Overview
Legal professionals need continuing education that fits around demanding schedules. Restructuring Masterclass is a premium online learning platform built for bankruptcy and restructuring attorneys, giving them on-demand access to expert-led courses with CLE credit opportunities. We built the platform on Drupal 10, engineering it from the ground up as a subscription-based learning environment that handles everything from payment processing and membership management to video progress tracking, automated transcription, and certificate generation. The result is a fully integrated system that manages the complete learner lifecycle without manual intervention.
About the Client
The American Bankruptcy Institute (ABI) is a leading organization in the bankruptcy and restructuring field, serving legal professionals across the country. Restructuring Masterclass is their dedicated online education platform offering 40 or more expert-led courses on topics ranging from general bankruptcy fundamentals and business restructuring to advanced topics and Subchapter V proceedings. The platform targets practicing attorneys who need credible, specialized education they can access on their own time, with membership priced at $1,500 per year and enterprise options available for firms and organizations.
Goals
ABI needed a platform that could handle the full learner journey in one place. That meant processing subscriptions and payments securely, syncing member data across their existing business systems, delivering video content with a smooth in-browser experience, tracking each learner’s progress through courses, automatically generating certificates upon completion, and managing membership expiry without staff having to intervene. They also needed tools to onboard bulk groups of users from law firms efficiently and to ensure that non-members were guided toward subscribing rather than hitting a dead end.
Challenges
The core challenge was the number of systems that needed to work together. ABI already had Salesforce as their CRM and iMIS as their membership management system. Any new platform had to integrate with both, not replace them. Every enrollment needed to flow through Stripe for payment processing and then update records across Salesforce, iMIS, and the Drupal user system simultaneously. Getting those four systems to stay in sync reliably and gracefully handle failures was the central architectural problem.
Content delivery added its own complexity. The platform needed to behave like a native app inside the browser, with video navigation that did not require page reloads, a player that remembered where learners left off, and an access control system that elegantly redirected non-members to the pricing page rather than showing a generic error.
Managing membership at scale was another concern. Firms wanted to onboard teams of attorneys at once, each getting personalized welcome emails and role-based access that expired automatically after a year. Doing that manually for every group was not sustainable.
Finally, accessibility requirements meant every video needed accurate subtitle files, and generating those manually for a growing library of course content was not feasible.
Solutions
We built the platform as a suite of tightly integrated custom Drupal 10 modules, each handling a distinct part of the learner lifecycle.
The subscription and payment system is managed through a custom mc_subscribe module that orchestrates a four-way handshake between Stripe, Salesforce, iMIS, and Drupal the moment a user completes enrollment. A successful $1,500 payment immediately creates a one-year Stripe subscription, records a purchase activity in Salesforce, updates the user’s profile in the iMIS membership system, creates or updates their Drupal account with the member role, and sends them a branded confirmation email via AWS SES, all within a single checkout flow. Users can manage their own billing through a self-service portal redirect to Stripe.
The course player experience is built around a split-panel layout where the left side shows the lesson list and the right side loads video content dynamically via AJAX. Clicking any lesson in the navigation fetches the video node from the backend and injects the rendered HTML into the player area without a full page reload. The Video.js player reinitializes automatically after each load. A separate progress-tracking module saves each learner’s watch position every few seconds via background API calls, so they can return to any video and resume from exactly where they left off.
Certificate generation is fully automated. When a learner finishes the last video in a course, the system detects completion, creates a certificate record, and makes a download available on their profile. The certificates are generated as branded PDFs using the mPDF library with custom ABI fonts, and a snapshot system caches the rendered certificate to avoid regenerating it on every download.
For law firms and organizations onboarding groups of attorneys, we built a bulk user import tool that allows administrators to upload a CSV file, select the firm, and trigger batch processing. The system creates accounts in chunks of 20 at a time to avoid timeouts, assigns the appropriate role with a one-year expiry, and sends each new user a personalized welcome email using firm-specific templates stored in the CMS taxonomy. The entire process runs in the background through Drupal’s Batch API.
Access control is handled by a dedicated module that intercepts 403 responses on video and course pages and redirects unauthorized visitors to the pricing page rather than showing an error. This keeps the conversion funnel intact and ensures that landing on a locked piece of content becomes an invitation to subscribe rather than a dead end.
Membership expiry is managed automatically through a cron-based module that runs on a regular schedule, checks each member’s expiration date, and removes the member role when the subscription period ends. Every removal is logged for administrative review.
Video transcription is handled entirely in the background. When an editor saves a video node with an S3 media URL but no subtitle file, the system automatically submits a transcription job to AWS Transcribe, adds it to a processing queue, and polls for completion. When the job finishes, the VTT file is downloaded and attached to the node without any manual steps.
For seamless access from external links and email campaigns, a lightweight event subscriber intercepts incoming requests containing an email address as a URL parameter and automatically authenticates the matching user, bypassing the login form for non-restricted member types.
Results
The platform handles the full arc of a member’s experience from initial purchase to certificate download without manual involvement from the ABI team. Enrollments are processed in real time with all four business systems updated simultaneously. Law firm groups that previously required manual account creation can now be onboarded in minutes through the bulk import tool. Learners never lose their place in a course, and certificates are available for download the moment a course is completed. Video content is automatically captioned, making the library accessible without a dedicated transcription workflow. The access control and redirection system ensures that every visitor encounter with premium content is an opportunity to convert rather than a frustration, and the automated membership expiry keeps role management accurate without ongoing administrative effort.