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At a glance
- 92% reduction in administrative work hours
- 650 hours saved per intake by eliminating manual coordination
- 87% reduction in no-show rates in meetings
Preparing future lawyers—at scale
The Canadian Centre for Professional Legal Education (CPLED) is a nonprofit organization that provides the training needed before being called to the Bars of Alberta, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan and Nunavut—and beginning in September 2026 —British Columbia. Its flagship program, the Practice Readiness Education Program (PREP) helps law students gain practical skills and competencies for professional legal practice.
PREP requires students to complete live oral assignments that simulate real-world legal work. Candidates conduct client interviews with trained actors, participate in negotiations with peers, and meet with experienced practicing lawyers, known as practice managers, for guidance, feedback, and mentorship.
Delivering this kind of experiential program virtually, across time zones and on a national scale is complex. With a provincial expansion to British Columbia on the horizon, it became clear that the organization needed a scalable system.
The Challenge
Manual coordination of high-stakes meetings and assignments creating bottlenecks
CPLED’s team was spending a lot of time manually coordinating and setting up hundreds of meetings using different online meeting tools, calendar apps, and video platforms.
“There was just a lot of manual scheduling and platform limitations,” says Taylor O’Rourke, one of the Learning Management Specialists at CPLED. “It was very resource-intensive coordination. In addition to manually making the schedule ourselves, we also had to manually create each video link for all of the candidates. It was quite time-consuming.”
In the absence of automated reminders and efficient calendar integrations, no-shows were also common. That had costs not only for students’ educational goals, but also financially for CPLED since they were paying practice managers for their time.
It was becoming evident that these processes were no longer sustainable, especially as CPLED’s leadership was focusing on proving that the organization was ready for expansion.
The Solution
An agile partner and platform ready to grow with them
The team at CPLED started working with MentorCity in the summer of 2025 and immediately felt an alignment.
“We are always going to pursue growth opportunities and always looking to expand our reach and our impact, and we expect the partners we work with to also share those values,” says Lizzie Hayward, Program Supervisor at CPLED. “MentorCity has been growing with us, which is very exciting. From day one, just the customer service they have shown us is really in line with our values—which are pursuing excellence and having a growth mindset.”
Implementation was smooth, supported by training and close collaboration with the MentorCity team.
“MentorCity was with us every step of the way,” says Taylor. “They really made sure we were ready to go with all of the tools we needed to be successful.”
The best part was that MentorCity was flexible and open to adapt to their needs.
CPLED’s use case for the platform was unique and extended beyond MentorCity’s typical model. They used it to deliver formal oral assignments for lawyers in training which included simulated client interviews with trained actors, peer-to-peer negotiations, and practice manager meetings for guidance and feedback. Students would record these meetings and upload them on the learning management system for assessments and grading. The MentorCity team remained receptive, working closely with CPLED to adapt the platform’s functions in ways that strengthened delivery for all stakeholders.
“They’re really open to feedback,” says Lizzie. “It’s definitely not common to find vendors who are also interested in being as agile as we are.”
When CPLED first started meeting with Shawn at MentorCity, one thing they wanted to see was the ability to have their meetings automatically recorded so that students could take those automatically recorded meetings and upload them to CPLED’s learning management system where they would be assessed for grades.
“At first that wasn’t a feature they offered or had,” recalls Lizzie. “But literally, within a business day, they were able to figure out a way to turn that on for us.”
That responsiveness has continued throughout the partnership. MentorCity was also able to turn on the ability to view contractor’s or mentor’s availability for CPLED and adapt features to meet the unique use cases the organization was utilizing the platform for.
“They’ve been really awesome to partner with,” says Lizzie. “We’ve benefitted a great deal from this partnership. They take all of our ‘this would be nice to have’ and find a way to make it happen.”
The Results
Automations and systems that save time, improve reliability, and enable growth
Working with MentorCity has enabled CPLED to move forward on its goals of delivering exceptional educational experiences smoothly at scale.
The impact of working with the platform has been transformational.
- Reduced administrative burden:
CPLED saved 650 hours of administrative work per intake just by moving their system onto MentorCity. What used to take 700 hours for setting up meetings, coordinating schedules, generating links etc, now takes only 50 hours, representing a 92% saving on valuable team time.
“It’s taken all the administrative burden of scheduling and creating links off our plate,” says Taylor.
That time can now be redirected to program quality, student support, and strategic growth.
- Dramatically improved attendance:
Meeting attendance has also improved drastically, with the no-show rate going down from 12% to just 1.46%. Stronger systems, reminders, calendar integrations and better matches mean fewer candidates are missing meetings. This translates directly to cost savings, as CPLED pays practice managers for their time whether or not students attend.
More importantly, it means students are receiving the full educational benefit of the program.
- Improved member engagement:
Giving students control over who they meet with has also significantly changed behavior. While CPLED only requires students to complete one practice manager meeting, many are now requesting five or more.
“MentorCity just makes it much easier to facilitate these opportunities and have it student-led,” says Taylor. “Students get to search for their practice manager and really find someone that aligns with them and their career goals. So that has improved the practice manager meetings immensely.”
- Increased volume capacity and reliability:
In October 2025 alone, CPLED facilitated 1,941 scheduled video calls through MentorCity—a volume that would have been impossible to manage through manual coordination.
“It’s gone to a point where our practice manager program more or less runs itself,” says Lizzie. “It’s something that used to take up a lot of time and a lot of humanpower, and it’s now something we don’t really think twice about. And it’s just kind of running in the background.”
- Getting a fuller picture with data and analytics:
Beyond operational efficiency, MentorCity has given CPLED data visibility that was previously unavailable. By having access to insights into usage, engagement, participation patterns and other data points, CPLED will be able to work towards more informed decision making as programs continue to grow.
- Enabling expansion with confidence:
With MentorCity, the scalability that senior leadership needed to demonstrate became a reality. As CPLED expands its programs to the province of British Columbia, student numbers will be growing significantly.
“Having MentorCity, really helped us show that we are partnering with a smaller Canadian company and we have come up with a customizable solution that has really reduced administrative costs for us,” says Lizzie. “It would have been really hard for us to scale up and take on a whole other province if we were still using the software and processes we were using before.”
Lizzie and Taylor have already begun sharing the success they are seeing with MentorCity with other departments and partnering organizations.
“We highly recommend MentorCity for its ease of implementation, the robust support that we’ve seen from the team, and then the ability to transform the mentoring experience into a really scalable, efficient process,” says Taylor.
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