I received an email from a West representative the other day calling my attention to the new CLE Mobile iPhone App (as well as letting me know that the West LegalEdcenter is a fan of Legal Geekery — aww, I’m blushing).

Anyway, now that finals are over, I thought now would be the perfect opportunity to check it out.

As you can see, it’s an attractive iPhone app.  The orange textured gradient is very web 2.0.

Once the program loads up, you’re able to register an account right on the iPhone.  At this screen, you select your username, password, and primary state.  This can be changed later if you’d like to receive credit in another state.  After registration, they send you a confirmation email, but you don’t need to read it before you log in.

The interface is very polished as you can see on the right.  Downloading was very quick over wireless network — I initially tried to download a talk over wireless on my pre-3G iPhone and then gave up.  I can’t really blame West for that, as it may be possible over 3G, and I’m just too cheap to buy a 3GS.

Now that we’ve got the course downloaded, the next step is to play it.  This, sadly, is where the program runs into some problems.  Maybe my expectations were too high, but when I opened up the course materials to see Word documents not even formatted for an iPhone, I got unreasonably annoyed.  There was also a “powerpoint presentation” which was clearly a .ppt file rendered to PDF.  I’m a bit baffled about why this design choice was made.  I’m fairly certain the developers could have used full screen images for each powerpoint page, and allowed users to flip between slides.  They didn’t, for whatever reason.  And there’s no way I’m going to read text not formated into iPhone-sized columns.  I would have expected something similar to the Lexis app’s case formatting.  As far as I’m concerned, the supplemental materials feature is in an early beta stage right now.

So presentation problems aside, the audio playback is quite good.  Given the unpolished supplemental presentation code, I half expected that viewing the supplemental material while listening to the audio lesson would stop the playback, but it kept playing without skipping a beat.

Although I’m just a lowly law student, I can definitely see the benefit of a program like this.  If I had a long commute to work, I could make the decision to get some CLE credit, find a course, download it, and submit the course for credits all between leaving my house and getting to work.  In that respect, it’s a clear upgrade from a pure podcast system.  It’s sort of a one-stop-mobile-shop for Continuing Legal Education.

If this program gets to the point where it’s like playback of my law school classes — that is, you listen to the audio while a fullscreen powerpoint presentation advances itself, this could definitely be a powerful little app.  For the moment though, don’t go into it expecting a terribly polished system.  Still, I have high hopes.  I’m graduating in a few months, after all.