Continuing Education of the Bar is California’s go-to resource for providing attorneys with information about the law and the practice of law. Established in 1947, CEB prides themselves on being the best network for California attorneys. With solutions for solo attorneys, small firms, mid-size and large law firms, in-house attorneys, and law schools, it has cemented its reputation as an inclusive legal resource.
Always ahead of their time, CEB has been a leader in innovation since its creation. The company’s original purpose was to educate veterans returning to the practice of law after service in World War II. After that, CEB continued to evolve and spearhead the sharing of information related to the law. They launched their website in 1997 and offered online programs before the 2000s. Blogging became the next natural step in their swift evolution.
CEB is taking their educational outreach a step further with the launch of a Portal, Golden State Lawyer. Currently, the Portal boasts 44 publishers covering 20 different topic areas. This includes immigration, health care, government, tax, and more. Being such a large state with such a complex jurisdiction, it’s extremely valuable to have an array of firms writing on state-specific, nuanced topics.
“It’s always been CEB’s mission to provide really great knowledge and resources and tools for California lawyers,” Stephanie Walker, the acting head of product at CEB, said. “So this just seems like a natural next step.”
CEB offers a large scope of free material already, but a lot of it is behind a registration wall, Walker explained. Although it is free to access, there’s still that additional barrier. Now, with a Portal, information is more readily available and easier to access.
Legal blogs have proven especially useful in the current social climate, where a pandemic has uprooted lives and businesses and caused an unprecedented changing of laws.
“Legal blogs are invaluable for staying up to date on what’s changing—especially this year with so much up in the air, and people are just trying to fit all the pieces together,” Walker said.
There are new legal developments, new case laws, and new statutory changes coming out every day in California. Finding out this information via a blog, rather than waiting several months for it to find its way into a practice guide, is a much more practical solution.
Although the most obvious audience for this kind of material is lawyers themselves, the resources are also beneficial for the general public as well as law students, Walker highlighted.
“There’s value to lay people who are trying to get their arms around what’s going on,” Walker said. “If I have a family law dispute, or if I have a trust and estates issue that I don’t know anything about—legal blogs are a great resource.”
For law students, reading law blogs is an opportunity for them to gauge their own personal interests and get a sense of how practicing lawyers talk about their respective practice area.
CEB welcomes all good legal analysis and content. Aside from the new Portal, they have resources such as webinars, guidebooks, free legal research, and free judicial council forms. They also offer products that include OnLaw, Practitioner, CoursePass, Compliance, and CLEPassport.
CEB is a non-profit that was created by the University of California and is partnered with LexisNexis as well as cosponsored by the State Bar of California. They support educational, outreach, and pro bono activities throughout the state and essentially pioneered formal legal continuing education.
“CEB was founded to help California attorneys succeed in the practice of law by providing them with the information and tools most relevant to their area of practice,” Nell Petri, director, business portfolio of CEB said.
Golden State Lawyer launched just last week and is expecting to continually grow in size.
“I think there’s so much scope for different topics to be handled in California and to be talked about in interesting ways,” Walker said. “We’re really looking forward to kind of meeting new people and new law firms and new lawyers and hoping they find us as well.”
Free podcasts and law alerts are also available at CEB. Their longstanding mission has always been to provide legal information for California lawyers, and throughout the years they’ve continued to expanded their resource collection to reach more and more individuals. Walker believes the Portal is just the next step in furthering that mission.
“Aggregating the content from other lawyers and having a place to provide some free CBE content, and having all of that great content easily searchable and available in one place is a really great fit for our public service mission.”