6-Hour Program

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Overview

Why You Should Attend

PLI’s Illinois Basic Skills for Newly Admitted Attorneys is designed to help newly admitted attorneys in Illinois meet their first-year Minimum Continuing Legal Education Basic Skills Course requirements. This program, taught by a faculty of expert practitioners from a range of practice areas, covers important professional responsibility topics and fundamental elements of practice.

What You Will Learn 

  • Effective communications and negotiations
  • Overview (and Avoidance) of the Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission (ARDC) of the Supreme Court of Illinois
  • Professionalism, civility, inclusion and resilience in the legal profession
  • Client confidentiality, attorney-client privilege, and work product protections
  • Digital security and ethical obligations

Who Should Attend

Newly admitted attorneys who need to fulfill their first-year MCLE requirements by attending a Basic Skills Course of no fewer than six hours can satisfy those requirements with this course. New attorneys who have passed the bar in the 2018 cycle but will not be admitted at the time of the October 1 program can still claim credit for program attendance if they are sworn in within 365 days of passing the bar exam.

 

Recent law graduates:

In July 2020, the Illinois Supreme Court entered an administrative order adopting Rule 711(g). That provision established a program for certain recent law graduates to engage in the temporary “performance of legal services” under the supervision of an experienced attorney. See the Court’s press release notes for details. To participate, the qualifying graduate needs to submit an application, signed by the applicant, the supervising attorney, and the dean of the graduate’s law school. This program expires in November 2021.

Each of these Rule 711(g) recent graduates has MCLE requirements:

  1. As the first requirement, each participating graduate needs to complete a Basic Skills Course by the end of the second full month after beginning work. The participant must report compliance with this requirement directly to the Board. This Basic Skills program meets that requirement.
  2. After that, each participant must complete three hours of Illinois-approved MCLE credits every three months. The participant must report compliance with this requirement directly to the Board every three months.

 Because participants will not yet have an ARDC number, Rule 711(g) participants require a special CLE certificate.  Please contact plicredits@pli.edu for a Rule 711(g) CLE certificate upon completion of this Illinois Basic Skills course or all other Illinois-approved PLI CLE courses.

Industries

Credit Details