Inside the Bar

No Free Lunch in Cyberspace
Technology's Real Cost

by George C. Brown,
State Bar executive director

If you were one of the 19,640 Wisconsin lawyers not logged onto the State Bar's first Web-enhanced CLE program on Oct. 16, you missed history in the making. The two-hour program, "Wisconsin Resources on the Internet," drew 60 registrants; 13 of whom were nonresident lawyers - State Bar members who live and work outside Wisconsin, including Canada.

A "Web-enhanced" seminar is one that you "attend" and participate in right from your office. The speaker's voice arrives over your telephone for reliable, clear, and uninterrupted sound quality. The visual information is delivered via the Internet on your desktop PC. The speakers enhance their presentation by adding live, real-time Web site examples, PowerPoint slides, and a variety of other written and visual materials.

So, how did people like it? By and large, they thought it was great. Two-thirds of the lawyers who responded to the survey rated the program "very good" or "excellent" overall. "I thought it was great, very convenient!" wrote one member. "Please make all of the CLE courses available by telephone and/or computer," wrote another.

The convenience of this technology is unmistakable. You don't have to get into your car to drive to the seminar, maybe pay for parking or a more expensive lunch than you normally would have, then drive back to your office or home. You save gas and time - and you can be back at work a minute after the seminar is finished. The challenge is to make CLE using new distance education technologies affordable and usable for all Bar members.

Of course some participants experienced a few problems. A couple of people had trouble logging on; for some, the program was difficult to follow because the "screen changes were slower than the speaker talking." These represent the continuing learning curve for using new technologies.

The other learning curve is understanding that Internet delivery of information is not free. The math shows that this seminar lost more than $8,000. In addition to reaffirming that many seminars do not break even, this experience demonstrates the fallacy that the Internet is "free." Delivering CLE over the Internet entails the work of writers, editors, planners, speakers, designers, technicians, customer service, and administrative support staff. The technology infrastructure must be built and maintained in-house, or outsourced. All of this costs money. The Bar is facing the same challenges that all providers of information over the Internet are facing - how to keep the end product affordable and accessible for all our members.

As more and more services move to the Web, we need to recognize that information delivered via the Internet is not free; the issue we need to resolve is who pays for it and how.