City firm Linklaters has launched Web-based training courses to enable businesses to comply with the growing burden of competition law.

Competition e-Learning is the brainchild of Andrew McBride, a managing associate in the firm's antitrust department, and follows his six-month secondment as antitrust counsel to a client with more than 100,000 employees.


Mr McBride, who developed the course with Brussels-based competition partner Johan Ysewyn and the firm's e-business team, said: 'During the secondment, I found myself travelling all over Europe giving seminars on antitrust. That is good for maintaining contacts, but to ensure a minimum level of cover we needed a way of delivering that message more effectively.'


Linklaters: sets three courses

The service - part of Linklaters' Blue Flag on-line product - contains three courses covering contact and dealings with competitors, abuse of market power, and how to cope with dawn raids.

The technology behind Competition e-Learning was developed with input from IT consultancy Fuel. It allows the product to be tailored to individual clients' needs and integrated into their existing compliance programmes. Companies also have the option of tracking employees' attendance on courses and their scores on various tests.


Information is provided through different media, including animation, graphics, sound and text.


'We thought long and hard about how best to use different media to convey the message,' Mr McBride said. He added that the firm would look in the future to provide on-line content through video, but said this is constrained by clients' own systems.


Patrick Hynes, Linklaters' director of e-business, said: 'e-learning is becoming increasingly important to in-house counsel and compliance functions as it can add significant value in terms of improved risk-management and increased efficiency.'