LRN, founded in 1994, is an American company which provides advising and educating on ethics, regulatory compliance, and corporate culture to other organizations. When founded, the company focused on the legal industry and was named Legal Research Network, before expanding into other fields. The company's founder Dov Seidman, also wrote the book How, about the role of ethics in business.
History
Founding (1994)
Dov Seidman founded Legal Research Network two years out of Harvard Law School. Seidman's business plan was to offer legal knowledge and analysis services through an expert network of academics and lawyers. This research could 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".
Expansion into Training
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. By the year 2000, 200 of the Fortune 500 companies were clients of LRN. 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 in corporate America. Seidman testified in 2004 before the U.S. Sentencing Commission, regarding the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, about the need for companies to develop ethical cultures instead of "check-the-box", compliance-only approaches. 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.
Operations
Services
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. 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."
Organization
Job titles were largely eliminated from the company, and "employee councils" handle major functions like recruiting and conflict resolution. LRN was originally headquartered in California and moved its headquarters to New York City in 2012. It also has offices in London and India. In 2007, Seidman published the book How, which discussed the business philosophy created at LRN. In it, he argues that companies that "outbehave" the competition will also outperform the competition financially.
Finances
It received a $30 million investment from Softbank in 2000.
