News on the e-Discovery Team’s Online Training Program

The California Bar Association has just approved the e-Discovery Team’s Online Training Program. After a final interview on Friday, they decided to award the full 20 hours of CLE accreditation requested. The Florida Bar had already approved and awarded 20 hours of CLE credit. Next we expect to hear from Texas, who has never before considered an online program like this. Still, we are optimistic that our program will be approved there too, but for less CLE credits. Next, we will move on to apply with the NY Bar and other large states. Bottom line, this should make it easier for students to cost-justify the upgrades to attend the full program. CLE credits are an important consideration for some firms to subsidize a student’s tuition.

We already have over 115 students registered for Level One (the free part) and it’s growing fast. Not only that, we’ve got some of the top instructors in the world lined up to back me up on the interactive training. That is available for students who upgrade to Level Three. There you not only get access to the whole course (Level Two), but you interact by email with a leading expert about the course and the homework assignments at the end of each of the 61 modules. This homework gives you research challenges, questions, supplemental reading, and creative exercises. You email your answers and the expert responds. You can also put questions that you may have to your assigned professor. This is an incredible opportunity for students for real-world guidance. This kind of creative interactivity is key to online learning.

Go here to register for the free program and see what the homework and exercises are like. They are found at the bottom of each of the 61 modules. This Level One registration costs nothing and just takes 60 seconds (we fixed a few bugs in that process just yesterday and are otherwise continuing to upgrade our systems). It opens up the first quarter of the program for free, which is all explained in detail at e-DiscoveryTeamTraining.com. Better do it soon, because we are not sure how much longer we are going to open up a full 15 modules for free. We are thinking of limiting that somewhat; maybe just the first five? Would love to hear your thoughts about that or anything else having to do with electronic discovery law education. Email me or leave a comment below and look for more announcements soon about this course.

Final note, if you are an e-discovery vendor who cares about legal education, a vendor with a product that does better with a well-informed consumer, then you should look into our Vendor Education participation program. We have made it possible for you to contribute content, to participate and be a part of the world’s first online e-discovery law education program. Many vendors are working on this now. Look for announcements about their new participatory content soon. Recall the movie Social Network and the story of Facebook. Being there first is huge in the online world. This is real and it’s happening now. You do not want to be left behind. We do not have any deadlines for applications, but the world is spinning fast. The need for competent, trained, professionals in e-discovery is critical and growing at an exponential rate.