When the American Bar Association convenes in New York City next month for its annual meeting, it will offer a series of low-cost continuing legal education programs geared toward attorneys who may never have attended an ABA event before.
Called "CLE in the City," the courses run as little as $25 in practice areas such as antitrust, construction law, mergers and acquisitions, securities law, family law, financial technology, international dispute and resolution, the legal profession, trial practice, and white-collar criminal law. Attorneys can take a single course, or a "track" of three courses with a lunch program and a keynote speech, for $95.
"We want the solo practitioners [and] the legal aid lawyers who often can't afford to come to these kinds of programs," said Stephen Younger, a partner at Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler who is among the organizers of this year's ABA meeting.
Several large law firms, the New York City Bar Association, Fordham Law Center, New York International Arbitration Center, and the United Nations are underwriting the costs to keep them minimal to attendees.
"They're donating their space, they're donating their people, they're donating food for the lunches," said Younger, a past president of the New York State Bar Association. "We wanted New York lawyers to have programs that would be cutting edge with phenomenal speakers so they could look at it and say, 'How could I not go to it?'"
The Aug. 10-15 convention will be headquartered at the New York Hilton Midtown, but the CLE programs and other events will be held at various midtown venues. For more information, go to www.americanbar.org/portals/annual-meeting.html.