Law Department Management Blog
According to Talent Mgt. Magazine, Vol. 3, June 2007, at 20, US corporations “spend about $20 billion a year on employee education in the form of tuition reimbursement.” That may be, but I have never heard of an in-house lawyer taking courses that an employer reimburses.
Probably some lawyers pursue an MBA and maybe some a specialized LLM such as in corporate law (as this author did). Another possibility for tuition reimbursement in-house are courses on how to make more skillful use of software or project management tools (See my post of April 18, 2005 and Feb. 1, 2006 on project managers; Aug. 22, 2006 on requiring project managers for large cases; Dec. 22, 2006 on Eversheds and project managers; and May 10, 2006 on Canadian rankings of the skills needed for in-house lawyers.).
Notwithstanding one-off courses, my impression is that tuition reimbursement covers courses that are taken for a grade toward a degree. Perhaps that perquisite also covers when senior lawyers of corporations take executive development courses (See my posts of April 12, 2006 about executive education courses; Jan. 27, 2006 about Bethlehem Steel’s GC; Aug. 26, 2006 #3 about courses; and May 14, 2005 about a course at Harvard Business School.)
It might be appropriate to think of expenditures on programs like this as the equivalent to tuition reimbursement courses. To spin the dial once more, reimbursement of CLE expenditures may not be counted in the $20 billion but it serves some of the same purposes.