Bar sets events to help sections punch-up their CLE courses: the Florida Bar working for you.

Bar and section members who plan CLE seminars will soon have new resources for improving their offerings to Florida's lawyers.

The Continuing Legal Education Committee will combine its late September meeting in Tallahassee with a workshop featuring top state officials and focusing on incorporating state officials and resources into OLE programs.

The committee also will use its annual retreat in April for a second workshop for CLE program chairs on how to organize and improve the educational efforts.

"My whole year [as chair of the CLE Committee] is 'How can we make our programs better?'" said new committee Chair Gerald Damsky of Boca Raton.

His inspiration, he added, is a series of workshops the committee held several years ago to assist those putting on CLE programs.

"We had moderators for each workshop who were experienced. We had people in the audience who had never put on a workshop who could ask the questions they needed answered. And they could exchange ideas," Damsky recalled. "I can tell you if you had done 100 programs, you would still walk away with a basketful of great ideas."

The Tallahassee meeting is intended to stimulate more great ideas around the theme of how to incorporate state agencies and officials into CLE programs. It is being organized by committee Vice Chair and Supreme Court Clerk Tom Hall.

"He graciously set up our first function -- a tour of the court with the clerk of the court," Damsky said with a chuckle. That will include a meeting in the Supreme Court chambers with Chief Justice Harry Lee Anstead on how and why to include professionalism in CLE programs.

The group will next go to the House chambers in the Capitol for a session led by committee member and legislative staffer Patrick "Booter" Imhof. That segment will include other legislative officials and focus on how the legislature operates and how to keep up with legislative activities.

That will be followed by a tour of the Capitol, including committee rooms, the Senate, galleries, libraries, and where to get copies of bills.

After lunch, the group will meet in the governor's Cabinet Room with Secretary of the Department of Management Services Cynthia Henderson (who is a former vice chair of the committee) and other Cabinet and executive office officials. The...