CEO Today USA Awards

111 www.ceotodaymagazine.com CEO Today USAAwards 2018 TEXAS With that in mind, we recently launched BARBRI Innovations, a suite of solutions solely dedicated to helping schools overcome those challenges. What is BARBRI Innovations composed of? BARBRI Innovations builds on our existing law school curriculum offerings designed to complement a law school’s own curriculum to help it successfully meet its goals for students’ bar passage. We’ve augmented that with our advanced data analytics expertise to help schools make more informed decisions. Serendipitously, we’re also in an environment where there is increasing openness from the American Bar Association (ABA) to allow more traditional legal education to be delivered in the law schools via distance learning (Standard 306). Our 2017 acquisition of iLaw, the leading distance learning provider for law schools, is enabling us to answer the bell and be ready to assist law schools with creative curriculum solutions. We can expand their JD catalog by augmenting with certain specialty courses or even collaborating on completely new graduate programs, like the series at Vanderbilt Law School announced September 2018. Vanderbilt Law School, together with BARBRI’s iLaw, has created a first-of-its-kind online program for non-lawyers. V-Legal is a series of three online courses designed to help executives and managers gain fluency in the legal principles, language and processes business leaders need to understand. This further extends our reach for legal education beyond lawyers. With BARBRI’s three-pronged approach of a proven distance learning solution, law school curricula assistance, and our proprietary data and analytics capabilities, we believe we can play a significant role in helping law schools succeed. In fact, we’re seeing early signs. Just last month, one of our announcements centered on our partnership with Cleveland-Marshall College of Law. The school achieved an outstanding 93 percent pass rate for its first-time takers of the July Ohio Bar Exam, well above the state average of 79 percent and five percentage points higher than any other Ohio law school. This marked the second straight bar exam in which Cleveland-Marshall led the state. What are the educational opportunities BARBRI offers that aren’t specifically related to law school? With legal education as our foundation, over the past several years, we’ve made some strategic decisions and acquisitions that are complementary to our core offerings. Our professional development offerings range from a practical mini MBA (financial skills) for lawyers, to an introduction to Legal English for non-U.S. attorneys, to advanced certification programs in areas impacting the legal profession and beyond, such as cyber literacy, electronic discovery and financial crime prevention. For example, one of the dominant areas of law, especially here in the U.S., is litigation, which inevitably requires diligence and discovery of electronic documents. BARBRI acquired the Association of Certified E-Discovery Specialists (ACEDS), a best-in- class membership association that promotes and verifies proper eDiscovery skills and competence through training, education, and certification. At the same time, the company invested in the Association of Certified Financial Crime Specialists (ACFCS), a worldwide organization offering resources and professional certification for private and public- sector professionals who work in diverse financial crime disciplines, including anti-money laundering, FATCA-tax evasion, fraud and others to help companies maintain compliance. A great majority of corporate compliance officers are also attorneys familiar with BARBRI. And finally, it has become increasingly clear to us how prevalent cybercrime is in every facet of business. In 2016, we joined forces with a global cyber education leader, Cybint, to form BARBRI Cybint Solutions. The company provides cyber awareness education and practical training solutions to help protect a firm or organization, as well as help individuals acquire the skills to get jobs and help fill the vast talent shortage in cybersecurity. Moving forward, what do you see for BARBRI? In the past seven years, we’ve seen a complete transformation of BARBRI both organically and through acquisition. We invested and retooled our company to be more diverse in its offerings during a historically depressed law school market. Now that the U.S. law school market has recovered and is growing again, and our other lines of business take off, we are realizing the fruits of our labor. We will continue to see growth as long as we maintain our commitment to evolving and staying at the forefront of legal education and leveraging the incredible passion and talents of our team. The markets we reach now are so much larger, and our vision of delivering legal education across borders resonates on a planet seemingly smaller and looking for commonalities around the rule of law. We are very excited about our future. Q Q Q “I’m privileged to work with a team of individuals who thrive on seeing our clients and students succeed and who never stop innovating, exploring new sciences in learning, and leveraging technology to produce better outcomes.”