Teaching Technology into the Law Curriculum

Key Directions in Legal Education, 2020

Are law schools equipping graduates with the skills required for twenty-first-century legal practice? Should an understanding of the impact of artificial intelligence and machine learning on legal services now be a pre-requisite for the contemporary law degree? Will coding be as important as constitutional theory? This chapter will argue that the digital age requires a commitment to developing the capacity of law students to respond to technological innovation. Practice-ready law graduates need more than a traditional legal skill base to navigate their way through a changing legal landscape. Law schools need to respond by developing a legal curriculum that equips law graduates to flourish in a digital environment. The authors assess the impact of digital transformation on the legal profession and consider the implications for contemporary legal education, both in terms of content and pedagogy. They argue that pedagogical innovations can enhance the teaching of law and consider the e...

Santa Clara Law Review, 2002

1 have been teaching law for eleven years, and currently teach civil procedure, advanced civil procedure, torts, products liability, and complex litigation. Prior to law school, I was a scientist and engineer. I would like to thank my colleagues at Washburn and former colleagues at DePaul for their insights during the first few drafts of this article, and the participants at faculty workshops held at DePaul, John Marshall, and Washburn law schools. In particular, I thank Barbara Glesner-Fines, Diana Donahoe, Cathaleen Roach, and Megan Ballard for their thoughtful suggestions; Mark Folmsbee for making sure I do not provide incorrect technology information; and members of the Washburn writers' group for their helpful suggestions. Much of the research for this article was conducted while I was a visiting professor at DePaul. Special thanks to Nick Castro for his untiring research assistance. As usual, I am indebted to my wife, Marianne Deagle, for her patient editing suggestions.

Social Science Research Network, 2021

2013

The law school curriculum is wholly inadequate to train future lawyers in law practice management and technology. Training in law practice management and law practice technology is a critical solution that will further align the skills that law students must have upon graduation with the employment needs of a radically changing legal market. As legal educators and administrators rethink their law school’s package of educational services, this article will provide guidance. Accordingly, what follows is not a traditional law review article. It is an analysis of a deficiency in one area of the traditional law school curriculum and a proposed solution to fix it.

Computer Law and Security Review, 2020

Legal professionals increasingly rely on digital technologies when they provide legal services. The most advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) promise great advancements of legal services, but lawyers are traditionally not educated in the field of digital technology and thus cannot fully unlock the potential of such technologies in their practice. In this paper, we identify five distinct skills and knowledge gaps that prevent lawyers from implementing AI and digital technology in the provision of legal services and suggest concrete models for education and training in this area. Our findings and recommendations are based on a series of semi-structured interviews, design and delivery of an experimental course in 'Law and Computer Science', and an analysis of the empirical data in view of wider debates in the literature concerning legal education and 21 st century skills.

Center on the Legal Profession, Stanford Law School, 2013

I was fortunate last Fall to teach a new course at Stanford Law School that I called Legal Technology and Informatics. Legal informatics could be defined as a computational perspective of law: where legal information resides, and how it is manipulated and transmitted. In putting the course together, I had to select from a wide array of potential material that I thought was important to train a new generation of lawyers and “legal technologists”. In this article, I will discuss some of what I included and why. In addition, as the guest editor of this issue of The Bottom Line (TBL), I selected authors whom I thought were working in areas of interest to practitioners. My goal is to inform lawyers about some of the changes coming as a result of legal technology, as well as to help prepare them not only to utilize new methods, but also to help build them. Although there is a decades-old history to the application of technology to the law (e.g. the conferences ICAIL, JURIX, TREC), in many important ways legal technology and informatics is transforming into something new. It is not surprising that technology would invade and transform any field at some point. Law, though, is often a bastion of tradition and risk aversion (often for good reason), so it is also not surprising that law has not generally been among the early adopters of the “new new thing”. This is perhaps especially true under the pyramidbased, billable hour model of many law firms, where the incentives to capitalize on technological improvements in efficiency and accuracy are often absent. Nevertheless, it seems that the law is currently undergoing a transformation, in no small part due to technology, that is disrupting the status quo. As a result, TBL felt that it was important to highlight some of the changes afoot in the profession so that practitioners can better anticipate, accommodate, and even accelerate a new paradigm of law and legal practice. Throughout this article, I'll be introducing the other articles in this issue as they relate to some of the material I'm describing

Web Journal of Current Legal Issues, 2008

Maharg, 'On the edge: ICT and the transformation of professional legal learning', [2006] 3 Web JCLI Summary Information and communications technology in professional legal education courses is perceived as problematic for teachers and course designers. It is so not because technology is inherently difficult or strange, but because at a deep level it can threaten the practice and identity of teachers. However the contextual challenges of their position, caught between academy and practice, may actually enable professional legal educators to take account of new technologies. The article discusses this proposal, using the example of the incremental development of a discussion forum. It suggests that the tools of pragmatist and transformative meta-theory may point the way forward for professional legal educators to create their own community of practice in the use of ICT in professional legal learning.

Osgoode Hall Law Journal, 2021

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at Osgoode Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Osgoode Hall Law Journal by an authorized editor of Osgoode Digital Commons.

2006

Information and communications technology in professional legal education courses is perceived as problematic for teachers and course designers. It is so not because technology is inherently difficult or strange, but because at a deep level it can threaten the practice and identity of teachers. However the contextual challenges of their position, caught between academy and practice, may actually enable professional legal educators to take account of new technologies. The article discusses this proposal, using the example of the incremental development of a discussion forum. It suggests that the tools of pragmatist and transformative meta-theory may point the way forward for professional legal educators to create their own community of practice in the use of ICT in professional legal learning. One possibility is that people are going to do what people always do with a new communication technology: use it in ways never intended or foreseen by its inventors, to turn old social codes inside out and make new kinds of communities possible. CMC [computer-mediated communication] will change us, and change our culture, the way telephones and televisions and cheap video cameras changed us-by altering the way we perceive and communicate. Rheingold (1992) Research replays the essential disjunction between any imagining of our condition and social life as a fabrication of divergences and of events quite unforeseen. Strathern (2000a) ____________________________________________________________ Contents Introduction Professional legal education: teaching on the edge Teaching staff and ICT Changing cultures of use and identity Dialogue, I Pragmatism and professional legal education Transformative learning Dialogue, II Bibliography ____________________________________________________________

Journal of Law and Society, 1998

The article deals with the interaction of computers, information technology, and legal education. It considers the technical achievements of communications and information technology (C&IT) in the practice and teaching of law, then the jurisprudential paradigms which underlie these issues. To the extent to which law is conceived as a form of information, existing assumptions about the theory, practice, and teaching of law are challenged. Where, on the other hand, law is regarded as a collection of rules, reversal to formalism, driven by C&IT, is identified as a concern for socio-legal scholars. Other concerns addressed by this article include the exclusive economics of the C&IT revolution, the power dynamics of technophobia, and the interaction of computers and gender. The article concludes with suggestions for alternative visons of the future of C&IT and legal education.