LegalSpan’s first User Group Meeting was held during the 41st Annual ACLEA conference in Washington, D.C. The first order of business was the installation of the first User Group President, Fran Wellington, Director of CLE for the Ohio State Bar Association. All those in attendance were able to benefit from the sharing of information with LegalSpan, each other and from the presentations made by Ray Ruppert and Susan Swope.

Ray, Director of CLE for the North Carolina Bar Association and Susan, Associate Director Technology for the Pennsylvania Bar Institute did an excellent job of presenting various strategies and experiences for developing successful online CLE. Ray stressed the importance of marketing, including branding online cle. North Carolina’s trademarked brand for online CLE is CyberCLE (http://www.legalspan.com/ncbar/onlinecle.asp) and their marketing campaign for CyberCLE won ACLEA’s Best Marketing Award (for more information regarding their award and campaign, please see the awards information included in the ACLEA conference materials handed out at the D.C. meeting). PBI’s branding of onlinecle.pbi.org (http://onlinecle.pbi.org) has also been successful for their marketing of online CLE . Both Susan and Ray agreed that even with extensive direct mail and email marketing, they find that people are still not aware of online CLE offerings. Although everyone struggles to get the word out about online CLE, their point was that a good marketing campaign is a major key to their success.

Susan discussed the success that PBI has had in offering a generic ethics course in the "off" (non-compliance deadline) months as a "loss leader" enticement to people to try online CLE. 3000 people have taken PBI's Stress Management for Lawyers under this campaign.

See Ray’s PowerPoint presentation for more topics touched on during his presentation.

Ray also touched on the success of his recently implemented online library of PDF documents - CLEStacks (http://www.legalspan.com/ncbar/e-pubs.asp). This library of digital documents was initially built from the manuscripts barrowed from retired online CLE seminars but has now grown to include over 150 manuscripts. LegalSpan's mechanism provides full text searching of the documents so users can easily find the resources they need. The online library functionality is available to any LegalSpan affiliate. Please contact Heather Eilers with LegalSpan to find out how to get this functionality implemented on your LegalSpan catalog.

LegalSpan is committed to facilitating the sharing of information and ideas throughout our affiliate network. To that end, we plan to hold User Group meetings in conjunction with the ACLEA Mid-Year and Annual Meetings and are in the process of developing a formal LegalSpan User group web site. This site, which should be completed in the next couple of weeks, will provide the infrastructure for you to communicate with each other, share ideas, documentation and marketing materials and will only be accessible to LegalSpan affiliates.

As always, please let us know if any additional ideas you may have as we get our user group up and running and don't hesitate to contact me at any time with question about the user group on anything else to do with your LegalSpan affiliation.

Quick Note from LegalSpan

Since the user group meeting, we have seen a renewed zeal in the area of marketing. It is great to see the message from the meeting being put into practice. One issue that has come up due to increased marketing is the use of links in emails and on web pages.

Links that are found in the address bar of the web browser when on any catalog page contain some extra information the system needs to keep its marbles together. When these copied links are accessed from web pages or emails outside of the LegalSpan system, it can cause the system to think a user is someone they’re not. To remedy the issue, we have created a way to acquire a safe link for use in the emails and on web pages. It is also possible now to get a block of fully formatted html code for each item that includes the title, credit info, screen cap, and link to access the item in the catalog. This can be particularly useful when creating emails.

This link and code block can be accessed by going to your LegalSpan Administrative site (http://admin.legalspan.com) and finding the item for which the link needs to be acquired. This can be done by going to the catalog tab and using the dropdown menus or by searching for the item directly. To the right is a column titled “Controls” that has various links for each of the seminars. The one to look for is the “Gen Link” link. Once clicked, a window will open that has a “Safe Link” highlighted toward the top of the page and a textbox with the html code toward the bottom. Also provided at the bottom are buttons to automatically copy the safe link or the html code to your clipboard.

Thank you for assisting us in this effort to use "safe links" on your websites and in emails sent to your customers.

If you have any questions or need help accessing and using these links, feel absolutely free to give Kevin Hodges (512-381-1566) a call. Good Luck in you marketing efforts!