology with differing degrees of alacrity, but its biggest internal challenges remain promoting diversity and reducing the high levels of depression among lawyers.

CLE programs are now starting to tackle the difficult area of depression.

“We have made a very specific effort over the last 18 months to deliver in Brisbane and major regional areas what we call ‘resilience sessions’,” says L’Estrange when talking about CPD course content at the QLS.

These sessions involve collaboration with LawCare, a member assistance program that provides free, confidential and voluntary counselling services to QLS members, their immediate family and legal support staff.

The QLS has also incorporated the theme of “resilience” into CLE courses. Identifying the symptoms of depression in the workplace and assessing the health of your firm have been components of recent courses offered by the QLS as part of its CPD program.

“We will talk about how you can develop resilience and we will continue these programs and we will roll them out through our quite extensive regional programs,” says L’Estrange.

The COL has also run with the theme of resilience.

It has teamed up with a number of large law firms to create the Resilience@Law initiative to raise awareness and understanding about stress, depression and anxiety throughout the legal profession.

Despite depression becoming an increasingly important issue that needs to be addressed by law firms and legal entities such as the COL, Carter says it can prove challenging to incorporate such themes into CLE courses.

“I think it is more difficult to translate that sort of subject matter into CLE programs,” says Carter. “Issues in practice such as depression, ethics, these sorts of soft skill areas, are very hard to promote through CLE courses,” he says, adding that while Carter likes the College to provide courses on ethics “it is often not met with [high levels of] registrations”.

Carter thinks that such issues are better handled in-house, where specific programs can be provided that take into consideration the particular culture at law firms or within in-house legal departments.

“In my view, subject matter like responding to depression in the workplace is a sensitive issue and can’t be managed by amateurs,” says Carter. “It can’t be done large scale and can’t be done on a fast treatment basis.

“It is better to be structured, thought through and brought into internal workplace programs rather than offered willy-nilly at large.”

According to the COL, when it comes to CLE programs, lawyers are attracted to courses that offer practical tips on how they can be better lawyers and develop case management skills.

“CLE, in the minds of practising lawyers, is about up-to-date, technical, how-to-do-it information in their field of work,” says Carter. “Lawyers look to our CLE program primarily as a resource for up-to-date information about what’s happening with the practice of law and to provide an understanding about new legislation in relevant practice areas.

“Courses that cover property law, personal injury, wills and estates and employment law are what many practitioners would look to the College for.”