Law school revolution

One of my favourite bumper stickers, back when such things were popular, read as follows: “Where are we going? And what’s with this handbasket?” If you’re involved in any aspect of legal education these days, or if you have even a passing interest in how law schools are doing their job, you might feel that bumper sticker is especially appropriate.

Law schools and legal education are in an uproar. There’s a host of factors at work, most notably an extreme and rapid change in how legal work is done and who is required to do it — a trend that’s making things difficult for law firms but that’s positively brutalizing law schools. There’s plenty of upheaval going on in legal education and admission in Canada, in the United Kingdom, and in Australia, but I’ll focus this post on the US, where the worst of the storm is centered. Here are some highlights:

As you might gather from all of that, law schools in the US are feeling tremendous pressure from would-be, current and former students — the three groups that control almost all of their funding and reputation. Much more so than law firms, law schools are extraordinarily conservative and change-resistant places, yet they’re now grappling with the same forces transforming the wider legal marketplace and have fewer resources with which to cope.

The fact also remains that despite these troubles, a great many law schools, administrators and faculty members remain serenely unaware of or unmoved by these developments. Law schools are, in the context of other professional schools and legal entities anyway, stable and profitable institutions whose personnel are remarkably resistant to what few demands for change are presented to them. Law schools have never had a superb reputation within the practicing bar — too many lawyers remember their desperate attempts to figure out their new profession even after three years of “education” — but the bitterness towards and condemnation of law schools by lawyers has never been this strong and this sustained.

I’ve had plenty to say on the subject of law school myself over the past few years, little of it heart-warming. But the fact is, amid all the noise and vitriol around this subject, quiet success stories are being written. If we spread our contempt for the current system’s failings too widely and indiscriminately, we risk missing out on the fact that right now, the very revolution we wish would break out is starting to unfold in front of us.

I want to bring your attention to an array of initiatives, innovations, and courageous pioneering efforts that could, if they catch on and receive the support they need, usher in a new era of legal education. In the areas of technology, informatics, apprenticeship, online learning and structural innovation, the future is already starting to arrive.

Technology

Last term, Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, DC, offered a new experiential seminar called “Technology, Innovation and Legal Practice” that explored how the first two elements can transform the third. Student teams were required to develop applications that either increased access to the legal system or made legal practice more efficient. The results were on display in the school’s “Iron Tech Lawyer Competition,” as described in this PBS news video. Here are two of the projects, one on citizenship acquisition and the other on same-sex marriage legality; all the projects were powered by Neota Logic, a legal tech pioneer that I profiled last year.

At the mobile end of the technology spectrum is another innovative program, Apps For Justice, spearheaded by Ron Staudt at the University of Chicago-Kent Law School (home of legal access software A2J Author) and Marc Lauritsen of Capstone Practice Systems, among others. Apps for Justice, as Marc explains in this six-minute video at Ignite Law 2011, enables law students to create software applications like document templates, guided interviews, dynamic checklists and interactive advisers. These apps perform useful legal work, from helping lawyers work smarter to helping clients resolve their own problems and opportunities. Apps For Justice won the 2011 Future Ed competition sponsored by New York and Harvard Law Schools.

Informatics

Related to but a breed apart from legal technology lies the field of legal informatics, which Wikipedia helpfully defines as the study of the structure and properties of legal information, as well as the application of technology to its organization, storage, retrieval, and dissemination — data crunching in the law, if you like. William Henderson of the University of Indiana-Bloomington Maurer Law School, who also writes urgently and incisively about crises in legal education and large law firms, was the first law professor I found paying attention to the study of data in the law school context (which he continues to do with his company Lawyer Metrics). Stanford Law School’s CodeX initiative is also worth attention in this regard.

This envelope is really getting pushed, however, at Michigan State University Law School, where professors Daniel Katz and Renee Knake are engaged in some of the most avant-garde work in legal education I’ve seen in a while. It includes the Computational Legal Studies program, which features courses in Quantitative Methods for Lawyers and Entrepreneurial Lawyering, as well as presentations with titles like “Quantitative Legal Prediction” and “The MIT School of Law.” There’s also an upcoming legal laboratory called Reinvent Law. In addition, MSU Law has launched the 21st Century Law Practice Program, which this summer features LawTechCamp London, in association with the University of Westminster Law School, presenting courses like “Legal Information Engineering and Technology” and “The Legal Services Act and UK Deregulation.”

Apprenticeship

Long-time readers will remember my articles about apprenticeships at law firms (PDF) and the potential I see for law schools to step into this arena. The pioneer in this regard, of course, is Washington & Lee Law School in Virginia, which ripped out its traditional third year and installed an entirely experiential curriculum “comprised of law practice simulations, real-client experiences, the development of professionalism, and development of law practice skills.” The program, which involves a broad range of clinics and externships, continues to thrive. Experiential legal education has since been embraced widely, including at Northeastern University Law School. (And it’s not only law firms that can benefit: corporate law departments are the subject of similar programs at the University of Chicago Law School and Columbia Law School.)

Now, here comes the next phase of apprenticeship, one I’ve been eagerly awaiting. Arizona State University Law School, running with an idea first proposed by law professors Brad Borden and Robert J. Rhee, is creating a “teaching law firm,” a kind of residency for lawyers that resembles teaching hospitals at many universities. Upwards of five experienced attorneys would act as “partners” to supervise 15 to 30 “resident lawyers,” recent ASU grads who would spend up to two years providing bankruptcy, family and corporate law services to middle- and lower-income clients. Above The Law, as harsh a critic of law schools as you’ll find these days, thinks it’s a great idea; I think it’s potentially a game-changer. (See also the small but growing number of law school “solo incubators.”)

Online Learning

If ASU Law’s “teaching law firm” is a game-changer for law schools, then coming up on the horizon is a development that could be vastly more influential and devastating to the traditional law school model. Online education is in the early stages of changing everything we assume and believe about learning, led by the Khan Academy and countless fellow travelers. This article in The Atlantic relays a telling account by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen of his first, eye-opening experience with online classes.

To get a sense of what distance learning could mean to legal education, read this New Yorker article about Stanford University, in particular the final page about Stanford’s recent experiments with online learning (and watch this TED video, wherein one of the professors talks about teaching a class with 100,000 students). A law school course with 100,000 students? Why not? Someday soon, some law school is going to invest seriously in online learning, and will turn their industry upside down in the process. (The private sector is already several steps ahead on this one: witness Solo Practice University, which is doing in this area exactly what law schools could and should have done years ago.)

Innovation

Then there are the pure innovation engines within law schools, driving full-scale change not just in their own institutions but industry-wide. Law Without Walls, as this ABA Journal article reports, is “a collaborative academic model that brings together students and faculty from 11 international law schools and one business school, law practitioners, business professionals, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to develop innovative solutions to problems facing law school and practice.” LWOW’s participating schools (it’s based at the University of Miami Faculty of Law) hail from the US, England, Australia, China, Spain and Colombia. The initiative’s third annual ConPosium is set for next April; check out the extraordinary Projects of Worth that the 2012 version created.

Further west, you’ll find the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System, a standalone institution at the University of Denver, and in particular the IAALS’s Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers initiative. ETL’s mission is “to encourage and facilitate innovation in legal education” in line with the Carnegie Model of legal ed reform, in pursuit of which it researches and designs innovative teaching methods to share with other law schools and showcases those school’s own innovations. (Here’s my own curriculum wish list, if you’re interested.) More than 20 US law schools are part of the ETL’s Consortium. Denver Sturm College of Law is also home to other innovations, including the transformation of the standard first-year legal writing course into a Lawyering Process Program.

The IAALS, by the way, describes itself as “a national, independent research center dedicated to continuous improvement of the process and culture of the civil justice system.” In that respect, it shares much in common with a growing number of research and innovation Centers at various law schools, devoted to improving both the legal education system and the legal services industry domestically and globally. These programs can be found at Georgetown Law, Indiana-Bloomington Law, Stanford Law and Harvard Law.

That’s more information about legal education reform, and more links to a wealth of rich content, than you can get through at one sitting, yet there are still law school initiatives and innovations that I haven’t touched on here. (If I’ve overlooked one that we should know about, please detail it in the comments.) I’ve provided you with all this data for two main reasons:

1. I want to increase your awareness and appreciation of what some legal educators are doing, their recognition that the present model is unsustainable and their commitment to trying something new to make the system work better for all concerned. Not every law school is clueless or manipulative, and it’s a disservice to lump the reformers together with the reactionaries.

2. I also want to encourage you to get involved with these initiatives at the law school or with the organization closest to you. I’m a volunteer with Law Without Walls and I’m speaking at an Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers event in Denver in October, and I’m actively speaking with law deans about innovations in their own schools. The more the profession gets involved, the better the chance these projects will succeed.

You say you want a revolution? There’s one starting up right now. Grab your bullhorn.

Jordan Furlong delivers dynamic and thought-provoking presentations to law firms and legal organizations throughout North America on how to survive and profit from the extraordinary changes underway in the legal services marketplace. He is a partner with Edge International and a senior consultant with Stem Legal Web Enterprises.



9 Comments

  1. Carolyn Elefant

    All of this is really, really exciting. But one question: where are the students who are taking these courses? I would LOVE to hire them for projects at MyShingle and innovative systems that I am developing for my NextGeneration Energy practice. Are these students being snatched up for jobs (probably?) Do they not want to work for solos? If any of the people you’ve written about are interested in in working on projects, I’d love to hear about them!! I do not get resumes with these kinds of skills no matter where I look.

  2. John Flood

    At Westminster Law School in the UK we were discussing revisions to the law degree. I wish you piece had been compulsory reading as it works in the UK context as well as the US. Much of law teaching is stuck in the 19th century let alone the 20th or 21st. Unfortunately, much of what you discuss is still considered marginal and even extreme in cases. The issue is how to bring this into the mainstream and make it the norm.

    My colleagues listened to me today discussing the new legal services market. The reaction–fear. We need to inculcate ideas of innovation and creativity combined with imagination. Law doesn’t have to be stultifying, does it?

  3. Will Hornsby

    Jordon, thanks for assemblying the pieces here. It’s an amazing collection of innovations. We may be seeing some rapid growth in incubators over the near term, much as we did for law school clinics umpteen years ago. The ABA has just launched a listserv for schools and bar associations creating and running incubators and post-grad residencies.

  4. Jon Busby

    I find this legal education debate fascinating.

    Rarely, if ever, does the legal education establishment come out and engage with the technologists who are developing things that are happening in the real world. They do engage with other academics who do law and technology but thats not the same thing. Laboratories are fine. Field hospitals are where the future is being crafted.

    I have tried for years to start a learning curve for law schools on technology (as have other open minded technologists). Just to be clear. Not our technology…just on the concepts of what technology can do, and to bring law schools into the development process.

    We might at best get a somewhat patronising nod, a “well done” pat on the head with everyone returning to ‘as you were’ after we have said our goodbyes.

    This is a shame because their are huge benefits to students (and professors) in enabling them to glimpse at what is being tested,experimented, built and refined in real time.

    It is always easy to use the blanket opt out ‘cultural challenges’ but isn’t the point, even remit, of a law school to provide leadership as well as education?

    They were ‘culturally challenged.’ What an epitaph!!

    In my experience the best way to decide about things is to go and look at them, play with them, kick them challenge them.

    Until law schools start doing that then they will continue to stagnate.

    Jon

  5. Richard Granat

    The first law school to experiment with a “teaching hospital” model was Antioch Law School, now the DIstrict of Columbia Law School, in the early 1980s, but it got no respect from the ABA and the organized bar. Edgar and Jean Cahn, true pioneers in legal education invented the idea of clinical legal education. now these ideas are starting to mainstream, only 25 years later.

    I taught a course in “Computer Applications and the Law” at various law schools in the mid 1990s, as an adjunct, just as the Internet was taking off. Regular law school faculty told me that the course wasn’t very relevant to law practice and the Internet was a passing fad.

    So I stopped wasting time in law schools, and started a company instead.

  6. Pete Smith

    Here at SHU, the LawSync project is looking at just these issues.We’re hoping that practitioners and academics will join us- we hope to create a truly innovative module for our students, but also ideas which can be developed elsewhere.

  7. Jonathan W

    This is all well and good, and I certainly wish some of these innovative programs had been in place when I attended law school, but the problem remains that US law schools continue to graduate twice as many lawyers as the market can absorb, and a growing number of these graduates face unemployment with truly astronomical levels of debt.


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