I’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.