If you’ve ever sat through an eLearning module that made you want to close your laptop and take up a different career, you know what I’m talking about. Monotone narration reading bullet points off a screen. Stock photos of people in blazers pointing at whiteboards. Quizzes where you can fail three times and still get credit. A “next” button that advances slides no human being should have to read.
This is what the eLearning industry has given people for decades. And it has consequences — not just for learner experience, but for whether the training actually achieves anything. A course no one engages with is not a training investment. It is an expensive checkbox.
The good news: it doesn’t have to be this way. Great custom eLearning — the kind that people actually complete, remember, and apply — is absolutely achievable. But it requires more than a vendor who knows how to use authoring software. It requires a partner who understands your content, your audience, and what it actually takes to transform complex material into something a sophisticated professional will find worth their time.
After more than a decade building custom eLearning for some of the world’s most discerning organizations — AmLaw 100 and global firms, global financial institutions, and complex professional services environments — here’s what we’ve learned separates the courses people are proud to put their name on from the ones they quietly hope no one notices.
1. Instructional Design — Not Content Dumping
The most common failure mode in custom eLearning isn’t bad visuals or poor narration. It’s the absence of instructional design.
Content dumping is what happens when someone takes a policy document, a slide deck, or a transcript of a live presentation and converts it, essentially verbatim, into an online course. The information may be accurate. The narration may be pleasant. But the structure doesn’t reflect how adults actually learn — and the learner walks away having passively consumed information they’re unlikely to retain or apply.
Instructional design is a discipline. It asks: What do we want learners to be able to do after this course that they couldn’t do — or didn’t do consistently — before? What are the specific learning objectives? What sequence of content and experience best builds toward those objectives? Where does the learner need to practice and get feedback, not just absorb information? What are the moments that genuinely require interactivity, and which ones are best served by clear, well-written narrative?
These are not trivial questions. A skilled instructional designer working on a 30-minute module on, say, your firm’s conflicts check process isn’t just organizing the policy into a logical sequence. They’re thinking about what a junior associate gets wrong, what a senior associate already knows, how to create scenarios that surface the judgment calls the policy doesn’t make obvious, and how to structure the experience so the learner leaves genuinely more capable than when they started.
There is no shortage of vendors who can put your content on a screen. There are far fewer who can transform it into something that actually changes behavior.
A good development partner will want to discuss learning objectives before they discuss technology. They will ask about your audience — who they are, what they already know, what they tend to get wrong, and what “good” looks like after training. If a vendor jumps straight to talking about timelines and templates without asking those questions, that’s a signal worth paying attention to.
2. Engagement That Respects Your Audience’s Intelligence
There is a particular kind of condescension baked into a lot of corporate eLearning: overly simplified scenarios, cartoonish characters, trivia-style questions with obviously wrong answers, and an overall tone that seems designed for an audience with no prior knowledge of the subject or the professional context.
For a room full of lawyers, this lands badly. Lawyers are trained to spot weak reasoning, imprecise language, and oversimplified analysis. A compliance module that presents scenarios a second-year associate could resolve in three seconds is not engaging — it is insulting. And a disengaged, slightly offended lawyer clicking through a module to get their CLE credit is not a lawyer who has been trained.
Engagement that works for a sophisticated professional audience looks different. It presents genuinely complex scenarios — the ones where reasonable people might disagree, where the answer depends on context, where the judgment call is actually hard. It uses branching interactivity to let learners experience the consequences of different decisions, not just select the obviously correct answer. It respects what learners already know and builds on it, rather than starting from zero every time.
It is also, critically, well-written. The narration should sound like a knowledgeable colleague, not a compliance officer reading from a manual. The on-screen text should be concise, precise, and purposeful — not a data dump with a voice track. At its best, a well-crafted eLearning module should feel less like mandatory training and more like a conversation with someone who genuinely understands the topic and respects your time.
This is a craft. It requires writers and instructional designers who understand your world — who know what a conflicts check actually involves, what a billing guideline dispute actually looks like, what the real stakes are when an associate mishandles a client communication. Generic eLearning vendors don’t have this. Partners who specialize in the legal industry do.
3. The Ability to Make Complex Topics Genuinely Clear
This one sounds obvious, but it is genuinely rare — and it is where deep subject matter expertise in the legal space becomes a decisive differentiator.
Law firms deal in complexity. The topics they need to train on — conflicts of interest, legal project management, regulatory compliance, client intake protocols, cybersecurity obligations, the responsible use of AI in practice — are not simple. They involve nuance, exceptions, judgment calls, and context that cannot be reduced to a three-step checklist without losing the things that matter most.
The challenge for eLearning — and the reason so much legal training fails — is that complexity and engagement are in natural tension. The more nuanced the topic, the harder it is to make accessible without dumbing it down. Dumbing it down produces compliance theater. Not dumbing it down produces courses that are dense, hard to follow, and ultimately ignored.
The way out of this tension is not a technology solution. It is a combination of subject matter understanding, skilled writing, and instructional design expertise that knows how to break a genuinely complex topic into digestible, logically sequenced components without stripping out the nuance. We sometimes describe this as “conversational complexity” — content that is as sophisticated as the topic demands but as accessible as the learner requires.
We’ve built this capability over more than a decade of working exclusively with law firms and sophisticated professional services organizations. Our team doesn’t learn your industry on your dime. We already know legal. We know how to write for lawyers. We know how to frame a scenario that a partner will find plausible and a first-year associate will find illuminating. We know which simplifications are useful and which ones undermine the entire point of the training. That depth of domain expertise is not something a generalist vendor can replicate — and it shows in the final product.
4. A Development Process That Includes You — Without Overwhelming You
One of the most common complaints we hear from organizations that have had disappointing custom eLearning experiences is some version of this: “We handed over our materials and got back something that didn’t reflect what we actually needed.” Or conversely: “We were asked to make so many decisions along the way that it felt like we were building it ourselves.”
Both of these reflect a broken development process. A great partner threads this needle. They involve you at the right moments — the ones where your expertise, your judgment, and your institutional knowledge are genuinely needed — and they handle the rest. You should not need to become an instructional designer, a scriptwriter, or a SCORM expert to get a great course. That’s what you’re hiring for.
What a well-designed process looks like in practice:
- Early alignment. A kick-off conversation that covers not just logistics but substance: who the learners are, what success looks like, what the most common failure modes are, what the tone and voice of your firm sounds like. This conversation shapes everything that follows.
- Script-first development. The script is the most important deliverable in any eLearning project — because everything else (narration, visuals, interactivity) flows from it. A good partner drafts a complete, narration-ready script from your materials and gets your sign-off before anything goes into production. Changes at the script stage are inexpensive. Changes after narration has been recorded are not.
- Rapid prototyping. Before the full course is built, a sample section is produced so you can see exactly what the finished product will look and feel like. You adjust course at this stage, not after delivery.
- Structured review cycles. Reviews are consolidated, clearly scoped, and time-boxed. You know exactly when you’re being asked to review, what you’re being asked to focus on, and how many rounds are included.
- Delivery with support. The course arrives ready to deploy, with the technical support to make sure it works correctly in your LMS or hosting environment. And when questions come up later — because they always do — there’s a real person to call.
A dedicated project manager who serves as your single point of contact throughout is not a luxury. It is what separates a smooth, on-time project from a fragmented, frustrating one. Ask any vendor you’re evaluating how their project management works. The answer will tell you a lot.
5. A Standard of Quality You’d Be Proud to Put Your Name On
This one is the hardest to define and the easiest to recognize.
When a law firm delivers training to its associates, it is sending a message about what it values. When it delivers training to its clients, it is sending a message about the quality of its work product and the seriousness of its client relationships. The production quality of that training — the narration, the visual design, the interactions, the overall fit and finish — is not a superficial concern. It is part of the firm’s brand.
We think about this every time we build a course. The question we ask ourselves is simple: Would this firm be proud to put their name on this? Not just satisfied. Proud. Would a managing partner watching this module think “this reflects well on our firm”? Would a client receiving this training think “our outside counsel built this for us” rather than “someone checked a box”?
Getting there requires professional narration that sounds like a knowledgeable human being, not a text-to-speech engine reading a policy document. It requires visual design that reflects the firm’s brand standards, not a stock template. It requires interactions that feel purposeful and polished, not bolted on for the sake of clicking something. And it requires the kind of editorial judgment that knows when a metaphor helps comprehension and when it just clutters the screen.
None of this is accidental. It is the product of a development culture that genuinely cares whether the final course is excellent — not just technically complete. That culture either exists at a vendor or it doesn’t. The best way to assess it before you sign a contract is to ask to see examples of their work for organizations like yours — not generic demos, but real courses built for real law firm clients on real legal topics.
The quality of your training sends a message to the people who take it: this matters to us. Make sure it does.
Questions to Ask Any Custom eLearning Vendor Before You Commit
A great development partner will welcome these questions. The answers will tell you quickly whether you’re talking to a vendor or a partner.
- Can you show me examples of custom eLearning you’ve built specifically for law firms, on legal topics, for attorney audiences?
- How do you handle instructional design? Walk me through how you develop learning objectives and structure a course.
- What does your script development process look like? Who writes the script, and how do you develop it from raw materials?
- What does my involvement look like throughout the project? What decisions do I need to make, and what do you handle?
- How do you handle accessibility compliance (if required) — Section 508, WCAG 2.1?
- What happens if I need to update the course after delivery? Do I own the source files?
- Can you accommodate our brand standards, not just add our logo to a template?
- Who is my project manager, and how will they communicate with my team throughout the project?
- What does “on time” look like for a project like mine? Can you share your track record on delivery timelines?
Why “We Know Legal” Is More Than a Tagline
We’ve worked in and around the legal industry for our entire existence as a company. SkillBurst by BARBRI was founded on the conviction that law firms and legal professionals deserve learning experiences designed for their world — not adapted from generic corporate training and retrofitted with a firm logo.
That focus has given us something generalist eLearning vendors don’t have: a deep, intuitive fluency in the legal environment. We know how attorneys think, how they learn, and what it takes to hold their attention. We know the difference between a scenario that a lawyer finds plausible and one that makes them roll their eyes. We know how to write about billing practices, client intake, conflicts, regulatory compliance, and AI governance in ways that are accurate, nuanced, and genuinely instructive — not oversimplified to the point of uselessness.
We also know what it means to work as a trusted partner, not just a vendor. Our clients — PD directors, HR leaders, COOs, practice group partners — come to us with training challenges that are often sensitive, sometimes urgent, and always important. They need a partner who handles their content with care, who communicates proactively, who delivers what was promised on the timeline that was agreed, and who cares as much about the final product as they do.
That’s what we’ve built. And it’s why the firms that work with us tend to keep working with us — not because they’re locked into a contract, but because they’ve found a development partner they trust and don’t want to replace.
Great custom eLearning is achievable. You deserve a partner who holds that standard as firmly as you do.
See what great custom eLearning looks like for law firms.
Request a consultation or sample at skillburst.com/custom-elearning-development
Catherine Poole is VP, Client Advisory at BARBRI and a co-founder of SkillBurst by BARBRI. She has spent over a decade helping law firms and professional services organizations design, develop, and deploy digital learning programs that connect with sophisticated learners and drive measurable results.
Tags: Custom eLearning Development | Law Firm Training | eLearning Quality | Instructional Design | Legal Training | SkillBurst by BARBRI | BARBRI
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