Their offerings currently include several audio programs starting at $149:

• Wage and Hour Class Actions: Avoiding the Scourge By Being Attentive To Your Pay Practices
• FLSA Gets A Face Lift - An Overview Of The Newly Proposed Regulations For The Fair Labor Standard Act
• Win-Win Investigations: 10 Steps to Compliance
• Supreme Court & the ADA
• New California Employment Laws

• Behind the Debate: Advice and Investment Education in the Workplace
• "Employer of Choice" - How a Company Achieves that Reputation
• Fortune Magazine's 100 Best Companies to Work For - What it takes to make the list
• The Top Ten Trends in Employment and Labor Litigation: From a Jury Perspective
• Diversity in the Legal Profession
• The Laid-Off Employee: Minimizing Work Life Disruption
• An Introduction to the Bermuda Triangle of the Workplace: Worker's Compensation, FMLA and ADA
• How well do you know the person you are about to hire?

Past programs are available for playing any time (“on-demand”), new programs are generally held on the 4th Wednesday of every month. Their fall series starts in September and will include a special focus on injury management.

Partner Michael Lotito spearheads the effort from the San Francisco offices of Jackson Lewis and presides over each recording, interviewing other attorneys at the firm in a "meet the press" approach. Jackson Lewis has signed up major players as co-sponsors of this pioneering web site, including American Express, UBS PaineWebber, KPMG, WorkSTEPS, Ceridian, and Sterling Testing Systems.

Mr. Lotito explains that workplace|network was “formed about a year ago in order to deliver educational programming over the net. It is devoted to work life, work law, and work health.” “I've been involved in management education of one kind or another for almost 30 years. We've done everything from face-to-face, to audio, to CD-ROM, to video. [Using the Internet] is just a natural evolution of some of these other techniques we've utilized over the years.”

ADVANTAGES

Delivery via Internet also has the advantage of timely response. A web site can quickly “deliver hot topics, for example, when the Dept of Labor came out with their proposed regulation amending the Fair Labor Standards Act, we were able to create a program immediately dealing with that issue.”

CHALLENGES

Psychological hurdles have also been challenging. The newness and complexity of the technologies they've harnessed — streaming media and online chat — have required persistence and flexibility to overcome the lurking problem of resistance to technology in upper management. “The level of knowledge and sophistication in utilizing this technology is still in its formative stages and so you really need to walk people through it because it can be very intimidating until they've done it a couple of times.” A spokeswoman adds that it's been particularly challenging fostering their live chat “online class”: “Once we get them over the fear of participating live, then they become loyal participants.”

Mr. Lotito says that his time investment is small. He usually meets with participants for half an hour ahead of time to plan before recording each 1 hour program. They outsource the webcast processing (digitization) through a service provider which allows the interviews to be conducted by telephone. Interviewees may call in from anywhere in the world. This site does not use streaming video, echoing a lesson noted in our discussion of MoFo Talk Radio (April issue); audio-only webcasts avoid the problems of slow modems and minimize production time and costs.

“People like the format, they like that it's stimulating, they like the Q&A, they like that it's somewhat irreverent, they like a sense of humor, they like that they can download the materials ahead of time so that they can follow along a little easier.” “The other thing that people love is the 1-hour web chat, or the web class, that comes after the program so that they can electronically have their questions submitted ...”

Any attempt to deliver training via computer must deal with the educational challenge of learning through the deadening face of the computer screen. For this reason, workplace|network is looking closely at live video webcasts. “Live delivery ... where people can actually view you ... you can create more stimulation with respect to delivery of the program by drawing diagrams and things like that. One of the things you have to balance with respect to delivery of the message — it is very cost-effective — [is training effectiveness.] It's difficult to just look at a screen ... or look at a Power Point [slide] and listen to audio. People learn differently, people like to be stimulated; the more interactivity you can create, the better you are.”

Mr. Lotito offers this advice to other law firms interested in giving web seminars (‘webinars’ as they've come to be known): “It's a long term commitment ... Make sure that you've got excellent content.”

Future plans include live webcasts and the move up to video. Mr. Lotito predicts, “The future is unlimited.”