Somewhere in your firm right now, a partner is preparing a presentation. She’s done it a dozen times — a 45-minute session on a regulatory topic her clients care deeply about. She’ll deliver it live, either in person or on a webinar. Twenty, maybe thirty people will attend. It will be excellent. And when it’s over, it will essentially disappear.
Maybe someone recorded it. Maybe that recording lives in a shared drive where it will gradually become harder to find and, eventually, outdated. If the partner leaves the firm — or retires, or moves to a different practice — that knowledge goes with her.
This happens hundreds of times a year at most large law firms. And it represents one of the most significant missed opportunities in legal talent development today.
Here’s the reframe I want to offer: your lawyers are not just practitioners. They are the intellectual property of your firm. Their expertise, their insights, their way of framing complex legal and regulatory issues — that is an asset. And like any asset, it can be captured, packaged, and deployed strategically — internally to develop your people, and externally to serve and retain your clients.
Custom eLearning development is the mechanism that makes this possible. Not the screen-recorded Zoom session. Not the PDF of the slide deck. A professionally produced, engaging, on-demand training course that reflects the quality of your firm and that works for your learners — whether they’re in your Chicago office, your London office, or a client’s conference room in Singapore.
The Recurring Presentation Problem
Let’s start with the most common version of this challenge, because it’s one that virtually every PD director, HR leader, and COO at a large firm has encountered.
Your firm has live training programs that get delivered repeatedly. Associate orientation. The mentoring program overview. New partner training. The annual ethics refresher. A practice group’s signature client program. Consider what these programs actually cost. A senior partner who spends twenty hours preparing and delivering a training session represents a real financial investment — even using a conservative internal cost estimate of $500 per hour (a fraction of that partner’s external billing rate), the firm has invested $10,000 to deliver that session. If twenty-five people attended, that’s $400 per person, for a single delivery, available only to the people who happened to be free that day.
And yet the delivery model is almost always the same: live, synchronous, and ephemeral. Thirty people attend if you’re lucky. Others miss it and have to wait for the next cycle. New hires who join between cohorts get an inconsistent experience, or no experience at all. The partner who created and delivers the program is the single point of failure — if she’s unavailable, the training doesn’t happen.
The partner who delivers the same compliance overview to a dozen different client companies every year isn’t just doing business development. She’s sitting on a scalable content asset that just hasn’t been built yet.
The math is straightforward. Transform that same content into a professional on-demand module and make it available to two hundred people across the firm — a modest number for any AmLaw firm — and the cost per learner drops to under $50. Future cohorts watch the same module at essentially zero marginal cost. The partner presents once. Every associate in every office, in every cohort going forward, gets the same high-quality experience. And the knowledge no longer walks out the door when she does.
Two Distinct Opportunities — Both Worth Pursuing
When we talk about capturing your lawyers’ expertise in custom eLearning, there are two fundamentally different use cases. They each have their own logic, their own audiences, and their own ROI. The most forward-thinking firms are exploring both.
Use Case 1: Internal Training at Scale
The internal use case is the one most PD and HR leaders reach first, and for good reason. It addresses real operational pain points: inconsistency across offices and cohorts, overreliance on specific individuals to deliver training, and the inability to track who has actually completed what.
Consider a few scenarios that are common across AmLaw 100 and 200 firms:
Scenario: Mentoring Program Enablement
A firm runs a structured mentoring program. Every year, the PD team delivers a 30-minute overview — twice, because not everyone can attend — explaining how the program works, what’s expected of mentors and mentees, and how to log participation. It’s the same content every time, delivered by the same people, consuming hours of staff time each cycle.
The custom eLearning solution: a dual-track module in which the learner selects their role at the start — mentor or mentee — and receives content specifically tailored to their responsibilities. Built once. Deployed to every cohort, every year, with completion tracking. The live presentation is replaced entirely, or reserved for Q&A only.
Scenario: Lateral and New Associate Onboarding
A firm with 40+ offices onboards new associates and lateral hires throughout the year. The orientation experience varies significantly by office and cohort — depending on who is available to present, what materials have been updated, and how much time the PD team has that week.
The custom eLearning solution: a comprehensive online orientation program covering the firm’s history, culture, structure, key policies, billing systems, and expectations — delivered consistently to every new hire, in every office, on day one. Partners no longer have to repeat the same foundational sessions. New associates arrive at their first live program already grounded in the basics.
Scenario: Firm Policy Rollouts
The firm launches a new AI usage policy. It applies to every lawyer and staff member in every office — globally. Leadership wants everyone trained and wants completion tracked for compliance purposes. A live webinar reaches some people. An email with a PDF attachment reaches no one, not really.
The custom eLearning solution: a 20-minute online course that explains the policy, the rationale, the specific dos and don’ts, and what to do if you’re unsure. Assigned to every person in the firm, trackable by office and role, with automated reminders until complete. Updatable when the policy evolves.
Use Case 2: Client Training as a Strategic Asset
The external use case is one that fewer firms have fully pursued — but the ones that have are finding it transformative for client relationships and, in some cases, for firm revenue.
Here is the opportunity in plain terms: your lawyers are already creating and delivering great content to their clients. Compliance training. Industry updates. Regulatory briefings. Practice group presentations. Much of this is delivered live — in person or via webinar — and then it’s done. The client was in the room. Others in that organization were not. The content was timely in the moment and stale a year later.
What if that same content — the real expertise of your lawyers, captured and packaged professionally — could be delivered to every relevant employee at every client company, on demand, trackable, and co-branded with both the firm’s name and the client’s? What if it could be updated annually and delivered again? What if the firm offered it to prospective clients as a demonstration of its expertise?
This is the “build once, deploy many” model. And it changes the economics of client training entirely. Instead of one partner investing twenty hours to reach thirty people at one client meeting — at a conservative internal cost of $10,000 or more — that same investment plus professional production reaches hundreds of people across dozens of client organizations, repeatedly, for years. The cost per learning experience becomes negligible. The relationship value compounds.
Firms that offer clients polished, branded, on-demand training aren’t just providing a service. They’re deepening the relationship, demonstrating expertise at scale, and creating a reason for the client to come back.
The revenue opportunity is real, too. Some firms have structured client training programs as paid subscriptions — a new, scalable revenue stream that doesn’t require additional billable hours to generate. Others use it purely as a value-added service that differentiates the firm in competitive pitches. Either way, the commercial logic is compelling.
From Live Presentation to On-Demand Asset: What the Transformation Looks Like
One of the biggest misconceptions about custom eLearning development is that it requires starting from scratch. In almost every case, it doesn’t. The raw material already exists. It just needs to be transformed.
Here’s what that transformation typically involves:
- Your input: Existing materials in whatever form they exist — a PowerPoint deck, a recorded webinar, a policy document, a set of talking points, or simply a conversation with the subject matter expert.
- Script development: Our team takes that raw material and crafts a narration-ready script optimized for the on-demand format — conversational, clear, and structured around specific learning objectives. You review and refine.
- Professional production: Professional narration is recorded — in the voice and tone that fits your firm’s brand. Visual design is created to match your identity. Interactive exercises, scenarios, and knowledge checks are woven throughout to drive engagement.
- Delivery and tracking: The final course is packaged for your LMS, our platform, or client delivery — with full completion tracking and reporting. You can see who has taken the course, when, and how they performed.
The result is something meaningfully different from a recorded Zoom session — and the difference matters. A recorded webinar is a passive experience. A well-built eLearning module is interactive, trackable, self-paced, accessible on any device, and reflects the production quality that signals to your learners — and your clients — that this training was important enough to do right.
The distinction is not subtle. When a client organization receives a professionally produced, co-branded online training course from their outside counsel, the message is: we invested in this for you. When they receive a Zoom recording link, the message — whatever the intent — is less clear.
The Retention Risk You May Not Be Thinking About
There is a third dimension to this conversation that does not get enough attention: succession planning and knowledge retention.
Every large law firm has a version of this problem. Senior partners who have spent decades developing deep expertise in a niche practice area. Rainmakers whose relationships, judgment, and institutional knowledge are woven into the fabric of the firm. When these people retire or transition, a substantial portion of what they know leaves with them — unless someone has taken deliberate steps to capture it.
Custom eLearning is one of the most effective mechanisms for knowledge transfer that exists. A well-built course on “How We Approach Complex Restructuring Matters” — scripted from interviews with your senior practitioners, reflecting the firm’s real methodology, framed in the voice of the lawyers who developed it — is something that a junior associate can access five years after that partner has retired. It is institutional memory made portable and permanent.
This is not a theoretical benefit. Firms that have invested in capturing the expertise of their senior practitioners in structured, on-demand formats have a meaningful advantage in developing the next generation of lawyers faster and more consistently than firms that rely entirely on informal mentorship and osmosis.
Q&A: Making the Case Internally
“How do I convince a partner to invest the time in helping build a course?”
Start with what’s in it for them — because there is a genuine answer to that question. A partner who invests time in building a polished on-demand course gets several things back. First, they stop having to deliver the same live presentation repeatedly — freeing that time for billable work or higher-value activities. Second, for client-facing content, they get a scalable way to demonstrate their expertise to a much larger audience than any single webinar could reach. Third, they get something they can be proud of — a professional, branded training resource that bears their name and their firm’s name.
The analogy I use: a partner who publishes a well-regarded article or client alert doesn’t think twice about the time it takes to write it, because the value of that thought leadership compounds over time. A custom eLearning course is the same idea — except it’s more engaging, more trackable, and in many cases reaches a larger audience.
“Who should lead this effort — PD, BD, or the practice group?”
The most successful implementations we’ve seen involve PD or HR taking the lead on the operational and logistical side — managing the development process, aligning with the eLearning partner, and coordinating reviews — while the practice group provides the content and BD helps identify the client-facing opportunities. It’s a genuinely cross-functional initiative, and the firms that treat it that way get the best results.
The PD leader who brings this idea to a Managing Partner or COO as a joint PD/BD initiative — framed not just as a training program but as a client service differentiator and potential revenue stream — is having a very different conversation than one who pitches it as a learning and development expense.
“How do we think about prioritizing which content to develop first?”
A few useful criteria for identifying where to start:
- High-frequency delivery: programs that get delivered repeatedly to the same or similar audiences are the best candidates for replacement or supplementation with on-demand modules
- High-stakes content: onboarding, compliance, policy training — where consistency and trackability are important and the cost of inconsistency is real
- High-expertise content: areas where senior practitioners have specialized knowledge that should be captured before it walks out the door
- High-value client content: topics where clients have expressed strong interest in training, or where the firm’s expertise is demonstrably differentiated
Starting with one well-chosen project — even a single module — creates a proof of concept that builds momentum for the next one.
The Bottom Line
The expertise sitting inside your firm — in the heads of your partners, your senior associates, your practice group leaders — is one of your most valuable and most underutilized assets. It gets delivered live, to whoever happens to be in the room, and then it disappears.
Custom eLearning development is how you change that equation. It is how you capture what your lawyers know, package it with the production quality that reflects your firm’s standards, and deploy it at scale — to develop your people faster, serve your clients better, and create training assets that compound in value over time rather than evaporating after a single session.
The firms that are doing this well are not treating training as an operational cost to be minimized. They are treating their lawyers’ expertise as an asset to be leveraged. That mindset shift — from training as expense to knowledge as IP — is what separates the firms that are building something durable from those that are perpetually starting over.
See how SkillBurst by BARBRI helps firms capture and deploy their expertise: 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 | Knowledge Management | Law Firm Training | Client Training | Professional Development | SkillBurst by BARBRI | BARBRI
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