It still requires a commitment – both of time and money. I disagree with Mark above that it’s a breeze. It’s not. Going to a 5-6 hour seminar every now and then takes some effort and planning, so I can imagine doing 16 hours a year.

The point about the demand letter was that that is all it takes to subject you to the CLE requirements. And what about some purely verbal advice given to a friend having legal problems in NY? Does that subject one to CLE requirements? If I gave advice to my cousin who lives in NY, will I have to do 16 hours a year? That’d be a terrible imposition (if online CLE credits are not available).

My mistake about the 32 v.s. 16 hours, sorry. And the way Gideon was concerned about it, I assumed the courses were more difficult to take. I’ve seen CLE courses priced out at $30-40/hr elsewhere, but obviously I’m not real familiar with how this stuff works.

As for the rest of my comment, my point wasn’t intended to be that anyone can do legal work, but rather that not all legal work requires the best-trained and most-experienced lawyers. To use your surgical example, a few years ago I needed to have a cyst removed from my back. Do you think I used the best surgeon in the state?

Actually, my real point was that while most forms of professional regulation may start out as a way to protect consumers from unskilled or unscrupulous providers, inevitably a certain amount of protectionism creeps in, often in the form of barriers to newer, less costly sellers.

A classic example is laws that only allow funeral directors to sell caskets. Certainly, you need expertise to handle dead bodies safely, but anyone can sell a wooden box.

And it certainly is not an economic barrier to anyone. It’s not 32 hours, it’s 16. You can do it online at your leisure, and you can do it in person, for free.

We have been doing it for a while now. Take courses that are ancillary to your main practice area, and you actually wind up learning something new. Or go to a three day conference. I get all of my CLE’s at the securities conference every year.

Actually, look at it another way. Yes, making someone prove a negative is stupid. The answer? They are not going to remove the presumption, they are simply going to remove the exemption.

“Oh, good point. The exemption is stricken, and all attorneys who are admitted to practice law in the State much complete the CLE requirement.”

If you’re a full-time lawyer in New York, 32 hours of CLE is annoying, but it’s a small price to pay to earn lawyer bucks.

On the other hand, if you’re a Connecticut lawyer looking to pick up a few bucks by doing some low-cost legal work for clients in New York…you can’t. Not without spending at least a week in New York, costing maybe $1000 or more for the course and losing a week of your day job.

It’s all justified in the name of protecting clients from poorly trained lawyers, but how much training do you really need to do some simple commercial law? Incorporation, creating and reviewing contracts, copyright and trademark, demand letters…none of it is very hard for the vast majority of routine small business cases. (In fact, all of those are things that self-employed people routinely learn to do themselves from books written by helpful lawyers.)

If you mean that “we lawyers” assume people innocent until proven guilty, then I have to disagree. Maybe — and I say maybe — “we defense lawyers” assume people are innocent until proven guilty (or at least pretend to for the sake of our clients, or jobs). Yet not all attorneys are defense attorneys; some are prosecutors.

I don’t know a single prosecutor (even the straight-arrow “nice” ones) who really starts from the proposition that anyone is innocent until proven guilty. If they did, I suppose they couldn’t do their jobs, so I don’t really fault them for that. At least at the point where you’re trying to prove guilt, you have to be assuming guilt.

So, anyway, I don’t really agree that we treat each other differently. I think the government, which (for me, anyway) includes regulatory agencies, increasingly assumes guilt. It’s easier for them than having to prove it all the time.

Because according to their rules, that subjects you to CLE requirements:

Attorneys practice law pursuant to this section if, during the reporting period, they give legal advice or counsel to, or provide legal representation for, a particular body or individual in a particular situation in either the public or private sector.

My take on it is if you are in private practice anywhere and admitted in NY, then you should be meeting the CLE requirements.

That leaves out public defenders.

OTOH, what happens when you take the position that you are not practicing law in NY, then you write a demand letter for a buddy to a New York defendant. Hmmm, what ARE the penalties for not completing the CLE?