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.
Content
For content to be of high quality, it ought to come from professionals qualified to offer it. But you must also properly vet legal content, not just for spelling or grammatical errors but for legal accuracy, precision, or both. There may be subtle yet important difference in legal concepts, and it is important to handle them properly because a qualified professional will immediately spot the mistake and the courseware will lose credibility. For example, an intellectual property lawyer with global experience will immediately know whether a course has incorrectly cited “fair use” as “fair dealing.”
Though lawyers tend to be verbally oriented, there is no rule mandating that all legal education exclusively employ text. In fact, graphics and animated multimedia can be successfully utilized, for example to depict procedural processes or judicial appeal structures (see Figure 1). When done properly, graphics and animation can enliven a presentation and increase learning effectiveness. (Editor’s Note: In Figure 1, “CFI” is the Court of First Instance, with unlimited jurisdiction in both civil and criminal matters.)
Leading legal academics know this as well. If one attends lectures of presentation-savvy legal lecturers, one would witness stellar examples of how the inspired application of multimedia can transform lectures on complex and potentially dreary legal topics into captivating educational events.
The importance of restraint
However, graphics should be employed judiciously and professionally; the overuse of cartoonish imagery, audio, or animation can leave some learners with a feeling of being patronized. Avoid unwelcome clutter.
There is also no need to go overboard with expensive graphics and animation. Good legal courseware need not look like Hollywood’s latest science fiction blockbuster to be attractive, engaging, or effective. In a legal presentation, the appearance of a single word – if relevant and timed properly – can have far more impact than dozens of extraneous, immaterial animations that may, in fact, be needlessly distracting.
Legal learners are far more interested in substantive content than stylish graphics. Accordingly, the incorporation of expensive multimedia into one’s legal courseware is often neither necessary nor justifiable — in many cases it is a waste of money.
Proper use of multimedia – that is, animation, audio, and video – offers other challenges.
Synchronization
In offering online courseware, some providers offer copies of slides and audio but do not synchronize the audio with the slides. The potential problem is that information on slides may be critical to the correct comprehension of the materials. Learners may easily match the wrong audio bits with the wrong slides, thereby taking away the wrong information. This is potentially disastrous if legal authorities (for example, case law, regulations, or legislation) are involved, and as a result the learner associates the wrong authorities with the wrong concepts or principles. Ideally, a course developer should synchronize audio with accompanying slides and additionally offer copies of any reference materials.
Video
Many online legal courseware presentations are video recordings of live classroom sessions or of persons reading from scripts. Admittedly, shooting and posting a video online may consume fewer production resources than producing a quality online course with synchronized audio and graphics or animation. However, an online video course is not necessarily an effective or an interesting one.
The mere inclusion of video does not automatically improve a course’s pedagogical effectiveness. Neither does it automatically make a course more compelling, particularly if the presenter is simply reciting a script in a monotone delivery.
Legal learners’ expectations may change when they experience quality courseware that features high-quality animation and offers high levels of interactivity. For that matter, even when they simply start to delve though the videos available on YouTube, videos of boring law lectures may no longer be good enough.
However, superior legal e-Learning need not, and in most cases, should not, rely solely on videos of subject matter experts lecturing on a topic. Unless the lecturer is exceptionally compelling, videos of lectures often fail to engage learners on their own
A lecture video (if one is necessary) should tangibly contribute to, or at least not distract from, the actual content. For example, one could display the video in a small window while showing the content on a slide – or simply dispense with the visual portion of the video and only retain the audio.
Engagement
Unlike classroom lectures, where learners may not be able to do anything other than listen to the lecturer, there are abundant potential distractions for online legal learners.
Given that legal learners may take courses during lunch breaks, after office hours at the office, or at home, engaging learners is even more critical in online than classroom training. Developers can make their courseware engaging both by ensuring their courseware is highly interactive, and through the judicious application of audio, possibly some video or other multimedia.
Should developers choose to have subject matter experts, rather than professional narrators provide the audio voiceovers, developers will need to contend with variations among presenters. Some presenters will be clear, concise and compelling, while others may seem pedantic, condescending, or dreary. There are many lawyers whose intellectual fireworks are not matched by their oratory delivery. Some can quickly focus on the salient points, while others get mired with trivial minutiae.
Interestingly, a person’s legal designation is frequently no indication of his or her speaking or pedagogical aptitude. For example, in Hong Kong, barristers advocate at the highest levels of the local court system. More experienced barristers often take in fresh law school graduates as pupils for several months at a time, under a sort of apprenticeship scheme. A lay person might reasonably assume that since barristers argue legal points in public all day and manage relatively inexperienced pupils, they are automatically good instructors or exciting speakers. But this is not always true.
Court proceedings are rarely as interesting or dramatic as they are portrayed in movies or on television. In law school, advocacy instructors often caution students against excessive theatrics, and many judges frown upon courtroom histrionics. Because of considerable conditioning, many barristers who may be able to present brilliant legal arguments tend to do so in a relatively subdued manner. In other words, they aren’t exciting speakers. On the flip side, there are lawyers who rarely present arguments in court, yet are marvelous speakers.
While it is not always possible to make a boring presenter more interesting, it may be possible to mitigate the dreariness by judicious editing or by adding animation. (Though it must be said that poor editing can also dull an otherwise interesting presenter.)
Thus the developer’s challenge is to make boring presenters a bit more exciting while ensuring that the engaging ones remain interesting. At the same time, of course, the developer must make certain that the quality and depth of the content is not compromised.
Contrasts
The importance of detail in legal courseware cannot be overstressed.
Lawyers’ obsession with detail is partly due to the nature of legal work, where, for example, a case may hinge on the interpretation of a single word. This is partly a product of legal education where instructors can spend hours covering a single legal notion, and the inherent complexity of law, particularly in areas such as patent infringement or white-collar crime. Such cases are often very long, detailed, and multifaceted.
Legal professionals may mull over points that professionals in other areas may overlook. For instance, business executives may view a business merger in terms of commercial terms and sensibility. Lawyers, on the other hand, may additionally contemplate the regulatory, intellectual property rights, competition/anti-trust, employment, or environmental implications.
As lawyers will expect legal education to be substantive and comprehensive, developers should preferably err on the side of including additional details.
Attention span
At the same time, developers must keep their legal courseware from becoming excessively bloated.
Given the importance of detail in law, one would expect that lawyers have better than average attention spans. This is generally true. However, like all human beings, lawyers will tune out if a course is too boring.
One solution is to work with the subject matter expert (i.e. lawyer, legal academic, or expert) to distill the salient elements. Present the key points in as clear a manner as possible using multiple slides. Prune excessive details from the main presentation, and place them elsewhere, for example as associated reference materials.
This is not always as easy as it seems. Some subject matter experts may be used to speaking at length without presentation aids, or may produce content in a single contiguous, monolithic output. It therefore falls upon the developer to work with the subject matter expert to carve up this content mass and create courseware that is effective, substantive – and not boring.
Another solution is to add graphics and animation, but as noted earlier, developers need to employ graphics and other multimedia with some care.
Relevance
Law continually evolves as new ordinances and regulations are introduced, court cases are overturned, or new practice rules take effect.
The speed at which laws can change can be illustrated by the Hong Kong case of Ng Ka Ling which dealt with the right of abode in Hong Kong. (Ng Ka Ling v Director of Immigration (1999) 2 HKCFAR 4)
On January 29, 1999, Hong Kong’s highest court (The Court of Final Appeal) ruled that certain groups of Mainland Chinese had right of abode in Hong Kong. The decision in this case arose from three separate judicial review proceedings brought as test cases to assert the right of abode in Hong Kong of Chinese nationals born in the PRC (People’s Republic of China) to a parent who had acquired permanent resident status in Hong Kong after living in Hong Kong for a continuous period of seven years. (Readers who are interested in the details may wish to read Tom Clarke’s article cited in the References.)
A few months later, the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress issued an interpretation (on June 26, 1999) that effectively overturned the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal’s verdict. Had one produced a course on the issue of right of abode in Hong Kong in February 1999, the course would have been out of date within five months.
Because of frequent changes to law, legal textbooks, reference books, and classroom courses must be regularly revised. This means that legal courseware developers ought to keep abreast of new legal developments and alter or delete courseware where necessary. This will both ensure content accuracy and uphold their professional reputations.
Additionally, interest in various areas of laws can wane or wax depending on legislative, political, business, technological, or other developments. While telecommunications law was a hot subject years ago, today anti-monopoly law is of great interest in Asia in large part because of China’s recently introduced Anti-Monopoly Law. A developer should also be able to react to these changes by quickly making and implementing changes to the relevant courseware, or introducing new courseware.
Applicability
Developers must also be careful not to cut corners in the international application of training, for example by using experts in one jurisdiction to cover laws in another.
There are significant differences among jurisdictions, for instance:
- Property law practice in Hong Kong, which currently relies heavily on time-consuming conveyancing transactions, is radically different from the United States, which utilizes a title insurance scheme.
- In patent law, the notions of what constitutes patentable subject matter, “prior art,” or “novelty” differ significantly among American, Chinese, and European laws.
- Legal practices differ within countries. As an example, two out of six states in Australia have separate practice regimes for barristers and solicitors, where the other four states have what is referred to as a “fused” profession.
Accordingly, instructors familiar with the laws in one jurisdiction may be unqualified to instruct in other locations.
Instructors need to be familiar with and accommodate local jurisdictional realities. For example, unlike America, Mainland China has laws governing the use of one’s visage under portraiture laws, so instruction on Mainland Chinese trademark law should also cover the relevant portrait laws. American and European copyright regimes treat an author’s rights to his or her copyrighted works differently. An American instructor, unaware of these differences, might omit key concepts were he or she to apply American legal notions to teach the subjects of European Copyright or Chinese trademark law.
Conclusions
Developers creating quality e-Learning for international legal professionals need not blow their budgets on fancy animations, graphics, or video. Rather they should focus on ensuring that their courseware is relevant, substantive, and engaging. Courseware developers ought to consider the needs of their audience – legal professionals – and adapt their materials as well as the underlying systems powering their e-Learning offerings accordingly.
This, however, requires some effort, given the complexity of laws, problems in locating the right presenters or subject matter experts, producing interesting courseware, keeping abreast of legal developments and updating course materials as required.
(NOTE: None of the above constitutes, or should be seen to constitute, legal advice. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective owners.)
References
Tetley, William. “Mixed jurisdictions: common law vs civil law (codified and uncodified),” available at http://www.unidroit.org/english/publications/review/articles/1999-3.htm (visited Feb. 20, 2009)
Community Legal Information Centre, “Making a business contract in Mainland China,” available at http://www.hkclic.org/en/topics/businessAndCommerce/setting_up_business_in_Mainland_China/making_business_contract_in_china/index.shtml (visited Feb. 20, 2009)
Clarke, Tom. “Ng Ka Ling V Director of Immigration; Tsui Kuen Nang V Director of Immigration; Director of Immigration V Cheung Lai Wah: One Basic Law, Two Interpretations.” Melbourne University Law Review [1999] MULR 29
