Virtual Law Practice

Category: Educational

  • Video – Disruptive Innovation in Legal Services at Harvard

    Last week I attended a conference hosted by Harvard Law School’s Program on the Legal Profession, entitled “Disruptive Innovation in the Market for Legal Services.”

    My primary reason for attending was to hear Clayton Christensen, a Professor at Harvard’s Business School and author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, speak about disruption in the legal profession. Unfortunately, he admitted to not really having analyzed our profession from the perspective of disruptive innovation so his talk was a bit of a rehash of both Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovative University. It was still really worth it to hear from the man himself, and following his presentation, the Senior VP of IBM Watson, Mike Rhodin, the CEO of Legal Zoom, John Suh, and GC of Charles River Ventures, Sarah Reed, weighed in on what they think disruptive innovation of legal services looks like.

    Chris Kenny, Chief Exec of the UK Legal Services Board, also spoke via video conferencing about how alternative business structures (ABS) are working out across the pond. According to Kenny, ABS is working great in the UK, increasing access to justice and creating healthy competition in the marketplace without risk to consumers or disciplinary issues in the profession. I found his presentation to be informative and encouraging in terms of looking forward towards real structural change in our profession. The ABA President-Elect, William Hubbard, weighed in after Kenny spoke to explain that the ABA was not on board with ABS, but he said he would like to see the gap bridged between main-street lawyers and the innovators and academics pushing for change in the profession. Of course the real reasons why we can’t move forward with ABS have to do with protectionism and the interests of the lawyers who sit at the helm of the Bar. Progress here will come slowly, and I still believe it will be consumers who push the change in the market forward, not the ABA House of Delegates.

    Bob Ambrogi wrote a good run-down of the morning’s presentations. (Note: it’s hidden behind a required registration wall.)

    After a very interesting morning session, the conference broke out into working groups. I attended one called “Lawyers and Technology.” There were also working groups on access, big data and analytics, and corporate pricing and matching. Several legal technology startups spoke briefly at each working group, but the discussions among the attendees was the most stimulating. Below is the video of the Working Group Report to the conference summarizing the key points from each breakout discussion.
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  • Game for Legal Services Launched. Giving Away Virtual Practice Materials for Donations.

    The RocketHub crowdfund campaign was launched yesterday to raise funds to build out the estate planning game, Estate Quest.

    Funds will be used to build out four additional levels of the game, playtest, refine, and provide to the public to play for free. In exchange for donations, I’m giving away some signed copies of my books, a bundle of books, legal tech resources, legal tech consulting time, and some other interesting gifts.

    I’d like to make this a game that’s free for the public to play and learn about some basic estate planning concepts. I’m also doing this to learn about how the crowdfund process might be used for other legal services related projects.

    Building a high-quality game that would be more easily distributed and catch on with the Facebook crowds, is expensive. But that’s the audience we need to reach to really share this as a tool for learning legal concepts. I’m still working with Illinois Legal Aid Online on a game related to eviction and landlord/tenant issues. There is something here in terms of increasing engagement with the public online through games. The legal profession needs to experiment to see if games are one way of increasing legal knowledge and access options. Below is me taking a chance on this. Please consider joining in. Thanks!

  • Infographic: Preview of New Access to Justice Project

  • Digital Lawyer Legal Ed Project

    CLPTNewOption1I’m heading down to Florida Coastal School of Law in Jacksonville, Florida next week to record sessions for the courses I will be co-teaching for the Center for Law Practice Technology. I’ll be teaching the core course in law practice management with Richard Granat, teaching a social media for lawyers course by myself and assisting Will Hornsby in his course on Ethics of Practicing Law in a Digital World. We will be adding more courses as the project gets underway.

    For the past several months we have been crafting the syllabi for these courses, compiling the materials for the students, and setting up the distance learning platform to facilitate the synchronous and asynchronous lessons for each course. It is an enormous amount of work, but something I’m finding really valuable because I’m having to pull from the past several years of teaching law students online for a variety of different schools that each use different platforms for their students. All of the course material we teach has to be updated regularly because the topics are related to technology and new ethics opinions and rule changes are coming out all the time that pertain to the use of technology in law practice management. It’s keeping me on my toes.

    I believe once we have many of these courses pre-recorded, the materials and discussion forums set up, and the quizzes and assignments online, this project will be an awesome resource for law students and practitioners who want to dive into it. It will be useful both for those who want that basic legal tech knowledge and skill base that they didn’t get in law school, but also for those who have more of that background and want to obtain more specific knowledge on a more detailed subject in one of the one credit courses, such as my social media course or the ones we are developing for future semesters, such as the e-discovery course, expert systems, document automation, or entrepreneurship in law practice.

    As with most of my projects, this one also ties back to improving access to legal services for the public. If we can educate lawyers about how to use technology to be more efficient and to make legal services more affordable and accessible, then in the long-term going forward, that is going to impact the way that services are delivered and the public is able to work with lawyers to have their legal needs met. It’s one piece of the puzzle, but it’s as critical to bring the profession up to speed with the changes in the legal marketplace as it is to be innovative creating new technology solutions for delivery.

    Want to keep up with the courses we are teaching and the materials? I’ll probably be posting snippets from the classes on the Center for Law Practice Tech blog throughout the term.

  • Infographic: Technology in Legal Education

    This was my first attempt at creating an infographic using Piktochart. Any feedback is welcome! It’s challenging for a writer to think in terms of graphic design, but I’m trying!

  • Less Law School + More Practical Training

    Two fingers upI have been enjoying the debates that have ensued after President Obama’s recommendation to cut law school down to two years. I agree with it personally, but only with the requirement of some form of mentorship or residency program added on. Actually, this practical skills requirement should be in place even with a three year schedule.

    My concern is that if the law school length were cut down to only two years, more of the practical courses that do exist in the curriculum would have to be cut. If the bar exam isn’t changing any time soon, then students would still be hard pressed to take all the substantive bar courses and the practice areas they are interested in only in two years. That might push the practical skills, legal writing, law practice management courses, incubators, clinics, mock trial, law review and many other extras further to the side.

    However, law schools could start looking at outside solutions to provide their students with this form of practical education. This is emerging in the form of certificate courses and supplemental programs for law students and young lawyers.

    I announced a couple weeks ago that Richard Granat and I are now co-directors of the Center for Law Practice Technology. This is our intention: to provide law students and, at some point, private practitioners with the practical business and technology knowledge that they need to practice law in the 21st Century. It is essentially a certificate program. The students will graduate with proof for themselves and prospective employers that they have real-world business and technology skills to practice law or work in any other capacity in our profession.

    Obviously, I believe this type of program is a good solution for law schools to consider – regardless of whether they ever go down to a two-year degree. It will help our law students and those currently practicing to get up to speed. I am excited to see what kind of innovation we can come up with in the way that this learning experience is delivered. We are currently working on course design for our project and thinking about user design and experience in how each course is laid out and taught both in lectures, prerecordings, podcasts, videos and other materials.

    When I read the discussions around President Obama’s statement, I got very excited that maybe this time the proponents of this two-year concept would be taken more seriously.

    To share some of our ideas about teaching this material, here is the online copy of the law review paper Richard and I co-authored. This provides a blueprint for a curriculum for such a program.

  • Center for Law Practice Technology

    This week I signed on as Co-Director of a Center for Law Practice Technology which I will be leading with Richard Granat. Over the coming months, we will be working to design a core curriculum and body of courses that reflects our experience in legal tech and draws from the expertise of our colleagues internationally. We hope to bring guest lectures and experts to the Center that will not only provide practical background in law practice management and the use of legal technology, but who will also foster a spirit of entrepreneurship and innovative thinking.

    I have been teaching courses related to the use of technology in law practice for several years as an adjunct professor at various law schools and have also provided many guest lectures for classes and programs. Working with law students provides a wonderful challenge and opportunity to share and learn what is needed for our next generation of legal professionals to thrive in a changed legal marketplace.  This experience has also given me the chance to use various distance learning platforms, pull a few together on my own, and figure out what works and does not work from a design and teaching perspective. (more…)

  • Writing, Writing and More Writing

    A few articles to note and a request for leads:

    • A Symposium on Justice, Lawyering and Legal Education in the Digital Age will be held by Chicago-Kent College of Law this week in conjunction with the CALI’s 2013 Conference for Law School Computing. Richard Granat and I co-wrote an article entitled The Teaching of Law Practice Management and Technology in Law Schools: A New Paradigm, for the symposium which has been published in the law school’s law review.
    • I also wanted to point out Will Hornsby’s article in this journal entitled, Gaming the System: Approaching 100% Access to Legal Services Through Online Games, an earlier copy of which I read with great interest. I incorporated some of his research on this topic into the business plan for my game project.
    • My chapter entitled “eProfessionalism” has been published this month in the new book from the ABA Center for Professional Responsibility entitled Essential Qualities of the Professional Lawyer.
    • I’m collecting research and case studies for an international report on online legal services that I’ve been commissioned to write. In particular, I’m looking for examples of online delivery methods by private practitioners and law firms in Asia, Africa and South America. If you know of any studies that cover these countries, please share.

    I like to write.

  • Slides from Presentation to Chicago Bar Association

    Today I gave a presentation which was live but also webcast for the Chicago Bar Association. Here are the slides from that talk. I’ve started just using graphics on slides so I’m not sure how useful these will be to anyone without the context, but here they are anyway!

     

     

  • Law Practice Technology in Law Schools

    Please take a minute to read Richard Granat’s post entitled “10 Top Law Schools Teaching Law Practice Technology.”

    The eLawyering Task Force is working on a project to identify law schools that are adequately preparing their students to enter practice with practical skills related to the use of technology. The Task Force is currently reviewing the programs and courses offered at different law school and has identified ten that meet the criteria discussed in the post.

    What is your law school doing on this front? Is it enough?

     

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