What Exactly is West Legal Ed Center?
West Legal Ed Center is Thomson Reuters’ online continuing education program available to the legal community since 1979. The program was initially launched as a closed-circuit video system based in St. Paul, Minnesota. With the advent of the internet in the 1990s, WLEC could be viewed from anywhere in the United States, and began webcasting high-quality video seminars and allowing users to view programs on-demand. West LegalEdcenter still hosts webcasts and on-demand or downloadable content dating back to 2001 that are available for CLE credit .
Thomson Reuters acquired WC2 in 1999 and WLEC changed its name to West Legal Ed Center. For several years, it was referred to as West Knowledge Network (WKN) while the company was transitioning to digital broadcasting technology. As one of the first in the field, West Legal Ed Center was instrumental in helping set a precedent for lawyers being required to obtain CLE credits to maintain their licenses to guide clients through an increasingly complex legal environment.
Available Programs and Certifications
The courses and certifications offered by West Legal Ed Center cover a wide range of areas. The company reports it offers more than 1,000 hours of courses and seminars annually. Topics include ethics, litigation, ADR, intellectual property, antitrust/competition law, environmental, health care, employment, pensions, consumer/credit, municipal, telecom and privacy, just for starters. Whether you are looking to strengthen a skill you already have, brush up in a tangential area, or delve into a whole new area, there’s something for almost everyone.
Advantages of Continuous Legal Education
Benefits of Continuing Legal Education
Attorneys need to meet certain guidelines and requirements for continuing legal education (CLE) every year. If you are an attorney and practicing law, you know that this is a requirement in just about every state. In fact, some states have even more stringent requirements for CLE courses.
There are many options available to attorneys to fulfill the CLE requirements, but one of the best ways is to utilize West Legal Ed Center. This online platform has both live CLE courses and on-demand classes available for attorneys to view.
Keeping current with the law is important to your clients and your law firm. As an attorney, it is your responsibility to know the latest and most current news in law related to your area of practice, whether it is criminal law, civil law or family law. West Legal Ed Center delivers the courses directly to your office or home by aides, legal assistants, secretaries, attorneys or yourself.
One of the best things about the West Legal Ed Center is that you can have a conference room full of attorneys join the live webinars and everybody can ask questions and learn from each other as though you were attending the live CLE course in person. This is one of the most valuable features of the site that you will truly appreciate when you can get answers to your most difficult questions almost immediately.
West Legal Ed Center has webinars continuously throughout the day and night. No longer do you need to worry about CLE deadlines anxiously looking for courses at the last minute or missing out completely on the opportunity to earn credits towards your goal of completing that months CLE requirement.
In addition, I heard about the lawyers having difficulty getting their CLE credits for the AAM. If you missed the live conference, I am going to make the presentation available for you to watch as a private screening. The private screening will be broadcasted live September 18th at 12 noon EST and again on September 20th at 7:30 EST. You will earn 2 CLE credits simply by watching that presentation. You can also find the slides used during the presentation on the AAM website.
How to Access West Legal Ed Center
The West Legal Ed Center is available by subscription. Subscriptions are available on an annual basis or in multi-year packages. Below are the subscription plans available at time of publication:
The legal research library offers a 30-day free trial of its WestlawNext research service and access to West Legal Ed Center online seminars during that trial period. New users just have to register for a WestlawNext account to access the trial and benefit from its full features.
If you already have a WestlawNext account, you may not need to register for a West Legal Ed Center account, as the two platforms are already interlinked. If you have trouble with access, double-check that your subscription has not expired and the email tied to your account is valid.
Once registered, you will be taken to the West Legal Ed Center homepage. There, you can access all law courses, webinars and podcasts, both live and archived, by selecting the "Webcast Center" from the menu at the top of the page. You can also search within West Legal Ed Center separately from the application, similarly to how you would conduct a search in a WestlawNext account.
Testimony and Reviews
"West Legal Ed Center has been an invaluable resource in our continuing education efforts. My attorneys are no longer limited to what is offered internally. With the ability to take seminars online when it is convenient for them, attendance at educational events has increased significantly."
Attorney George W. Degroot, Nichols Liu
"The benefit of West Legal Ed Center is that our lawyers can satisfy their CLE needs from anywhere they have access to the Internet. It allows our lawyers to watch the programs whenever is convenient for them – walking the dog, working out, sitting by a pool . And the content covers everything – ethics, practice area updates, and very specialized and esoteric topics. There is something for everybody. Finally, the interface is easy to use, keeps track of what you watched and automatically provides certificates to my staff. I will never again go back to live CLE!"
Jamie Beth Torosian, Heller Ehrman LLP
"Being able to get CLE credit for watching West LegalEdcenter webinars has opened a whole new world for our attorneys and saved our firm a lot of money."
Matt Bentley, Allen, Dyer, Doppelt & Galacademos, P.A.
Comparing West Legal Ed Center to Its Competition
Unlike the offerings of our competitors in the area of legal education, West Legal Ed Center provides much more than just Continuing Legal Education (CLE). The West Legal Ed Center supports lawyers in professional development throughout their entire career, and does not leave subscribers behind as they move from CLE subjects into more advanced learning in their areas of specialized practice. While you may be comfortable with our legal research solutions, we know that the tools you need for research will be different from the tools you use for advanced, continuing education. This dynamic is what helps bring together our content from all of our publishers including West, Kluwer, Cheetah, Bender’s, and other LexisNexis® publishers.
In the pages that follow, we will compare West Legal Ed Center to a few of its competitors in the legal education space: Practical Law, Lawline, and Quimbee. We have reached out to our competitors to include their information in this document, but not everyone has responded. We will be adding to this document as responses come in.
Lawline:
Lawline offers a comprehensive library of CLE courses, including on-demand video content and downloadable materials. Course prices are comparable to individual West Legal Ed Center CLE courses, but Lawline also sells subscriptions. Currently, West Legal Ed Center offers subscribing members unlimited access to the CLE library.
Lawline Review
Though Lawline has a large number of legal education products, they seem to be less comprehensive than West Legal Ed Center. Their library includes some On-Demand CLE videos and educational content, but is narrowly focused on professional development and skill-building, rather than on a full range of education in substantive law. For those looking to purchase continuing legal education products, their pricing is comparable to purchasing individual CLE courses on West Legal Ed Center, but less than a West Legal Ed Center subscription. This might be beneficial for an attorney looking to comply with CLE requirements without paying for what amounts to subscription to an entire library of content.
Quimbee:
Quimbee is an online legal education site for current law students. Subscription is $249 per year with discounts when purchased in conjunction with your law school textbooks. Quimbee focused primarily on bar exam preparation, but do offer CLE content as well. Students seeking bar preparation will find law school outlines, practice questions, video lessons, video flashcards, and a case brief database. CLE content is much more limited, though it is expanding.
Practical Law:
Practical Law offers comprehensive legal education content, many of which are organized by Expert, Practical Law’s in-house experts, including forms, checklists, timelines and practice notes. Like Lawline, Practical Law offers course materials and content for those looking for CLE courses, as well as a subscription service for those looking for more in-depth legal education and practice resources. Their CLE offering is aptly-named Practical Law Continuing Legal Education Center, and is similar to West Legal Ed Center in format: on-demand audio and video courses.
Practical Law Review
Practical Law offers a large library of legal education products and a subscription service for those practicing law. Their CLE offering is comparable to West Legal Ed Center, although it is possible that the Practical Law content may be more helpful to attorneys familiar with the platform and Legal Tracker. Overall, subscribing to Practical Law will offer more benefit to seasoned practitioners than West Legal Ed Center.
And The Future of Online Legal Education
As intuitive as the user interface may be, the West Legal Ed Center is not a website you will find yourself browsing through, unprompted. But that does not mean they don’t know what you are looking for. They have long since moved past simple recommendation engines and experts. Now, they make it possible to view the exact content relevant to the search parameters you input. If you search "Oregon statutes," you’ll find Oregon’s statutes. If you search "ethics," you’ll find the latest ethics CLEs.
The future of online legal education hinges on the ability to not only induce a certain subject, but to grasp the interest of the user, find similar content, and recommend it without overloading the user with suggestions. They do this just by capturing basic elements of your search, replicating the process you might do manually.
What makes sites like West Legal Ed Center successful (aside from keeping up with trends) is that the creators know that the average legal professional is a busy individual. Someone who has little time to him or herself will have even less time to search endlessly for a course that meets their criteria. The legal industry has, thus, become one of innovators, who have rapid, responsive recommendations, platforms that better deliver complex information in a simplified manner.
West Legal Ed Center has jumped in front of this trend as well by offering feature descriptors visible right up front. In a search result , they indicate the learning objectives, the format of the content, the skill level of the course, the credit type, the jurisdiction, the presenter, and whether or not it includes a video. You can even filter by states and credit type (live or recorded).
These features demonstrate a larger trend towards tailored specificity for the legal industry. Webinars such as West Legal Ed Center, have mastered the know-how to appeal to specific segments of the legal industry. They know who is looking for what and can essentially tell them, "Here it is." It is the individual consumer that benefit most from this insight.
Court systems have also begun to adopt these tactics, providing quick links to court rules and statutes when you search, rather than playing an endless waiting game. This can reduce the amount of time lawyers spend on basic research and thus allows them to focus on substantive analysis.
As the legal industry continues to overcome obstacles, they will look towards innovation and web platforms such as West Legal Ed Center to guide their success. It’s a two-way street. West Legal Ed Center exemplifies the future of legal continuing education, both in its content and construction. As the industry grows and the technology codes/advances, the education has to do the same.