This new startup intends to be the MasterClass of continuing legal education.
Online education has been around since the dawn of the internet age, but only recently have online education companies finally hit their stride and now suddenly it’s a very hot sector. Coursera had an IPO earlier this year and now has a market cap of nearly $5 billion. Duolingo followed, and now Udemy is expected to IPO at the end of this month. These companies offer online classes ranging from cooking to chemistry, from nutrition to music. Meanwhile, MasterClass has become a very popular learning platform for consumers, featuring a wide range of celebrities as teachers.
A new startup in Southern California, Lawyer Square, is launching a new online education platform focused on a very specific market: continuing legal education. Bar associations typically require that practicing attorneys complete ongoing education as a condition for their law license. In California, for example, the State Bar requires all practicing attorneys to complete 25 hours of continuing legal education every three years.
The founder of Lawyer Square is a young attorney himself, and after sitting through endless hours of dry (and often irrelevant) continuing legal education, he thought to himself “Why can’t this be better?”.
The fact is that there’s a demographic shift going on in the legal profession today (as in all professions) as the young generation moves in. Millennial attorneys are accustomed to today’s standards for media consumption — they want online content that is well-produced, viewable across a wide spectrum of devices, engaging, and relevant.
Lawyer Square will launch later this year, with continuing legal education classes featuring partners at leading law firms across the country, delivered in an engaging way, with content topics that are relevant to the newer generation of attorneys that are now forming the core of the legal profession. Think of it as MasterClass for continuing legal education, for the 1.3 million attorneys across the United States.
