Brooklyn Bar’s new CLE director helping to implement new technology

September 22, 2014 By Rob Abruzzese Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Danielle Levine, a Brooklyn Law School Graduate, has taken over as the Continuing Legal Education Director at the Brooklyn Bar Association, and hopes to innovate the position with new technology.

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Meet Danielle A. Levine, the Brooklyn Law School graduate who hopes to transform the way the Brooklyn Bar Association runs its Continuing Legal Education (CLE) program.

“The Bar Association has been working to improve its CLE program for a little while now, and as we move on with our technology, I think we’ll be able to grow the program to a whole new level,” Levine said. “We’re making it easier for our members to obtain their CLE credits and, with the technology expansion we have coming soon, we want to expand our audience beyond Brooklyn.”

Levine, who is a Westchester native, graduated from Brooklyn Law School in 2013 and got her undergraduate degree at the University of Rochester. She said that she sought out this position as it gives her an opportunity to combine her legal expertise with educational programming, a personal passion.

“The new director of CLE would be heavily involved in upgrading the technology at the bar and I’m very heavily invested in educational technology,” Levine said. “In law school, I was involved in the Dean’s Technology Working Group, so I thought it would be a really good fit, and it has been.”

“There is a lot of robust, complex and useful technology and our Young Lawyer Section, in particular, is interested in putting on CLEs that incorporate that technology,” Levine said.

Over the last year, the Brooklyn Bar Association (BBA) has made an effort to incorporate technology more from learning how to incorporate iPad apps available to learning how to E-file. Its headquarters is now outfitted with WiFi internet access in all public areas and it has put somebody in charge of social media to help promote upcoming events.

“Last week we did a CLE program on E-filing,” said Avery Eli Okin, the executive director at the BBA. “It’s only a matter of when, and not if the courts will require E-filing. It’s coming. These are the types of services that our members are going to need.”

All lawyers need to obtain 24 CLE credits each two-year period to stay up to date with the bar. The BBA wants to make this as easy as possible, so its next major upgrade will be to make its CLEs available to stream or download online so that lawyers can obtain credits from their personal offices or even at home in their pajamas.

“We’re not going to turn into Amazon; you won’t be able to buy shoes from us, but we have to get away from the old business model,” Okin said. “If you can do something on Amazon in six clicks, it can’t take 27 on the BBA’s website. The things that we do offer, we want to do better than any other bar association.”

Eventually, the BBA hopes to be better than any other organization at providing three specific things: it wants better CLE programs with easier access, it wants to have a strong legal referral service, (the American Bar Association recently honored the BBA for having the best in the country), and it wants to provide the best networking opportunities possible.

So while the BBA will continue to make an effort to become more technologically advanced, that doesn’t mean that it won’t continue its strong tradition of hosting 30-40 live CLEs per year at the Association’s Headquarters.

“Our members need the option to be able to go online to get their CLE credits, but at the same time, people still need to do business together,” Okin said. “Which is why we’re going to continue the in-person CLEs and we’re going to have our events like Judiciary Night and Legislative Night.”