Law School, Disrupted

Shoots of innovative, provocative life can be seen at a few law schools. And these changes hint a broader change coming for all in legal education.

Embracing Technology

For starters, two recent events at the gold standard of law schools, Harvard, provide examples that change is happening at the most prestigious levels. First came the announcement out of the Harvard Law School Library that in conjunction with legal research startup, Ravel Law, the library would be digitizing the large trove of nearly every state, federal, territorial and tribal judicial decision since colonial times, and ultimately making that information available to the general public. It's ridiculous that so much of what constitutes the interpretations and rulings based on existing laws in this country ' case law ' is either inaccessible or accessible through only paid services online in our digital age. When complete, this project will provide, as the New York Times put it, a “floor of essential information” for anyone with access to the Internet who is seeking access to the law.

Next, more personally and a bit less newsworthy, came the invitation I received from Harvard Law School's Center for the Legal Profession to come to Cambridge and talk about Avvo. When Avvo launched in 2007, it was frowned upon initially by many in the legal community for its perceived interference between lawyers and consumers, and for rating lawyers on a 10-point scale. Fast-forward eight years, and as a result of Avvo's maturation and proven relevancy for lawyers and consumers, even Harvard Law School now understands the important role that Avvo plays in the legal ecosystem. When I showed up at Harvard Law School for my scheduled presentation on Avvo, I was surprised to find there were more professors and staff in attendance than students, indicating a growing scholarly interest in understanding how consumers are finding lawyers, and the central role that technology is playing in that process.

Another bright spot in legal education reimagined can be found in Suffolk University Law School's Institute on Law Practice Technology and Innovation. A recent visit to a class on the Boston campus led by law professor Bill Palin revealed an interesting class exercise: the entire class of students focusing on building document automation tools for their future law practices. Professor Palin, who's about as far from a traditional law professor as you can get, is a 2013 Suffolk Law grad who taught himself to code and works closely with the Boston chapter of legal technologists, known as Legal Hackers, to push technology adoption among lawyers. Palin's apps have won or placed highly in legal “hackathon” competitions held in Boston and New York, and now he's incorporating what he's learned into teaching law students at Suffolk to understand the changing digital landscape. What's more, viewing just a sampling of the titles of the courses that Suffolk is offering, it's clear that this program is stepping outside the bounds of traditional legal education: Lawyering in the Age of Smart Machines, Coding the Law: An Introduction to the Technology of Practice, and 21st Century Legal Profession. Altogether, a far cry from the ivory tower of curriculum and lawyer processes demonstrated by Professor Charles W. Kingsfield in The Paper Chase .

Yet another example of the shifting trends in legal education happened in my own backyard, at my alma mater of Seattle University ' the Seattle University Law School held a Social Justice Hackathon in November 2015. There were three remarkable things about this event. First, that it was dreamed up, fundraised, organized, and largely executed by an enterprising second-year law student, Miguel Willis. I'm struck that even slow-to-adapt-to-the-changing-landscape law schools can be pushed or dragged into the 21st century by their students. Second, the tremendous community support the event garnered. Groups from civic hackers to community technology organizers to local Fortune 100 companies got behind the event in both time and dollars. This support is largely due to Miguel's active promotion efforts, but it also demonstrated that, even in a mid-sized city like Seattle, there is a large swath of people ' beyond just the legal community ' who are interested in finding technological solutions to social justice legal issues. This has been reinforced by the fact that the Seattle Mayor's Office held a demo day on February 3 to show off the project winners and expose the great results of this event to the city at large. Finally, the projects produced at the event were exceptional and particularly applicable to implementation and change. The winning projects: Court Whisperer, Social Justice League, and Paid It are each innovative contributions to society's social justice challenges. I'm excited to see how each continues to evolve and the impact each might have.

Conclusion

These prime examples at Harvard Law School, Suffolk University, and Seattle University, illustrate how legal education has adopted recent and unique changes. There are quite a few more small-scale examples throughout the country and, really, throughout the world of legal educators rethinking the way they do things. But these innovators are still in a significant minority. Conservative, reactive, precedent-based thinking remains the overwhelmingly dominant norm as it was in the days of the fictional professor Kingsfield. But with the growing prominence of programs and events like these, at law schools as varied in geography and prominence as Harvard, Suffolk and Seattle University, and with change agents as varied as students, professors, and general parties invested in social justice issues, legal education is unlikely to remain an ivory tower bastion, untouched by the transformations going on all around it.

Dan Lear is the Director of Industry Relations for Avvo. He is a lawyer, blogger and legal industry gadfly, and currently sits on this newsletter's Board of Editors. More information on his published writing and upcoming events can be found by visiting http://rightbrainlaw.co/.