Despite the current economic gloom, today’s world is still fast changing. Therefore, it is no surprise that professionals must continue to constantly update themselves.
Though some professionals choose to keep current voluntarily, others need do so to retain their professional qualifications. For example, legal professionals in Australia, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong and 46 jurisdictions of the United States, have annual mandatory continuing professional development obligations.
In addition, many lawyers are looking to broaden their legal skills bases. This enables them to, among other things, seek new opportunities, adapt to their firms’ or clients’ demands, or maintain their jobs.
While legal professionals have traditionally gone to seminars, classes, or conferences for their continuing professional development or other legal training, an increasing number are turning to online e-Learning because:
- They do not have the time to attend seminars, conferences or classes,
- Their firms have cut their travel and education allowances, or
- They have discovered that online e-Learning can be an economical and convenient alternative to classroom-based training.
Creating online learning for an international legal professional audience can be a daunting task. The designer must deal with potentially diverse backgrounds and expectations of learners, the technological challenges, and the complexity of the subject matter (particularly where highly technical content is involved).
Nevertheless, there is no secret to the successful creation of engaging, high quality online training for lawyers or other specialized professional groups. One starts with quality content and transforms it into an engaging presentation. One adds graphics, video, animation, and reference materials that tangibly contribute to pedagogical effectiveness. At the same time, one must resist the temptation to add unnecessary clutter. Finally, one must include a measure of quality control to ensure both relevance and accuracy, while keeping the strengths, expectations and limitations of the intended audience firmly in mind.
Creating e-Learning for lawyers
As with all online training, e-Learning courseware for legal professionals should be:
- Relevant,
- Of high quality,
- Engaging, and
- In line with learners’ expectations.
Admittedly, this is easier said than done; here’s why.
Legal variation
In creating courseware for legal professional learners, developers should not assume that lawyers are a homogenous professional group (or that all learners of legal courseware even have legal backgrounds).
Legal professionals vary considerably in their areas of expertise, technical, and legal backgrounds. National legal systems can vary significantly. Common Law systems such as those found in the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Australia, Singapore, and Canada fundamentally differ from those found in Civil Law jurisdictions such as Germany and Japan. They even differ from legal systems derived from the Common Law such as the United States, or places such as Sri Lanka, Scotland, South Africa, Louisiana, and Québec where mixtures of Civil and Common Law systems are in force. (See the article by William Tetley, in the References.)
Conceptual chasms
Legal concepts and practices vary among jurisdictions. Practices or concepts common in one jurisdiction may be completely alien in another, even among ostensibly compatible or similar jurisdictions.
For example,
- The notion of a “Covenant Not to Sue,” which is employed in the United States, and, to a lesser extent, in Australia, in environmental and information technology (IT) law is utterly foreign to many British lawyers.
- The weight and importance of legal authorities
also varies among jurisdictions – for instance,
- South African case law has less impact in Singapore than local (that is, Singapore) case law,
- With respect to legal systems worldwide, case law, in general, carries far less weight in Civil Law than in Common Law jurisdictions.
- “Consideration” is a necessary element in a binding contract under Common Law contract law (along with “offer” and “acceptance”), but Mainland Chinese contract law does not have a specific requirement for “consideration” before a contract becomes legally binding. (See the Community Legal Information Centre article in the References.)
Geographic gaps
Among lawyers, there can be profound dissimilarities by practice area and geography:
- Legal professionals may employ different jargon or use the same word differently depending on their area of practice. For instance, Canadian criminal lawyers and American patent attorneys apply the word “prosecute” differently. Likewise, the term “moral rights” means different things to intellectual property and human rights lawyers.
- American lawyers employ the phrase “attorney client confidentiality” when referring to the notion that communications between a client and his or her attorney must be protected and kept confidential, or not disclosed without the client’s permission. Lawyers in Common Law jurisdictions, such as Hong Kong or Australia, might refer to this as “legal professional privilege.” (It should be noted there are subtle differences between “Attorney client confidentiality” and “Legal professional privilege.” There also may be some slight differences between jurisdictions in terms of implementation and scope of coverage.)
Many e-Learning content developers either are unaware of or fail to consider the complexity and extent of these differences. In extreme cases, students might end up heading down the wrong learning paths because of incorrect assumptions, missing background information, or both.
Restrictions as to the legal application, jurisdiction, or area of law should be plainly apparent to learners. Courseware may need to:
- Incorporate extensive background information or provide this in introductory training, or
- Make background prerequisites and assumptions clear to the legal professional student.
Technical limitations
Developers of legal online training should further appreciate that a wide gamut exists among legal professionals with respect to comfort and competence with technology (particularly IT) and technical concepts, legal or otherwise. This variation is complex, and developers should be mindful of this.
Technology is increasingly finding its way into many legal practice areas, and many lawyers, who are studying to familiarize themselves with different practice areas, may be unfamiliar with the relevant technological or legal concepts. Legal professionals studying international patent infringement as it applies to biotechnology, for instance, may require some introduction both to biotechnology and the intricacies of infringement analysis, which can be very different depending on the jurisdictions involved. This may require multiple subject matter experts for the technical as well as the legal aspects.
The decision as to whether to include technical materials as part of a legal course, and the extent of such inclusion, is discretionary, though it may be possible to mix short, simplified technical explanations with complex legal ones. For instance, a course covering developments in the criminal treatment of unlawful online access, in particular unauthorized zone transfers in an Internet environment, can combine short, (relatively) non-technical explanations of zone transfers with detailed legal discussions of unauthorized online access.
Knowing IT
As for IT knowledge, developers should resist making sweeping generalizations among legal professionals. Though younger lawyers generally tend to be more technology-savvy and more at ease with IT than older ones, there are many older lawyers who are entirely comfortable with the latest Blackberries, Palms, or iPhones, yet can be completely befuddled by Facebook or even by their own firms’ e-mail systems. Law firms may also vary in their adoption of technology.
This has several potential implications for developers and providers:
- Courseware covering technological areas may need to include non-technical explanations of relatively rudimentary technologies and concepts. For instance a developer creating a comprehensive program on electronic discovery that includes modules on digital forensics might want to explain how data is stored on a disk drive. Courses on telecommunications law may need explanations of, for example, the operation of mobile telecommunications services.
- Some learners may require training on how to take an online course, and should be able to easily locate the relevant instructions.
- Learners may not view courseware on the latest computer platforms. Many law firms in Asia, for instance, still use computers that run older operating systems such as Windows 98. Thus, course providers may need to devise strategies and policies to deal with situations where, for example, technical considerations preclude the proper or intended operation of their courseware.
- Multilingual support, both at the content level and the user interface, may be necessary if foreign terms form a critical integral content element, or if a significant number of learners prefer training in a foreign language.
- Learners may access online courseware from devices other than computers. Given that many legal professionals working in large urban areas have access both to Internet-capable mobile handsets and to high-speed 3G mobile or Wi-Fi networks, it is quite likely some will attempt to run even the most highly animated, highly interactive e-Learning courseware on their mobile devices. As a result, courseware or graphics may need to be redesigned to accommodate such devices and their associated networks.
Legal professionals encountering technical problems may be unable to offer proper technical explanations or implement technological remedies (for example, downloading and installing software patches). Therefore developers may need to offer learners several options to access materials.
In addition, developers and providers may need to consider government policies or regulations relating to Web accessibility, particularly for people with disabilities, for the specific markets they service. Some jurisdictions that have promulgated guidelines and standards for Web access include Canada (under its “Common Look and Feel Standards for the Internet” available at http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/clf-nsi/index-eng.asp ), France (refer to “Circulaire du 7 Octobre 1999 relative aux sites internet des services et des établissements publics de l'Etat” available at http://www.admi.net/jo/19991012/PRMX9903708C.html ), New Zealand (Refer to the New Zealand Government’s “Web Standards and Recommendations v1.0” available at http://www.e.govt.nz/standards/web-guidelines/http://plone.e.govt.nz/standards/web-standards ), and Germany (under its “Barrierefreie Informationstechnik-Verordnung” available at http://www.admi.net/jo/19991012/PRMX9903708C.html ). In the United States, Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act in the United States applies to all Federal agencies when they develop, procure, maintain, or use electronic and information technology and requires that Federal agencies ensure that this technology is accessible to employees and members of the public with disabilities to the extent it does not pose an "undue burden." (Refer to the publication “Proposed Access Standards for Electronic and Information Technology: An Overview” available at http://www.access-board.gov/sec508/overview.htm)
User interface: Website design
Ideally, legal learners should feel at ease not only in using and navigating through, but also in locating training materials. Unfortunately, the design of the Website and the overall user interface (in addition to the aforementioned multilingual support and Web accessibility requirements) is sometimes overlooked.
While the more technologically-savvy legal professionals might be willing to explore a Website, the more technophobic ones tend to be less patient and demand quick access to courseware, and therefore need instructions that are clear, simple and non-threatening. Lawyers often create large legal documents but don’t necessarily like plowing through lengthy technical instructions. Therefore, should extensive technical directions be necessary, these instructions should not appear intimidating.
Searching for search
Some developers and providers place great reliance on the search functions of their learning management, database, or other underlying systems to solve their users’ courseware location concerns.
Unfortunately, many of today’s lawyers have become adept at using online Internet search engines. They tend to expect, or at least desire, Google-like search functionality — and will not hesitate to make their complaints known, often quite vocally, when such functionality is not available.
Despite their complaints, most lawyers could probably muddle
through most online search facilities. Any lawyer, who has tried searching for
information on a subscription database such as Lexis or Westlaw, should be
familiar with relatively unfriendly (in comparison to Google, Yahoo!, Ask.com,
or other online search engines) Boolean or proprietary search terms. This
applies to other free legal databases such as WorldLii ,BaiLii, CanLii, AustLii
or HKLii, or government databases such as those provided by the Hong Kong
Judiciary, or the
Nevertheless, this should not stop developers and providers from devoting some effort to making life a bit easier for their learners.
The problem of catalog navigation (i.e. the location of courseware) can be somewhat mitigated by:
- Grouping content by category, but this is potentially tricky. Classifying some courses is straightforward. For example, a course on “How to apply for a trademark in France” would fall under the category of “intellectual property.” But classification gets tricky with courseware covering multiple legal disciplines. For example, a course on the “international moral implications of patent law” could be classified under conflicts of laws (or “international law”), under intellectual property, or under human rights. Furthermore, as noted earlier, lawyers in different jurisdictions may employ different terms for the same legal concepts – or the same legal term for different concepts.
- Including extensive explanations of how to find courses — or even short training presentations or videos — that are clear, concise, and expunged of unnecessary techno-babble.
- Providing site designs and user interfaces that make location of courses, or at least of some courses, quick and easy.
All this requires compromises that, by their nature, will leave some unhappy. Nevertheless, legal courseware developers and providers can ensure that the bulk of their students are comfortable with both the training materials and the site. This may necessitate some additional design and programming effort, and possibly some focus group testing. But ensuring students’ comfort, no matter what their technical background and competency, is ultimately worth it.
