LRN (company)

Founding (1994)

Dov Seidman founded Legal Research Network (later changed to “LRN”) two years out of Harvard Law School. While working at a law firm, he was assigned a three-week task to research a basic legal issue. He had the idea that clients could save time and money if there was a company that offered legal knowledge and analysis services through an expert network of academics and lawyers. The research would then be repurposed in a database licensed to companies. He was able to pre-sell a $500,000 contract to MCI based on the idea. He raised $2 million from 42 investors to launch the company.

In the first year, LRN had a network of 1,100 legal experts in over 2,500 subjects reported by the Washington Post as being "mostly law professors, solo practitioners and lawyers on leave from their regular jobs".

In the first year LRN attracted 90 clients, 34 of them from Fortune 500 companies.

American Lawyer magazine featured LRN in a feature story called "Should You be Afraid of This Man?" because of concerns in the legal industry that LRN would undercut law firms by charging substantially less.

Expansion into Training (1990s)

The company added ethics and compliance training in the later 1990s as part of an effort to spread legal and ethical awareness throughout organizations, instead of just in their law departments. Online classes, starting in the 2000S, facilitated mass training of thousands of employees at large multi-nationals like Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer. Pfizer trained all 150,000 of its employees with LRN courses. Subjects included complying with sexual harassment laws, trade secrets and anti-trust.

Growth (2000s)

By the year 2000, 200 of the Fortune 500 companies were clients of LRN and the company was reported to be rapidly growing, according to Fortune magazine. High-profile corporate ethics scandals like those at Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco accelerated the demand for corporate ethics education. Corporations that took steps to train employees were less likely to be held liable by the U.S. Department of Justice and other regulators for their missteps.

Starting in the early 2000s, the company offered "common standards" for ethics and corporate compliance education. Competitors like Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer shared as much of 90% of the course materials, helping to standardize best practices for business ethics across corporate America.

Seidman testified in 2004 before the U.S. Sentencing Commission about the need for companies to develop ethical cultures instead of “check-the-box”, compliance-only approaches, and his testimony helped shaped the amendments to the Federal Sentencing Guidelines.

Consulting

LRN's services include analyzing corporate cultures, rewriting their codes of conduct, and providing ethical-compliance education and training to their employees. LRN emphasizes principles and values rather than "blindly" following rules.

Training

Its online education platform offers about 500 courses in 50 languages, on topics including international corruption law, intellectual property, data protection, and environmental sustainability. LRN ethics training materials include videos, blogs, quizzes, social media and video games. Dell told the Wall Street Journal in 2014 that LRN developed an ethics game for it entitled the "Honesty Project."

Partnerships

In 2007, LRN became a member of the World Economic Forum (Davos) "Community of Global Growth Companies."

Since 2008, LRN has been the corporate partner of The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity’s Prize in Ethics Essay Contest, an annual competition for students to analyze ethical issues.

LRN joined the United Nations Global Compact in 2010, working to help companies adopt a set of universally accepted values.

LRN has been in partnership with the Clinton Global Initiative since 2011 to encourage organizations’ to adopt "values-based leadership." LRN works with members of the Clinton Global Initiative on forum for "principled leadership", governance and operations.

Organization

Job titles were largely eliminated from the company, and "employee councils" handle major functions like recruiting and conflict resolution.

How (Book)

In 2007, Seidman published the New York Times best-selling book How, which publicly introduced the framework of the business philosophy created at LRN. In it, he argues that companies that "outbehave" the competition will also "outperform" the competition financially. An expanded edition of the book was published in 2011 with a foreword by President Bill Clinton. Seidman advocates that companies differentiate themselves via good behavior toward customers and clients because globalization has made many products and services commodities. He also says that the rise of networked technology has made it more difficult to hide bad behavior. According to How, there are three models of company management: "Blind Obedience", "Informed Acquiescence", and "Self Governance." LRN promotes self-governance as the most transparent, values-based model and therefore, most likely to facilitate "principled behavior." LRN commissioned an independent study which reported that only three percent of organizations are fully self-governing. Self-governing companies in the survey were said to five times more innovative than "blind obedience" companies.

Funding

It received a $30 million investment from Softbank in 2000.

Headquarters and other major offices

LRN was originally headquartered in California and moved its headquarters to New York City in 2012. It also has offices in London and India.