Building a CLE attendance record that survives an audit

What does an audit of a CLE provider actually ask for?

It asks you to show that the attorney you claimed hours for was in the room for the hours you claimed. Everything else — the marketing, the materials, the invoice — is secondary to that one link between a person and a session.

The usual failure is not dishonesty, it is bookkeeping. A paper sign-in sheet at the front door records that somebody arrived, not which sessions they sat, and it cannot distinguish the attorney who stayed all day from the one who left after the first speaker. When the certificate says six hours and the sheet proves arrival, the gap is yours to explain.

Bindro closes that gap by making the certificate derive from the scan. A credit is written from check-in records, so it cannot exist for someone who was never admitted, and there is no path in the product to issue one anyway.

How should I structure the day into sessions?

One session per credit block you intend to award. If the morning is worth three hours and the afternoon two, those are two sessions — not one course with a lunch break in the middle.

This matters because contact hours are derived from the session itself: when you issue credits, each attorney receives the hours of the session they were scanned into. A single all-day session can only ever award all-day credit, so the attorney who left at lunch either gets too much or gets nothing, and neither is right.

The same structure is what lets a credential be session-scoped: an attorney sold a morning seat is admitted in the morning and is unknown at the afternoon door.

• Split on credit boundaries, not on catering.
• Give each session its real start and end — the hours come from those timestamps.
• If a session is a distinct credit category for your bar, keep it as its own session; bindro does not model categories, so the split has to be structural.
• Ethics blocks almost always belong in their own session for this reason.

How do I run the door so the record is clean?

Scan at each session, not once on arrival. It takes a few seconds per attorney and it is the entire evidentiary difference between "registered" and "attended".

Do not rely on the venue network. Each device syncs a signed manifest of who is expected at that session and then validates scans locally with no network at all — so the door keeps working through a dead conference-centre wifi, and the shift log uploads when connectivity returns. Re-uploading the same log counts as duplicates rather than admitting anyone twice.

If you run two doors into the same room, expect the occasional clash: the same attorney scanned on two devices lands in a conflict queue for someone to review afterwards, rather than being silently resolved in favour of whichever device happened to sync first.

When and how do I issue the certificates?

After the session has ended — bindro refuses to issue credits for a session that is still running, because attendance is not yet a settled fact. Issuing writes one credit per verified attendee, carrying the session's contact hours and a unique serial, and produces a printable certificate for each.

Issue again if late scans came in from a device that synced afterwards. It is idempotent: an attorney who already has a credit for that session does not get a second one, so there is no way to double-award by clicking twice.

The serial is the verification handle. A certificate can be checked by quoting its serial alone, which is what you want when an attorney emails you two years later asking you to confirm a course they half-remember.

What does bindro NOT do here?

It does not file anything with any state bar. There is no jurisdiction registry and no transmission of any kind: bindro produces the hours and the certificates, and the provider files them exactly as they do today.

It does not model credit categories. Ethics, technology and specialty credits are not fields on a credit record, which is why the session structure above carries that weight instead.

It does not collect a bar card image at registration — document upload is not enabled for this vertical — and it does not host recorded content, so an on-demand programme is out of scope entirely.