What happened to the Law Society’s professional development centre?

I've come to rely on the Law Society’s professional development centre (let’s call it PDC) as part of my diet of CPD or continuing competence or whatever we’re meant to call it these days. Over the past 12 months or so I viewed webinars the Law Society offered on vertical agreements, legal privilege in 2020, cyber security and a contract law update. All were pretty good. And all were reasonably priced (not that I personally pay for it).

The Professional Development Centre... gone, but not forgotten

In November, the Law Society pulled the plug on their PDC service. The portal is still there, but all courses have been marked as ‘inactive’ and you can’t purchase new material. I still had a webinar to complete before the switch off occurred. Damn!

It turns out the Law Society put out a blog post out about it in early November, but my attention was elsewhere at the time.  

Changes to the Professional Development Centre | News | Communities - The Law Society

From 23 November 2020, the Professional Development Centre (PDC) will no longer be available.

You’ll need to complete any courses you have begun by this date. You’ll also need to download any training records and certificates you want to keep while you still have access.

Members can soon access future training through our new platform – Law Society Learning.

Ah — so that’s the plan. 

The advent of Law Society Learning is all well and good, but there’s a paltry selection of content on there currently — just practice management stuff. 

And that’s a real shame. What I don’t get is why they couldn’t port across all of the existing content from PDC. They seem to be starting completely from scratch. Perhaps it's a licensing thing.

Oh well. I’m sure it’ll improve over time.