It was bad enough that states began allowing Continuing Legal Education credit for courses in lawyer marketing.  You feel the need to market yourself?  That’s nice. So take whatever course you want, but that doesn’t mean is bears upon any purpose for which CLE credits are required.

The idea of continuing legal education was born of the notion that too many lawyers would allow their knowledge and skills to languish after passing the bar, leaving them substantively lacking while imbued with the monopolistic right to hold themselves out as qualified to represent others in the law.  CLE was made mandatory, since lawyers couldn’t be trusted to keep abreast of developments in the law on their own.  Schools and associations, not to mention a cottage industry of private fee-based providers, were authorized to provide CLE.  All to make lawyers more competent.  Really?

It was intended for the benefit of clients. And was then co-opted by lawyers for their own benefit. The argument was made that by better marketing, access to lawyers would improve, and clients would benefit by being able to find the “right” lawyer for their needs. 

Yeah, our ability to bullshit ourselves with facile arguments is one of our strongest skills. If only we were as good at cross-examination. But I digress.

There are CLEs in marketing, blogging, social media, all in the name of improving our knowledge so that we can serve society better.  If there is any saving grace, it’s that most of these CLEs are taught by people without a clue, so the joke is on the people who pay for them.  But at least they can use this nonsense to fulfill their credit requirements.

As lawyers continue their downward spiral into self-indulgence, a new call for CLE credits was made.

Four months ago, I experienced a transformative Mindful Lawyering program at New York’s Garrison Institute. As icing on the cake, the program even included three hours of talks, including one hour of legal ethics, to benefit those, like I, belonging to bars that require a minimum number of annual continuing legal education credits.

I timely filed an application with the Virginia Bar for the three CLE credits. Unfortunately, last month, the Virginia Mandatory Continuing Legal Education Board denied my request for CLE credits, with the ten-word explanation that “The program did not focus on a recognized legal topic.”

Yeah, sucks to pay for a course and not get CLE credit, particularly since CLE has turned into a joke anyway.  As long as any malarkey can be turned on its ear by some easy rhetoric into a benefit for clients, why not let a lawyer claim it?

The question here is not whether mindfulness is good or not, beneficial to lawyers or not. If you like to meditate, knock yourself out. If it relieves your stress and makes you feel all in the moment, great for you. I’m completely agnostic on the issue.

But unless we’ve given up any hope of CLE being anything beyond a farce, you don’t get CLE credit for doing something that makes you feel good.

The point of CLE, even though its been diluted by the marketing nonsense, is to improve skills and knowledge in the performance of our representation of clients.  It’s an opportunity stay up-to-date on the law, to learn or hone our skills, to be better capable of serving the only people who actually matter. Clients.

Learning to relieve our stress may be good for lawyers personally, and good for society in general, but it has only the most tenuous connection to our responsibilities as lawyers.  Yes, we can fabricate an argument that when we feel better, more focused, more in touch with our feelings, we can do better work as lawyers. But it’s a silly argument, a sham that rationalizes our personal comfort in terms of “anything that makes us happier makes us better.”

Certainly, lawyers who are drug addicts would do better for their clients with not being drug addicts. Does that make detox a proper subject for CLE credits?  And, of course, if we can’t get to court, we can’t do our best work for our clients. So why not make a mechanics course good for a few credits as well?

On the other hand, maybe the message here is that Continuing Legal Education was a nice theoretical idea, but as it worked out in real life, a waste of time and money. Those lawyers who care stay abreast of the law, keep their skills up to par and don’t need the bar association to ram expensive and worthless courses down their throats like errant children.

And if CLE is, in fact, a big joke, then why not mindfulness? Why not auto mechanics? What’s the difference if its all just a farce anyway?

If you want to go to mindfulness conferences, and feel that it will make you a better person, a better lawyer, that’s terrific. Have a good time.  Nobody says you can’t.  But expecting your desire to meditate to be counted as if it was keeping up to date on Supreme Court precedent, or the latest forensic scientific frauds and how to rip the prosecution’s experts throat out, is not the same thing.

Should mindfulness be an accepted subject for CLEs, then let’s admit that the CLE experiment was a bust.  Hey, good try, worth the effort, but it just didn’t work. And let’s end the farce and let lawyers do whatever they want to do to make themselves feel happy. Meditate on that for a moment.