On the air with Minnesota Lawyers Mutual

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Webcasts have come a long way from their fuzzy, ever-rebuffering beginnings. For years, Minnesota CLE has been the giant locally in bringing attorneys educational material via Internet video, but a new player in the game is offering another option.

Minneapolis-based Minnesota Lawyers Mutual recently debuted its own webcast studio and has since put on about half a dozen CLE webcasts that have reached an average of about 350 lawyers each.

By the admission of Todd Scott, MLM’s vice president of risk management, the company learned from the best when it decided to put together its own studio.

“We have a long-standing relationship with Minnesota CLE, and their facilities and people are great,” he said. “But that arrangement was never meant to be permanent. We had it in the back of our minds for years that we wanted our own facility.”

The 16-by-20-foot studio is located in a previously vacant MLM office, and cost around $20,000 to put together. It has three cameras, Rhode Podcast microphones, and a separate area where an audio-visual technician helps stream the webcast while choosing the camera shots and checking mic levels. The studio also has the capability to bring in out-of-town seminar participants via Skype.

The idea was to do more than provide a static shot of a panel facing an audience. MLM tried to replicate the look and feel of a radio studio, given the popularity of televised radio talk programs on ESPN and other TV networks.

“We’re different from a lot of organizations when it comes to online education,” said Jayne Harris, MLM vice president of business development. “Many providers just shoot over the head of a live audience. We design content specifically for an online audience.”

Webcasts from the new studio are presented live, on demand and via scheduled repeats — the latter of which has shown to be a surprisingly popular option, according to Harris. The first webcast from the new studio was sent out on Jan. 3, with more than 570 attorneys registered to view it. About 90 more attorneys signed up to watch a replay of that first program.

A new option

Mark Lanterman, chief technology officer with Computer Forensic Services in Minnetonka, conducts about half a dozen CLEs each year, and said the quality at both MLM’s new space and Minnesota CLE is world-class.

“I’m on the faculty at the Federal Judicial Center in Washington, D.C., and MLM’s studio has better functionality than that one,” he said. “There, the viewers see either the speaker or the slides. With MLM you can see both at once.

“The quality is fantastic — it’s a very professional set-up.”

One way in which MLM’s webcast studio differs from Minnesota CLE’s is that MLM has chosen to hand off the job of content delivery to a third party rather than doing it in-house. Austin, Texas-based InReach, which does similar work for many state and local bar associations, takes the footage captured by MLM and delivers it to viewers from its own powerful servers.

“We wanted to get away from the cable-access type of set that most webcasts have,” said Scott. “We wanted to create a studio environment where really good conversations could happen.”

And while the video quality of MLM’s webcasts is important, the company realized that most of the lawyers who watch webcasts are doing more listening than watching – they have an ear open while they catch up on work.

“The challenge was creating a way to broadcast really good conversations that people will want to pay attention to,” said Scott.

“We put a lot of emphasis on the audio. We were going for the look and feel of a video podcast. The quality of the microphones and the audio reproduction forces the speakers to forget about the cameras and really focus on what they’re saying.”

While developing the new studio, MLM transferred its library of on-demand webcasts to the new platform. Meanwhile, teams within the company worked to secure the platform and to make the most of the latest web streaming technology.

MLM’s hopes for the future of its new webcast capability include expanding its distance learning offerings both by creating more educational program and by tapping into InReach’s network of lawyer-related associations and affiliates.

“Online CLE is changing,” said Scott. “You don’t need to spend a fortune to stream good-looking, good-quality content.”