We’re celebrating the Tennessee Bar Journal’s first 40 years all year! In each issue we will look back at an area of life in the law to see how the TBJ covered it. This month we consider the beginnings of mandatory continuing legal education.

Coverage of continuing legal education in the Tennessee Bar Journal dates back to its first issue. But it wasn't until 1987, when the Tennessee Supreme Court made CLE mandatory with its Rule 21, that reporting extended much beyond photos of lawyers attending classes.

From that point — when the Commission on Continuing Legal Education set up shop in a couple of spare rooms in the old Tennessee Bar Association office on West End Avenue — the magazine has featured articles about new ethics programming, increases in requirements, the advent of distance learning through online classes and more.

In his report on the status of CLE in the May/June 1988 Journal, newly appointed commission executive director David N. Shearon helped clear up questions about the program. In the first year of mandatory continuing legal education (MCLE), he reported that there were more courses being offered and they were of better quality than before. Now 18 years later, Shearon, who still heads up the commission, believes that has continued.

“MCLE has improved the quality and quantity and increased participation,” he says today. “As participants in a justice system that society has created, i t ’s our obligation to try to improve the system and our performance.”

Of the 9,703 lawyers required to comply in that first year, about 11 percent were sent orders that gave them 90 days to get their CLE or face suspension. On the more positive side, “more than 8,000 had obtained the necessary hours by April 15,” Shearon wrote back then, “7,000 of those having taken more than the required 12 hours.”

That was a trend that would continue. In fact, in the May/June 1989 Journal, charts and graphs (using new in-house computer graphics technology) showed that eight out of 10 attorneys exceeded the minimum requirement with an average of 23.2 hours; 125 attorneys clocked in with 60 hours or more and eight overachievers took more than 100 hours. The most popular subjects in those first two years of MCLE were general review, litigation and commercial law.

In 1992, the requirement had changed so that three of the hours needed to be designated as “ethics and professionalism” (E&P) credits and the next year the total went to 15 hours.

Claudia Swafford Haltom laid out the details of the upcoming increase to 15 hours in the November/December 1992 Journal article, “The New Ethics Rule: Q & A.” The extra hours were added, Shearon said in the article, because most other states had 12 or more and “when the ethics requirement was added, the commission did not want to decrease the hours for substantive training.”

In 1997, technology embraced the CLE process with the advent of the TBA’s TennBar University, an online CLE source.

“The most significant change,” Shearon says, “is the same as it’s been for adult education in general: the development of distance learning technologies. That’s been huge.”

“Distance learning” hours were approved by the court, but with a restriction on how many would count toward the requirement. Today, six of the required 15 hours may be obtained electronically.

In 2002, the Journal began carrying the insert that you still find in the center of the magazine, as well as up-to-date information at https://www.tba.org/clefront.html.

—Suzanne Craig Robertson