How to Earn CLEs and the Skills, Confidence, and Connections You Need in the AI Era

Be honest: does professional development sneak up on you? You look up from the relentless pace of your workload and realize year-end is approaching and those CLE boxes can’t check themselves—so you scramble to book something and block off a couple of days for a summit or annual meeting.

You attend, mingle (or avoid mingling), and promptly catch the first flight back to your full docket. Certificates earned, and it’s back to business as usual.

That approach may satisfy requirements, but you should know that, these days, it comes at a cost.

The legal profession is under an incredible amount of pressure to evolve in a major way: artificial intelligence is changing everyday workflows; ethical considerations and regulatory requirements are so nuanced; client expectations shift rapidly.

Many of the rules you know are being rewritten, which means the way you approach career development today could be the safeguard for your future success in the legal profession.

So, this year, why not try a new strategy? Pick a conference that speaks to you, truly invest in actively participating, and see how it pays off.

Prepare for Real Impact Back at the Office

Aiming to take a more proactive role in your professional development, keep this goal in mind: You want to return to the office not just compliant, but sharper, better equipped, and ready to do things a little differently.

A good conference will offer you plenty of opportunities to hit that goal, including:

CLE Credits

Of course, this is why you’re here, reading this article. Attending a conference is an excellent way to tackle multiple CLEs at once.

For example, at Relativity Fest Chicago, you can earn a combined 10 CLE credits from sessions including a judicial panel, an international panel, and a mock argument on the use of generative AI for document review.

Take a close look at your event’s session catalog and make note of the sessions that will really hold your interest and improve your approach to your work.

Lessons on Legal & Tech Trends

According to the 2024 Future Ready Lawyer Report, almost 70 percent of lawyers in law firms reported already using generative AI at least once a week—and that was a year ago. Given current trends, it’s safe to say that number has grown in 2025.

What this means for you is: not keeping up with those trends will put you squarely behind your competition in the coming years, in both winning clients and progressing your career.

In the law, it does little good to be a jack of all trades and master of none. But if you aren’t ready to talk through the details of “Generative AI in e-Discovery: How to Test, Trust, and Thrive in a New AI Era” (another example from the Relativity Fest agenda), it’s a good idea to attend a few diverse sessions that can help you explore which subject areas most intrigue you. You’ll be well equipped to specialize from there.

So give yourself an opportunity to identify which emerging and evolving areas of law and practice (AI for doc review? data breach response? MA&D?) call your name, and think about how sessions can help you keep tabs on ethical issues, case law developments, and regulatory shifts among them.

Risk-free, Hands-on Tech Exposure

All that shiny new AI you keep hearing about? All the promises to lighten your load of rote work while enhancing your ability to serve your clients? It’s difficult to wrap your head around any of it without giving the tech a try for yourself—but that’s a lot easier said than done.

At a tech-forward conference, you can take advantage of hands-on labs, workshops, and product sessions to get more familiar with emerging technologies and how they may (or may not) suit your team and workflows. And you can do it with no client data or real cases involved, in a sandbox environment that’s ready to show you what’s what.

At Relativity Fest, you’ll find both instructor-led workshops and self-guided learning labs that can help you give Relativity aiR a try, as well as many other features in RelativityOne. If you’ve been curious about how it all works, there’s no better place to find out than in Chicago this October.

Improve Workflows & Best Practices

The hardest-hitting benefits of investing in a good conference aren’t lofty or conceptual. Many of them are deeply tactical. Take, for example, the chance to hear concrete advice on managing emerging evidence types or boosting efficiency.

The operational side of legal work isn’t always forefront in the minds of lawyers and other legal practitioners. Often, you’re so busy just doing the work that’s demanded of you that pausing to look up and evaluate if you can do it better or faster or cheaper isn’t just unrealistic, it’s demoralizing.

But this is a huge benefit of stepping away to focus on development in an educational, communal, and purposeful setting. Pushing pause on your to-do list to join a workshop or hear your peers reflect on what’s working for them (and what isn’t) can be just the spark of inspiration you need to innovate within your own practice.

The Career Capital You Can’t Afford to Miss

In fact, it’s those moments of connection and knowledge exchange that make conferences indispensable if you’re really looking to drive your career forward. These are the “soft” benefits of conference attendance, which you’ll carry with you for the rest of your professional practice.

Forging connections with peers, industry experts, and thought leaders has a remarkable way of bringing the loftiest ideas down to earth. The brilliant panelists on that CLE session? They’re facing a lot of the same challenges you are. Things don’t come easily to them because they’re smart; they’re smart because nothing comes easily.

Look at networking not as a chance to bulk up your LinkedIn connections, but as a place to build community with other humans doing work like yours. These are people—2,000 of them, in the case of Relativity Fest, including hundreds of lawyers—who can relate to you, and learn from you, as much as they can teach you. Odds are, they’re super excited to get to know you and talk more about all of this.

If ever you feel intimidated by the seismic shifts you read about in the legal world, two simple habits can help soothe your anxiety:

1. Do some real learning about the thing that seems scary. If you dig just a little deeper, you’ll likely find it’s not as foreign or fantastical as the headlines make it sound.
2. Talk to a human about it. Doomscrolling through yet more articles will never be as fruitful as turning to a peer and asking: “what are your thoughts on this? should I be worried?”

You can do that online, sure. But face-to-face conversation and connection just hit different.

In all my years attending Relativity Fest, I’ve never walked up to a speaker or a familiar face from my LinkedIn feed and not had them enthusiastically welcome me into a meaningful and breezy conversation. This is a community that’s eager to make everyone feel welcome and valued.

Notably, remember that carving out time to intentionally connect with people and build community will mean looking at your conference agenda strategically. As one colleague puts it, be sure to plan out what you have to do, so you can do what you want to do. You’ll be glad you did.

Making the Business Case

Whether you’re already on board with all of this or still pondering it, your next step is to try. Be more considered in your CLE selections this year by signing up to attend a conference that appeals to you for its breadth of content, diversity of speakers, and opportunities for connection.

Naturally, this is easier said than done. In many organizations, making a case for this kind of exercise can be a project of its own, and you’ll need some buy-in before you can book your ticket.

Here are some key items to share with stakeholders alongside your request to attend an upcoming conference.

Draft a playbook for how you’ll absorb as much value as possible.

That plan for how to maximize your time at the event? It’ll come in handy here. Start by listing the specific sessions you’d prioritize attending and why you believe they’ll help you add value to your organization and its clients. Emphasize:

• The breadth of topics covered within your practice area and in broader industry trends.
• Opportunities to get CLE credits and/or learn from well-known experts in your field.
• Ways you can get hands-on with any new tech that’s of interest to your team.

Highlight real ROI and be budget conscious.

Numbers are numbers, and sometimes they’re limited. Your pitch can be budget-friendlier if you plan far enough in advance to book hotels and travel early, take advantage of provided meals during the conference, and so on. Be sure to check for applicable savings on registration; for instance, Relativity Fest offers a dedicated rate for public sector attendees.

Just as compelling would be setting some ROI-driven goals. For example:

• Aim to achieve a certain number of touchpoints with clients or prospective clients during or after the conference.
• Create a cost comparison between registering for, traveling to, and taking time to attend several a la carte sessions over the year versus achieving many of your CLE requirements at a single event.
• Express interest in speaking at next year’s conference, to save on registration costs and boost brand visibility.
• Set up time with partners or vendors also in attendance, to talk shop and learn how their team is adding value to the services and products they deliver to yours.

Present ideas for how you’ll share insights gained when you get back.

There are tons of ways you can socialize what you learn and make the most of what you spend to attend a conference. For instance:

• Take copious notes, clean them up, and share with your colleagues for their perusal. You can answer any questions that come up or help them dig deeper into topics of interest.
• Put together a lunch-and-learn presentation with your top takeaways.
• Name two workflows or strategies you can optimize with what you learned and put together a pitch for doing so.

You can also go beyond your team and share insights with the wider org. Maybe sharing some event reflections with your social media team will help showcase your firm’s commitment to ongoing learning exercises that help you better serve clients.

Research some stats on the perspective and community you’ll encounter.

Networking isn’t just valuable for you as a professional—it has benefits for your team and firm, too. You’ll have a chance to connect with potential clients, listen for the challenges your clients are facing and what help they need to tackle them, come up with co-marketing ideas with your partners or vendors, and learn how industry peers are adapting in this marketplace. Informed by these diverse perspectives, your conversations and relationships will help improve the work you and your team do each day.

Drive home these benefits by citing the size and breadth of your chosen conference, who typically attends, and the diversity of content you’ll encounter.

Need an example? Check out some conference pitches designed to earn buy-in from decision makers here (for in-person attendance) and here (for digital).

Ready to Reimagine Professional Development?

Rushing to half-listen to whatever topic fits your schedule is not the engagement CLE requirements are intended to inspire. Assuming you want to stay competitive and better serve clients in a profession that’s become a lot less predictable, now is a crucial time to approach ongoing learning with greater focus.

Fortunately, this doesn’t have to be boring. Great conferences are built not like obligations, but as opportunities to deepen your expertise, sharpen your practice, and build a network of peers who can have a huge impact on your career.

And they’re fun! Which is crucial not just to slap a band-aid on that burnout, but because solid insights and meaningful relationships are a lot more likely to stick when you’re enjoying the experience of gathering them.

Start planning your next professional development exercise this way and watch it bear fruit. I bet it’ll be more enlivening than you think.

And if you’re in need of suggestions? Give Relativity Fest Chicago a look. Offering 100+ educational sessions across 13 tracks, with 2,000 attendees from many professional and legal backgrounds, you’re sure to pick up on something incredible.

Graphics for this article were created by Natalie Andrews.

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