eDiscovery Daily Blog

• May 14, 2018

In 2016, Florida became the first state to mandate technology training for lawyers, when it adopted a rule requiring lawyers to complete three hours of CLE every three years “in approved technology programs.”  We covered it here.  That requirement went into effect on January 1, 2017 and CloudNine has certainly been providing several CLE courses that are technology approved in Florida.  We’ve been wondering when a second state was going to follow suit and we may be close to an answer.

According to Robert Ambrogi and his Law Sites blog (A Second State Moves Closer to Mandating Technology Training for Lawyers), the North Carolina State Bar Council has approved a proposed amendment to lawyers’ annual CLE requirements that would mandate that one hour of the required 12 hours of CLE training annually be devoted to technology training.

The council adopted the proposed amendment on April 20. The proposed amendment now goes to the North Carolina Supreme Court for approval.

The proposed amendment would also add a definition of technology training, as follows:

“Technology training” shall mean a program, or a segment of a program, devoted to education on information technology (IT) or cybersecurity (see N.C. Gen. Stat. §143B-1320(a)(11), or successor statutory provision, for a definition of “information technology”), including education on an information technology product, device, platform, application, or other tool, process, or methodology. To be eligible for CLE accreditation as a technology training program, the program must satisfy the accreditation standards in Rule .1519 of this subchapter: specifically, the primary objective of the program must be to increase the participant’s professional competence and proficiency as a lawyer. Such programs include, but are not limited to, education on the following: a) an IT tool, process, or methodology designed to perform tasks that are specific or uniquely suited to the practice of law; b) using a generic IT tool process or methodology to increase the efficiency of performing tasks necessary to the practice of law; c) the investigation, collection, and introduction of social media evidence; d) e-discovery; e) electronic filing of legal documents; f) digital forensics for legal investigation or litigation; and g) practice management software. See Rule .1602 of this subchapter for additional information on accreditation of technology training programs.

However, as Kevin O’Keefe notes in his Real Lawyers blog (via a tweet by Richard Granat), the same North Carolina has just passed regulation restricting the distribution of self-help legal software over the Internet.  Go figure.

Regardless, I will be very interested to see what happens in the state that I’m now spending a lot of my time (because of our recent acquisition, of course).

So, what do you think?  Will we see more states require technology CLE?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

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