Have you checked out our CLEs Lately? If not, you should. Harris County Law Library is home to hundreds of volumes of Continuing Legal Education (CLE) coursebooks published annually by the State Bar of Texas. These resources are often overlooked as a form of research, but they can provide valuable insights into a particular area of law. They typically include legislative updates, focused discussions regarding specific issues, court trends, and recent case law developments. The articles are written by experienced attorneys who are recognized experts in their field and regularly practice in that area.
The library collects CLE materials for many subject areas, including family law, wills, trusts, & probate, employment law, litigation, real estate law, criminal law, and much more. Just look at our catalog to see what we have. Coursebooks usually hit the shelves at the beginning of the year following the year in which they are published. This means that you can now find 2016 course materials in our library.
For those of you who may not have visited our library in a while or for those of you who are regular visitors who may not have noticed, we have rearranged and moved our CLE materials. All CLE resources, including the criminal law coursebooks, are now shelved in one location of the library. Also, in an effort to make the collection more accessible, we have aligned our CLE categories to more closely match those set out by the Texas State Bar and the various law sections comprising the Houston Bar Association. Thus, some of our familiar categories may have a new name. For example, estate planning coursebooks have been moved to a new category: Probate, Estates, & Trusts, and DTPA materials are shelved in the Commercial and Consumer Law section. If you have any trouble locating a particular topic or are wondering whether we have a particular resource, just ask one of our helpful librarians for assistance.
In addition, we have added the tables of contents of the CLE coursebooks to our library catalog. So, if you are looking for a specific presentation or a particular topic, you can now search our catalog to see if we have it. The contents are included on CLEs from 2014 to present.