Introducing My First Online Course

I’m excited today to launch a new product line, Agile Attorney Learning, and the first product in that line, an online course titled Agile Productivity for Legal Professionals.

Here’s how it came to be:

I was at ABA Techshow a few weeks ago watching Jess Birken & Charity Anastasio deliver a talk about Kanban for Lawyers, which I think is great. My goal has always been to start a movement around Agile tools for legal professionals, so I love that others are spreading the gospel. Jordan Couch was in the room, who has also been teaching Kanban a fair bit lately. 

Here’s the thing: I know I taught Kanban to Jess and Jordan, and I’m pretty sure Jordan taught Charity (or maybe it was Greg McLawsen, I’m not sure).

So I was standing in the back with the amazing Aastha Madaan (also an agile attorney) and I jokingly whispered to her, “I should start a video library of other people teaching my stuff.” Her response surprised me: She jabbed her elbow into my ribs and said, loud enough for a few people to turn around, “You should start a video library of *you* teaching your stuff, you dope!”

I knew immediately she was right. Or rather, I’ve known it for a while (in part because Jess and others have been telling me too). But, as can so easily happen, I’d been blocked on actually getting it out. I have a sticky note on the wall next to my desk that asks the question, “Are you procrastinating to avoid failure?” But even that reminder isn’t always enough.

Aastha’s elbow was my tipping point, however. So for the last couple of weeks I’ve been building lessons and testing content to get ready for this initial launch.

I call it a soft launch ’cause I’m actually building the course Lean Startup style (and eventually I’ll include a lesson about what that means). As of today I’ve generated enough lessons that I’m comfortable launching as a Minimum Viable Product, and I’ve priced the course accordingly. 

Anyone who enrolls now will get locked in at that price—no additional charges no matter how many lessons I add. As I add content, however, I’ll also ratchet up the price bit by bit to reflect the value of the total content in the course.

But I also want to include a special deal for those of you who have been listening and supporting and working with me this whole time, which is why I set up a special coupon where the first 30 people who enroll in the course get it for free forever! In exchange, I hope you’ll engage with the lessons and give me your feedback so that I can continue to deliver valuable content and improve upon what’s already there.

Once those 30 slots are gone (and a bunch of them got claimed from a single tweet I sent earlier today), I’m offering the next 30 slots at a discounted rate, so if that first link stops working you can click this one for the early adopter rate. After that, I’m going to let the course stand on its own for a while to make sure I’ve got the value premise right.

(Crazy as it sounds, one amazing person has told me that they want to pay the full price in order to support my work. If you’re one of those people, you go to the regular course page. Megan Zavieh I’m looking at you ?.)

Special thank yous to Aastha, Jess, Jordan, Greg, & Charity for spreading the word about Agile methods for lawyers. And also to Ernie Svenson for his advice and encouragement, and to Sam Glover, Matt Homann, Aaron Street, and the entire class of the Lawyerist TBD2 (now LabCon) conference for continuing to encourage me to draw the owl!

Finally, you may have noticed that I’ve put my office hours sessions on hold for now. Partly that was due to a crazy travel schedule through February (5 weeks in a row) and partly due to me going heads down in building out this course. I do hope to start them up again, but I’ll be on spring break with my kiddos next week so it will be at least a couple of weeks. 

I’ll likely change the format too; I enjoyed the conversations I had, but demand wasn’t exactly beating down the door so I’m going to re-work a few things before it returns. You can still sign up though and you’ll be the first to know whatever format it takes.

As always, I’d love to hear from you about the course or any other topic. Please don’t hesitate to drop me a line.

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