Speaking today & tomorrow: NIBA and LSBA re technology

Today I'll be speaking to the National Investment Banker's Association, doing a quick technology tips presentation (slides viewable here).

Tomorrow, I'll be speaking at the Louisiana State Bar Association's Solo & Small Firm Conference. I'll be doing an early morning session on Little Big Firm (or how being small can be an advantage if you make smart use of technology). Then in the afternoon I'll do a 90 Tech Tips in 90 minutes presentation with Natalie Kelly, Tom O'Connor, Mike Adams and Craig Bayer.

My crazy idea for how to improve continuing legal education

I have a crazy idea.

What if continuing legal education programs took advantage of what we now know about the human brain? Our education system wasn't designed to make learning fun or easy; it was designed to make us obedient factory-workers. CLE programs were developed more recently, but they seem to have copied and pasted from the "obedient factory-worker model."

So, say that we were going to re-imagine CLE programs to make them "brain-friendly." How would we do that? Are there any good books that can help us make the shift? Yes, turns out there is an excellent book: Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School, written by John Medina, a molecular biologist with a lifelong interest in how brain science might improve the way we teach our children and the way we work.

I recommend that you read the book from cover to cover, but for now I'm going to focus on three key "rules" that would help folks who put on CLE programs. It could also help the folks who create accreditation rules. For sure, it could help the people who attend CLE programs.

Rule #1: We don't pay attention to boring things.

If you want people's attention you have to earn it, and then you have to keep earning it. Most speakers act as though they're entitled to the audience's attention simply because they're up on a riser behind a wooden podium. Engaging an audience takes some practice, but it helps to know what techniques work best and why.

• Emotion - if you can engage an audience's emotions you'll have a much better chance of keeping their attention. Emotions can be triggered by personal things, but some of the universal triggers are: fear, sex, and familiar things. Emotions are more easily conveyed with pictures and interesting stories than with bullet points, but we'll talk about that in a bit.

• Meaning - an audience needs a framework for the new information, and they need to know how each piece of information fits into that framework. So, they will pay attention if they're given a roadmap of what's coming, and then continual signals of where you are in that map as you speak. Give them the gist of a topic first to show why it matters, and then you can offer some details. If you give too much detail without clearly explaining why it matters you'll lose the audience fast.

• Timing - the brain can only pay attention for about 10 minutes. So, ideally, CLE programs wouldn't last more than 10 minutes at a time. Medina says that his 50 minute college lectures ran up against this problem. So, he improvised a workable solution: he breaks down his lectures into 10 minute modules. Each module addresses one core concept, which he explains the meaning of at the start of the module, and then summarizes when he's done.
• Bait the hook - to "buy" another 10 minutes of attention it's important to create a tantalizing hook. Ideally, the hook should trigger emotions such as fear, laughter, happiness, nostalgia, intrigue or surprise. The hook can't be random. So you can't just work in any old joke or story (see the section on "Meaning" above). The hook has to be relevant to the next module you're going to talk about.

Rule 2: Review information you want to remember

Comedian Father Guido Sarducci used to joke about creating a new type of college called The Five Minute University. The idea was: in five minutes he could teach what the average college graduate still remembers after five years after graduation.

Humor aside, it turns out that Father Sarducci was basically right. Medina cites studies that show that people forget 90% of what they learned in a class within 30 days. The retention time can be extended if the presentation was multi-sensory, with emphasis on visuals (see Rule 3 below).

The best way to ensure retention is with regularly spaced intervals of review. Here the onus is really on the student, but there are things that the presenter can do to help. Here are some embryonic ideas:

• Create written materials that encourage review and make it easy to do. So, for example, an outline that tracks the speech, but with bullet points and short text.
• Put the "written materials" online an provide hyperlinks from the bullet points that go to more extensive discussion to encourage exploration of the topic. Using online storage of "written materials" allows you to supplement the written materials after the event. (I use Delicious.com for this purpose; look at my social networking links, as an example of how I use it).
• Send an email to attendees a week after the event with a link ot the online materials (if you use Eventbrite to schedule your CLE events this is easy to do).
• Post the slideshow online too, and link to that (Slideshare is great for doing this, and I do it for my presentations)

There are probably a lot of things that we could experiment with here. The first hurdle is to get over the mindset that a CLE provider is only responsible for creating a single live presentation and then does nothing else to encourage further learning or investigation. Aren't we supposed to be encouraging education? Or is it just about supplying credits?

Rule #3: Use more pictures than words

Bullet points are a staple of most slidedeck presentations. And most presentations contain no visuals whatsoever. Our brains struggle with these kinds of presentations, and get very little out of them.

The average powerpoint slide contains 40 words, says Medina. According to extensive research, this almost guarantees that the information won't be paid attention to, understood, or remembered. Many lectures don't feature slides at all, which is fine if the speaker can create vivid mental imagery with words (most can't). Even so, a speech where there are images that compliment the spoken words is much more effective; it creates a retention factor of 65%, as opposed to 10% for words alone.

The best kind of visuals are animations, which need not be complex. Probably even a Ken Burns effect would suffice in many cases. Point is: use animations (or video) occasionally.

They say that a picture is worth 1,000 words, and that might literally be true when it comes to remembering. One study showed that people can remember 2,500 pictures with 90% accuracy days after exposure. A year later their accuracy is still above 60%. Pictures are a powerful tool for explaining things, and for fixing new information into memory.

I understand the daily challenge of the accreditation folks: getting speakers to give interesting seminars is harder than creating rules focused on audience compliance. Much harder. But instead of easy rules that do little good, why not propose some new ideas that significantly improve CLE? For example, formally decree that speakers follow the Guy Kawasaki 10/20/30 Rule of Powerpoint. Or, at least the ’30’ part of it.

Conclusion: A proposed approach to the 60 minute CLE program

• Opening - (2 or 3 mins) - memorable opening in first 30 seconds, then explain the GIST of the lesson. Then provide the ROADMAP of presentation (e.g. list the modules and how they fit together)
• Module 1 − (10 mins) - Remember to use MULTI-SENSORY stimulation (more VISUALS than words, ANIMATED wherever possible)
• Use a relevant HOOK to set up next module
• Modules 2 − (50 mins total) - Repeat formula above, with liberal repetition of “where we are.” Don’t need hooks for last two modules; people tend to stay tuned in based on the first ones, and the 10 minute cycle.
• Wind down - (4 − 5 mins) -Briefly revisit the key ideas, and some key details Tell students where the visuals will be posted online for later review.
• Q&A - (3 − 5 mins) - Answer questions with reference to materials discussed if possible to reinforce concepts

Best of the 60 Tips presentation

Yesterday I had the pleasure of doing a 60 tips in 60 Minutes session with several good friends and follow law-techies. Even though I've done dozens of these 60 tips programs in the past few years, I always wind up learning something. Here are a few of the most interesting tips I picked up:

• Asana - An online collaborative project management tool, sort of like Basecamp, but free if you have less than 30 team members. This one was recommended by Catherine Reach Sanders (who just moved from the ABA Technology Resource Center to the Chicago Bar Association).
• Pathagoras - a document assembly tool that works with Word for Windows. It's free to try for 90 days, and from what Jim Calloway described, it's a powerful tool for transactional lawyers who create variations of form documents and need a tool that makes it easy to do this.
• How to create a Digital ID for using with Adobe Acrobat, which Nerino Petro says is a surefire way to have true digital signatures that actually get accepted by the recipient. I'm going to start using this for sure.
• Let Me Google That For You - I forgot about this one, but it's a classic. If you're adept at using Google but find that you get annoyed when people ask you for information that they could just as easily have googled themselves, you need to check it out. I won't ruin it for you; just go do a sample search and you'll see what this tool does.

If you want to see all the tips that we did, here's the link to our presentation.

Risk aversion is hampering CLE (and why I'm not averse to the risk of competition from great speakers)

I've just spent a few days here in New Orleans at an ACLEA conference, i.e. the folks who put on continuing legal eduction programs. I've learned a lot, and met some great people.

But that said, I also have some thoughts on the sad state of how we regulate CLE programs. Not everyone will agree with my point, and that's fine. But, if you think we overreacted to 9/11, and wound up making air travel unnecessarily harder, then you might accept my point.

But first, a quick observation.

As some of you know, lawyers are risk averse. They (and those who regulate them) think that the first step in looking at a problem is to identify all the risks and possible mishaps. The "risk-examining mindset" is developed early in law school, and grows steadily as one practices and hangs around other lawyers. What doesn't get developed by law school, or any law organization, is the ability to weigh risks in a practical way.

The TSA mindset is a derivative of the lawyer mindset: think of every possible risk and react to it fully. Why do we search old people in wheel chairs and infants traveling with their mothers? Because it's more important to anticipate every conceivable risk than it is to weigh risk with common sense or human judgment. Okay, I suppose not everyone minds the TSA approach. But, if you're like security expert Bruce Schneier (who believes the current TSA approach is nothing more than 'security theatre'), then you'll probably share my dismay at the way CLE is viewed by those who regulate it.

To understand the problem, let's focus first on the laudable objective of CLE.

Call me crazy, but the overriding objective of CLE programs should be to encourage lawyers to learn. CLE programs should be engaging, and –dare I say it– entertaining. Okay, that's the objective.

What do many CLE regulations focus on?

Mostly, they try to minimize the risk some lawyers will try to cheat and not stay for the whole program, or not really use the opportunity to learn. That's why you get a rule that says that you can't serve food at a CLE program, only coffee and mints (the D.C. rule). Or you get a rule that you can only have "online CLE" if it's interactive, which is interpreted in some states to mean that there has to be live Q&A or a live chat window where questions are answered.

Why can't questions be answered by email within a few hours, or a day later (where presumably the answer might be more thoughtful)? Don't ask. We're fighting risks here, not trying to figure out how to make things convenient, interesting, or consistent with well known principles about how our brains learn most effectively.

Most CLE speakers that I've seen do a poor job. Sorry, but that's the truth. And if you polled every attorney who's been to five CLE programs you'd confirm this with data.

The bad speaking happens not because the speakers are incapable of doing a good job, but because: (1) it's not something they tend to do often, (2) they're not usually paid or given any incentive other than "notoriety," and (3) they don't usually craft their speech for use at more than one event.

Good trial lawyers are in court a lot and handle a lot of cases, and they get good by getting a lot of experience in the courtroom. Some of those lawyers might be good CLE speakers, but they're usually busy and it's hard to get many of them to take time off from their lucrative practices with the simple lure of "notoriety."

Good CLE speakers are rare. That's a fact.

Obviously, if there were more good CLE speakers, or if the system somehow created better incentives for CLE speakers to improve, then more lawyers might benefit from mandatory post-grad education. Instead, according to the metrics I'm hearing at the ACLEA conference, 70% of the lawyers who get CLE don't care at all about the educational component; they simply look for the most convenient program that will satisfy their reporting requirement.

I'm don't consider myself to be an exceptional speaker, but I work really hard to create interesting talks that are also practical. When I create a new talk I find ways to give the talk repeatedly so that I can tweak it, and refine it. This is what you have to do if you want to give a speech that is well received. You have to figure out what works and what doesn't by speaking and then self-evaluating your performance. Then you change it up and try the new approach, until eventually it clicks. This would be true of a five minute talk, but it's especially true of a hour long speech.

It took Jerry Seinfeld a year to come up with an hour long comedy show (watch the movie Comedian). A year of working full-time on nothing but creating that one hour's worth of material. Seinfeld did this after he created his hit show, at which point he had obviously developed serious chops as a comedian. To develop his hour's worth of material he had to go do shows in dive clubs, and a lot of his jokes flat out bombed. But he knew that the only way to get an hour of top notch material that was to practice in smaller venues, and to do LOTS of shows.

Pretty much every CLE program lasts an hour, or close to it. How much time do you think that most speakers put in? (Obviously they aren't trying to make a living at speaking like Jerry Seinfeld. But, still, they're going to take up an entire hour of an audience's valuable time.) And so how much do they prepare? The answer, usually, is: not much. Maybe an hour or two, at most. In some cases, maybe a little more. But that's not enough to give great a great presentation. And like I said (and sorry if this is disagreeable), most presentations stink.

I've seen well-respected leaders of the bar bore audiences by reading from old Powerpoint slide decks that they didn't even prepare. If they went into court and bored a jury the way that they bore their CLE audience they'd lose notoriety, not gain it.

Lawyers pay good money to receive instruction about topics that are critical to their practice. The lawyers in the audience value their time as well. If some of them aren't paying attention it isn't always because there are snacks being offered in the back of the room, or because they don't care about learning. It's because the talks are boring. The talks are lifeless. The talks are disorganized. Not all of them, but plenty enough.

So why am I risking my livelihood by doing full-time CLE speaking? People have peppered me with skeptical questions.

When you start a new business people invariably ask "who's your target audience"? My target audience is: those lawyers who figure, if I'm going to have to sit through a seminar to get CLE credit, then I'd rather go to one with interesting speakers who know how to explain what I need to know efficiently. Even if only 30% of lawyers want good CLE (and I think it's higher than that), that's still a lot of lawyers. The problem for people who want to do great CLE is that most lawyers are conditioned to expect mediocre CLE. So, what my company has is "a marketing problem."

Most of our "target audience" doesn't even know the product they want is for sale, or who they would buy it from if it was.

When Dane and I do presentations people invariably say "my God. I had no idea that anyone was doing CLE programs like this." We know that we're not the only ones. There are other people who are doing great CLE, and trying innovative approaches that inform and entertain. Those folks walk a tight line sometimes. The more innovative you are they more likely you are to have a regulator say that what you're doing is too risky and not allowed.

What does good CLE look like? Have you seen a great CLE presentation? If so, list the name(s) of the presenter(s) in the comments and give a link to their webpage. My well-meaning skeptics also tell me I need to figure out who my competition is, and those skeptics would probably say, "hey, Ernie, why help identify those people, aren't those other good speakers your competition?"

To which, I'd respond: no, those are my brethren.

My podcast interview with Enrico Shaefer about my new venture

I got a call from my friend Enrico Shaefer right after I announced that I was shifting out of the practice of law to do more CLE programs for lawyers who were interested in technology. He practices law and tries to innovate wherever possible to do a better job for clients at a lower cost, so he and I have kept in touch (mostly through social media). He has a weekly podcast where he interviews folks about innovation in the law etc., and so he interviewed me. The interview lasted about 20 minutes as I recall. You can either listen to the podcast, or read the transcript.