As a lawyer, I'm required by law to undergo 15 hours of continuing legal education, or CLE, every year. Now, as a tax law specialist I spend way more than that amount of time just keeping up with the constant changes to the tax laws, but under the CLE requirement, most of the time that I spend treading water with the Internal Revenue Code doesn't count. I've also got to spend time listening to others talk about new developments in the law.

To insure compliance, the rules require every active member of the Oregon bar to submit a report every three years, laying out his or her CLE activities for the triennial period just concluded. And it so happens that my cycle ends this year, and so I'm putting together now my CLE list for the period Jan. 1, 2002 through Dec. 31, 2004.

As usual, I'm quite a few hours shy of the 45-hour minimum, especially in the mandatory areas of ethics, child abuse reporting, and "elimination of bias." Thus, during the final two weeks of the year, I'm engaging in the festive solstice ritual of Listening to Audiotapes of CLE Presentations Past. From here to New Year's Eve, on my sound system Johnny Mathis's "I'll be Home for Christmas" and Guy Lombardo's "Auld Lang Syne" are being pushed aside for some fascinating spoken-word material. Yesterday it was "Child Abuse Reporting -- Recognizing the Danger Signs." Today, just to spice things up, I think we'll go with "25+ Years of Female Litigators in Portland's Major Law Firms" -- a scintillating three-hour program. After that it's "Annual Ethics Update," and maybe a hearty helping of "Estate Planning: Fixing the Common Problems."

Woo hoo. Happy Festivus.