Presenter: Dan Hunter
Tech as an important driving force in legal education. It’s not hard to see that, if we’re to make law school more relevant to our students and if we are serious about making our graduates capable of operating in a fast-changing legal services marketplace, we need to do something about the technology gap in law school education. But what should we do?
This presentation reviews a range of options in building a serious law school technology programme, including approaches that (1) teach coding to law students; (2) provide training in how to translate legal rules into expert system shells or pouring legal cases into a neural net simulators; and (3) systematic approaches that looks to exposing students to technology and innovation across the whole curriculum.
This latter approach is the one that we use at Swinburne Law School. It has three layers:
- At the bottom, every student is exposed to the concept of an innovation mindset, and also some applications of technology in legal practice. They get an understanding how careers in law look these days, and some practical exposure to, for example, smart contracts and the blockchain (in Contract Law), or technology-assisted review (in Civil Procedure).
- At the next level up, we give students a small range of electives that are focused on technology and innovation within legal services, such as Legal Tech & Innovation where students work with law firms on real-life tech design problems, and The Business of Law, which demonstrates the structural changes that are going on in the legal profession and how grads can position themselves in the new legal profession.
The final layer (which suits about 10% of the student body) is a Y Combinator-like legal services accelerator for law firms. The insight is to have a hosted innovation lab that generates intrapreneurial innovation within the firms, and which gives our students experience in cutting-edge legal innovation projects and businesses.
