Every March, Lawline pauses to do something we believe matters: look back at the year and recognize the women whose expertise, preparation, and generosity of spirit made this platform better. The educators who spent hours in front of a camera so attorneys across the country could learn something useful. The ones who took hard subjects seriously and made them accessible. The ones whose names kept appearing in course reviews left by attorneys who sat down expecting a routine CLE and walked away genuinely moved.
2025 gave us no shortage of those women.
This year's list features 29 faculty members whose courses ranked among the most completed on Lawline in 2025. Together, they covered five themes that defined the year in legal education: artificial intelligence and technology; ethics and professional responsibility; wellness and mental health; litigation and practice management; and diversity in the profession.
If 2025 had a defining theme in legal education, it was artificial intelligence. Attorneys everywhere scrambled to understand what it means, what it allows, and what it ethically requires of them. These women were there to answer those questions with rigor, practicality, and no small amount of foresight.
If there is one name that defined AI education for attorneys in 2025, it's Ashley Hallene. With three courses among the year's most completed programs, Ashley stands at the top of this list by virtue of a rare combination of deep expertise and genuine teaching skill.
Her course, Artificial Intelligence and ChatGPT: Uses, Abuses, and Ethical Standards, was the most completed Lawline course by a woman in 2025, with over 2,500 attorneys finishing it. She also co-presented Practical & Ethical Questions: Does Artificial Intelligence Pose an Existential Threat to Law? and AI Machina, Esq.: Practical Tools, Risks, and Ethical Rules alongside Jeffrey Allen of Graves & Allen.
What makes Ashley's work stand out is her ability to meet attorneys exactly where they are: acknowledging the anxiety that comes with rapid technological change while offering the kind of grounded, actionable guidance that makes it manageable.
Hope Anderson's course, AI Governance in the US: Key Regulations, Policies, and Global Insights, arrived at exactly the right moment. As AI governance became a genuine policy battleground in 2025, with new frameworks emerging at the state, federal, and international level seemingly every month, attorneys needed a clear-eyed guide to the regulatory landscape. Hope provided one. Her course gives practitioners the context they need to advise clients confidently in an area where the rules are still very much being written.
Anastasia Tramontozzi sits at the intersection of two of 2025's biggest legal conversations. Her course, How Social Media and AI Can Affect Client-Attorney Relationships and Communication, examines how AI and social media are reshaping the attorney-client relationship. It’s an increasingly urgent topic as clients form expectations in a world of instant information, AI-generated content, and always-on communication. It's an essential watch for any attorney thinking seriously about how they connect with clients in 2026 and beyond.
In Don't Risk Ethics Violations & Confidential Information Disclosure – How to Develop a Strong Firm AI Policy, Desire'e Martinelli tackled one of the most pressing questions firms faced in 2025: how do you actually build an AI policy that works in practice? Her course gives attorneys the tools to assess risk, protect client confidentiality, and develop governance structures that hold up not just on paper, but in the daily reality of a busy legal practice.
With a direct, no-frills approach that attorneys clearly responded to, Angeli Raven Fitch's AI Ethics for Attorneys became one of the year's standout programs. Her course grounds ethical obligations in real-world scenarios, making it an indispensable starting point for any attorney who wants to integrate AI responsibly.
Ivy Grey has a talent for translating complexity into clarity, and her course, A Practical Guide to AI and Your Ethical Duties, is a masterclass in that skill. With over 1,000 completions and strong reviews, this program has earned its place as a go-to resource for attorneys who want to do AI right and understand exactly why it matters that they do.
What does professional identity look like when AI can generate your content, your strategy, and the first draft of almost anything? In Make Your Mark: Building a Brand in the Age of AI, Wendy Heilbut and Savannah Merceus take on that question with creativity and purpose, offering attorneys a thoughtful framework for building a distinctive, authentic brand in a landscape where standing out has never mattered more.
Ethics courses have always been central to what Lawline does. In 2025, the women on this list brought fresh perspectives to both perennial and emerging challenges, from bullying and workplace culture to engagement letters, error disclosure, and the ethics of remote practice.
Trisha Rich has become one of the most respected voices in legal ethics in the country, and her 2025 course on bullying, The Ethics, Management, and Prevention of Bullying & Other Bad Behavior in the Legal Profession, is among her finest work with Lawline. Drawing on her national leadership in professional responsibility and her role in founding the Attorney Defense Initiative, she approaches a difficult and often underdiscussed subject with the rigor and candor it deserves. Over 2,300 attorneys completed this course in 2025, a number that says something important about where the profession's attention is focused.
Tracy Kepler accomplished something in 2025 that very few faculty members ever do: she placed three courses among the year's most completed programs, covering ethics, wellness, and jurisdictional practice.
Her course The Ethics of Errors takes on one of the most uncomfortable realities of legal practice: that even excellent attorneys make mistakes, and that those mistakes carry real professional obligations. Her Beating Burnout: Stopping It Before It Starts gives attorneys the practical tools to sustain their careers over the long haul. And Here, There, and Everywhere: Multi-Jurisdictional Practices and the Unauthorized Practice of Law rounds out a year that confirmed Tracy as one of Lawline's most versatile and reliably compelling educators.
Based on a first-of-its-kind study involving more than 6,000 Illinois lawyers, Bullying in the Legal Profession, presented by Roberta Liebenberg and Stephanie Scharf, is both landmark research and deeply practical guidance. Their findings about how bullying disproportionately affects women, attorneys of color, lawyers with disabilities, and LGBTQ+ attorneys give the profession both a diagnosis and a roadmap for change.
Jayne Reardon and Jackie Schimmel, joined by Anthony Davis of FisherBroyles, reframe the engagement letter as what it actually is: the ethical foundation of every client relationship. Their course, Why Engagement Letters REALLY Matter – To Clients, To the Firm and To You – and What Should They Contain, gives attorneys a comprehensive, practical guide to crafting engagement letters that protect clients, the firm, and the attorney.
As attorneys become more active on social media, and as the platforms themselves evolve faster than the rules governing them, the ethical questions multiply. Elizabeth Simon's Navigating Legal Ethics in Social Media: Rules, Pitfalls, and Best Practices cuts through the noise, offering clear, rule-based guidance on one of the profession's newer and most consequential frontiers.
Wellness, Mental Health & Professional Development
In 2025, attorney wellness was a defining concern of the profession. The women below contributed some of the year's most human, most honest, and most genuinely helpful courses on what it takes to sustain a legal career.
Lynn Garson's approach to wellness is precisely what makes her course essential: she doesn't traffic in platitudes. Her program, Wellness for Lawyers: Practical Strategies, Trusted Resources, and a Reality Check, gives attorneys a realistic picture of what wellness support in the legal industry actually looks like, and concrete strategies for advocating for their own well-being in spite of it. Attorneys who've completed it describe it as a "reality check" in the best possible sense.
Burnout is a word that gets used a lot in conversations about the legal profession. In Beyond Burnout: Mental Health, Stress, and Pathways to Resilience for Lawyers, Karen Munoz goes beyond the word to examine what's actually happening and what can actually help. Her course offers attorneys both the science and the strategy they need to build careers that are sustainable over the long term, not just the next billing cycle.
The legal profession is, by its nature, full of difficult people. Claire Parsons equips attorneys with something genuinely useful: mindfulness-based strategies for navigating those relationships without sacrificing professionalism or well-being. Her course, Dealing with Difficult People: Mindfulness trategies for Lawyers, is direct, practical, and surprisingly enjoyable to work through.
Valerie Madamba's Essential Legal Presentation Skills: Stand Out and Build Influence Through Powerful Storytelling is a reminder that professional development is about more than compliance. Her program on presentation and storytelling helps attorneys become more compelling advocates, be it in the courtroom, the boardroom, or anywhere in between. It's the kind of CLE that attorneys return to.
Litigation, Arbitration & Practice Management
These educators delivered courses that sharpened core skills and expanded competencies across some of the most demanding areas of legal practice. From arbitration strategy to remote practice ethics, their work met attorneys where the work actually happens.
With nearly 1,800 completions, Jeanne Huey's course, Coping with Difficult Clients and Lawyers: Tips and Tools to Stay Both Ethical and Professional, was one of 2025's most popular programs. What elevates it above a simple stress-management guide is Jeanne's decision to root the entire discussion in the ABA Model Rules, making clear that professionalism isn't just good etiquette, it's an ethical obligation. This course placed #15 on the Top 25 Courses of 2025.
Arbitration has its own logic, its own culture, and its own pitfalls, and Patricia Thompson knows them intimately. Her course, 10 Common Mistakes Attorneys Should Avoid in Arbitration, identifies the specific errors that even experienced litigators make when they enter the arbitration arena and explains precisely how to avoid them.
The title earns it, and Sescily R. Coney delivers on the promise. In Laughing Through Litigation: Navigating Difficult Judges and Attorneys, she uses humor and hard-won courtroom experience to explore one of litigation's less-discussed challenges: how to stay professional, strategic, and effective when the people around you are making that very, very difficult. It's one of the more refreshing CLEs you'll find in any library.
If Patricia Thompson tells you what not to do in arbitration, Lisa Romeo helps you avoid arriving there under the wrong conditions in the first place. Her course, Clause and Order: Drafting Effective Arbitration Clauses, on drafting effective arbitration clauses is precise, practical, and indispensable for any attorney who touches transactional work.
Expert witnesses can make or break a case, and knowing how to work with them effectively is a skill that too few attorneys develop deliberately. In The Devil is in the Details: Expert Witness Tips for Attorneys, Dr. Allison Muller brings an insider perspective that litigators won't find anywhere else.
Private equity transactions operate by their own rules, and Kimberly Sheehan's course demystifies them for attorneys who need to navigate this space confidently. Clear, thorough, and well-structured, Private Equity M&A: Understanding Fundamental Concepts of Private Equity Transactions and Key Differences from Strategic M&A was one of 2025's most completed courses outside of ethics and wellness – a sign of how much demand exists for substantive transactional education.
Remote work is a permanent feature of the legal landscape now, and so are the compliance questions it raises. In Managing the Remote Workforce: Compliance Considerations & Identifying and Mitigating Risk, Laura M. Fant's course gives attorneys the framework they need to manage distributed teams without running afoul of the law, a resource that's as relevant as ever heading into 2026.
Lauren Scardella's You Don't Have an Office? Operating an Ethical and Fully Remote Legal Practice takes the remote work conversation from the perspective of the attorney herself: how do you run a law practice ethically when there's no physical office? Her answer is specific, practical, and grounded in the realities of solo and small firm practice.
Social Media Law
The legal questions surrounding social media have moved from niche to essential faster than almost any other area of practice. As platforms evolve and their real-world consequences multiply, attorneys can no longer afford to treat this as someone else's specialty. The educator below was among the most sought-after voices on the subject in 2025.
Social media law is one of the fastest-moving areas of legal practice, and Sarah W. Anderson's Social Media Laws – The 5 Ws is among the best introductions to it available in CLE. By organizing the subject around the classic framework of Who, What, When, Where, and Why, she creates a program that's both immediately accessible and genuinely memorable.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
Progress on diversity in the legal profession is real, but it's also uneven, and it often gets measured in ways that leave most of the profession out of the picture. The work of broadening those conversations, asking harder questions, and looking beyond the most visible institutions is ongoing.
Conversations about diversity in the legal profession have too often centered on large firms, where the data is most visible and the resources most available. In Diversity in the Legal Profession Outside Big Law Firms, Ayesha Hamilton turns that lens outward, examining what diversity, equity, and inclusion actually look like in the smaller firms, public interest organizations, government offices, and other settings where most attorneys spend their careers. It's an important and underrepresented perspective.
To the Women Who Made It Possible: Thank You
2025 was a year of remarkable breadth. The women on this list taught courses as varied as private equity transactions and mindfulness, AI governance, and laughing through litigation. They came from large firms and solo practices, from academia and government, from nonprofits and insurance companies. What they shared was a commitment to teaching what they know and the ability to make it matter to the attorneys who showed up to learn.
We're grateful to all of them. And we're glad to be back.
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