Improve member education that is responsive to changing member
needs.
Every year, the State Bar continuing legal education departments
collaborate with State Bar members to provide substantive and practical
CLE. In addition to the traditional programs and publications that
members know and rely upon, the State Bar experimented in developing
alternative delivery mechanisms for CLE materials.
Traditional CLE programs and publications. CLE
Seminars collaborated with numerous State Bar sections, committees,
other legal organizations, and interdisciplinary professional groups to
produce more than 80 live seminars resulting in 420-plus program dates
and locations, and serving more than 13,000 members. The Appellate
Advocacy Workshop, produced in collaboration with the Appellate Practice
Section, received the Award of Outstanding Achievement from the
Association for Continuing Legal Education.
CLE Books continued its award-winning publications program, updating
more than 30 of its 50-plus books and issuing several new titles. The
year's new notable accomplishments include the comprehensive Wisconsin
Trial Practice, added to the Bar's civil litigation series; the
Wisconsin Guide to Citation, which explains the new public domain
citation format adopted by the Wisconsin Supreme Court; Wisconsin
Employment Law Codebook, added to the Bar's collection of selected
statutes and regulations on specific topics; and a paperback, Wisconsin
Law of Easements, with useful forms on disk.
New year brings hands-on technology training to Bar
Center. The Quarles & Brady LLP Technology Center, located
at the new Bar Center, became home to members and their support staff
seeking hands-on training in law office technology applications. The
technology-training curriculum grew out of the 1996 and 2000 technology
surveys in which 56 percent of respondents said that hands-on training
would help them in their practice. More than 15 program titles and 80
program dates have focused on Internet- and computer-assisted legal
research and other law office applications such as PowerPoint for
Litigators and effective use of Word in the law office.
The State Bar has partnered with the Law Librarians of Wisconsin,
which has been instrumental in designing and teaching the legal research
classes, and Westlaw, LOIS, and LEXIS to present individualized
instruction in each of those research tools.
Popular Probate Systems books developed into electronic forms
system. In exploring new ways to deliver products that increase
attorneys' efficiency, CLE Books introduced the Windows version of the
Probate Document Assembly System. The fully integrated practice system
software is a companion to the State Bar's top-selling Wisconsin Probate
System: Forms and Procedures Handbook. The probate software is a
complete document automation system that merges client data into forms
and correspondence for informal probate in Wisconsin. The software is on
CD-ROM, and is compatible with both Word and WordPerfect.
Wisconsin Lawyer
