I’m at Osgoode for the next couple of months, and yesterday attended the Legal Innovation & Education Workshop organised by the Winkler Institute for Dispute Resolution, Thomson Reuters (TR) and Osgoode Hall Law School‘s Office for Experiential Education, and held in TR’s downtown offices. This is a mix of liveblog & later comment on the event…
We started with lightning talks – five minutes on what we do, why, top skills needed (my contribution is in the last paragraph below). Amongst others we had Casey Flaherty on Procertas, Erika Pagano on Law Without Walls, Nicholas Vermeys on the work of the Cyberjustice Laboratory in the Faculty of Law, University of Montreal, and John Mayer, on CALI A2J Author Course Project. John’s work is great – I’ve followed CALI for decades now, and been a huge admirer of the work of the centre, and John’s inspirational leadership. A2J Author is, as he describes it, a deep dive into law, procedure and heuristics. There are policy/ethical issues raised by legal services delivery and technology, and the the project focuses on competences for emerging law practice (elawyering, software driven law practice, unbundling, etc). Teamwork, project management are key. He showed some student projects, and noted that CALI is writing its own integrated document assembly system. The project is at the intersection of legal education, technology, A2J.
At first breakout we considered the following questions:
- What are some of the challenges that accompany integrating new legal innovation curriculum offerings into law sschool?
- How can we demonstrate the ‘value added’ of these courses to faculty and students?
- What are the necessary conditions to build a critical mass of support for infusing the curriculum with courses that equip students with the skills required to be successful in the new legal landscape?
- What can we do collectively to increase awareness and increase the number of courses in law schools in North America?
Lots of useful discussion in the subsequent plenary. Eg ground zero curriculum can never be achieved, so we need to think about partnerships with faculty, profession, multi-disciplinaries, etc, the idea of partnerships of various sorts to shift cultural conservatism in law schools, the role of regulators in assisting or stymying innovation. The question of law school’s function arose, education for the profession, or for wider roles – the usual Periclean plumbing issues, which I’ve written about here.
Dan Linna gave a really interesting presentation about measuring innovation in legal services, and the legal services innovation index that he has developed out of it. As he said, it’s important because clients want to know about innovation, as do law firms, legal startups, legal aid organisations, law schools and law students. The project is written up with data displays at legaltechinnovation. Phase 1 is the creation of a catalogue of legal service innovations, types of legal innovations, innovations by jurisdiction. His methodology was carefully designed, and not just for big law but small law too (though he admitted alternative legal services aren’t well represented). Indicators of innovation included alternative fees, project management, KM, automation basics, data analysis. There are weaknesses, as Dan pointed out, for the descriptions on websites that he relied upon were weak proxies for innovation. The gap between what a firm may say on its website and what it actually does in practice could cut both ways, either hyping innovation, or misjudging or overlooking it when it occurred.
I thought this was going to resolve into a comparison of legal innovation in the profession for us to take away and think about in our law school practices – but no, Dan’s team had applied the methodology to law schools – he took 40 recognized innovative law schools, and focused on their legal service delivery innovation. Again, much information about Phase 1 of the project is at legaltechinnovation – well worth visiting. Topic categories included business of law (inc legal aid), process improvement, leadership for lawyers, project management innovative lawyering, computational law, empirical methods, data analytics, technology basics, applied technology. Courses included AI & Law, Blockchain and Law, Cybersecurity and Law.
The next lightning round included Kate Simpson of Bennett Jones on Knowledge Management, innovation and legal education, Geevith Rubakumar, newly graduated from Osgoode, talking about ParDone, a platform that is designed to give people with a criminal record a second chance at success by reducing the cost and time of the record suspension application. To achieve this, ParDONE automates the record suspension process, while keeping the client updated at every step of the process.
Darin Thomson next, talking on sims in the context of ODR, and analysing the differences between double blind bidding, text-based negotiation and video mediation. Learners given not a lot of instruction, but still coming out with valuable learning experiences – a fascinating experiment. The work was written up with Martha Simmons, co-director of the Winkler Institute, and published in the OA (kudos!) Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice.[1]
Both Darin and John Mayer noted the same point: that students became more expert at the substantive law they were working with precisely because they needed to work with in what might be called processual frames or logic frameworks. As John said, there’s no hiding there, unlike fudging essays or exam answers; and the active work that students do deepens understanding that goes beyond the tasks in hand. And that was exactly my experience in the SIMPLE project, where for example Karen Counsell discovered that when she introduced a simulation into her first year first semester course in Torts (taking out an essay, but keeping most other things the same on the module), not only did student engagement improve, but their marks in the course examination increased by a cohort average of 10%.
My colleague at Osgoode, Trevor Farrow, was in the next lightning round, and he talked about empathy, particularly empathy with students. Stress levels are increasing – changes in learning, learning new ways, etc. What to do? We need to do four things: critically identify the problem (eg teaching today’s knowledge with yesterday’s tools); there needs to be a culture shift in law schools; innovation processes in law schools need examined; and data needs to be much better analysed. Eg changing educational cultures means identifying prior knowledge of students. Hersh Perlis next on the legal innovation zone at Ryerson U, focusing on supporting legal tech setups, advancing innovation initiatives. encouraging modernization of the legal system – with a focus on the consumer.
We had another breakout and plenary, with our hosts from Winkler, Nicole Aylwin and Jean-Paul Bevilacqua, working us hard…
So many useful things came out of the day for me, and I’ll discuss some of them briefly below. I have to say that at first glance I didn’t really appreciate how valuable Procertas’ work is. Now I think it ought to be part of law school induction, and repeated where document production by students is taken to a new level – eg law school entry, the move from essays to dissertations, to Masters dissertations, to PhDs; and of course to basic competence in professional document production.[2]
An Osgoode student, Leah, made a valuable point about the invisibility of indigenous cultures and viewpoints in the discourse of innovation, including legal services innovation.[3] The critique that has been carried out in Canadian HE generally by Marie Battiste (eg see this literature review) and others could be applied more narrowly to the topic of technology and legal education (some are already engaged in this, such as my colleague at Osgoode, Karen Drake) Leah’s comment pointed to the wider issues of innovation in legal education – how we frame its discourse and practice, ideologically as well as economically, and the need to include indigenous perspectives and values.
Dan’s work was fascinating. We need more projects like his, with data about innovation beyond legal services innovation, what it consists of, how to support it, how it affects law school learning, what it does to law school teaching, and much else. We were talking in breakouts that co-curricular activities, interdisciplinary courses, embedded heuristics such as simulation are important, and that such activities often go under the radar of what is stated at a high-level on the law school websites; and we also need data that’s more granulated and verified. This isn’t a deficit view of Dan’s work, it’s simply saying that we need to build on it and do the second-order analysis.
Dan’s work brought up another issue. Unlike in the BILETA reports, law schools are named as doing legal services innovation in a cloud diagram. When the graphical information also includes extent of it beside the school’s US News ranking, what we have on the screen is at least the start of a ranking. And rankings have negative effects on many things in education, not least when they are used to ends for which they were not intended. Goodhart’s Law applies here: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. To be fair, Dan made it very clear in his presentation that the measuring Index is not intended to be a ranking; but it may well become one.
Which brings me to the subject of regulation and regulators – no regulators were present, and yet we legal educators must work closely with regulators to let them understand what we’re doing, why, and what sorts of innovations work and in which contexts. We need to engage with them on all of the above.
Finally, in my lightning five minutes’ worth I mentioned process thinking, but spent longer quoting an Enlightenment Scots philosopher, Adam Ferguson, from the notes of lectures he gave in his Moral Philosophy class at Edinburgh University in 1775. So much of current regulatory discourse and the political management of HE veers towards arguments of economic efficiency and consumerist option, a form of market citizenship that embeds neoliberalist educational policy. In its place I’d argue, as Ferguson did, for more resonant, social and ethical values to be implicit in habit, practice and conduct, and for the analysis and understanding of them to be close to the centre of legal education. He was addressing students but his inspiring words now are relevant for government, regulators and university management:
Now is your time to begin Practices and lay the Foundation of habits that may be of use to you in every Condition and in every Profession at least that is founded on a literary or a Liberal Education. Sapere and Fari quae sentiat are the great Objects of Literary Education and of Study. … mere knowledge however important is far from being the only or most important Attainment of Study.
The habits of Justice, Candour, Benevolence, and a Courageous Spirit are the first Objects of Philosophy the Constituents of happiness and of personal honour, and the first Qualifications for human society and for Active life.[4]
My thanks to the Winkler Institute, and especially to Nicole and Jean-Paul for their excellent work in organising a great workshop.
- [1]As the abstract states:
The main objectives of the project were to expose law students to ODR from the perspective of a disputant or client; expose clinical mediation students to a range of technology-based dispute resolution processes; demonstrate the potential for technology to support collaboration across vast distances; and promote experiential education by giving students “hands-on” ODR experience.↩
- [2]I’m old enough to remember, in the UK, the three reports produced under the auspices of BILETA (British and Irish Law Education Technology Association). As Chair of BILETA when the third report was being produced I had some experience of them, and summarised them recently in this article. Going back to those reports on legal education technology in the 1990s and early years of the millennium, and specifically the second BILETA Report, it was noted there that
The Committee believe that as a minimum […] law students should be able to use IT to: Produce documents; essays and/or assignments and CVs using a software package . The Law School should be responsible for the organisation of the training (by the most appropriate and effective means) of undergraduates either directly or alternatively ensure that undergraduates are able to learn about the electronic production of basic documentation through courses organised at the institution of which the Law School forms a part.
Note the date – 1996. Actually, and on this point, this report was simply restating the earlier 1991 report. So over 27 years later, and in the opinion of Casey, law schools are still not sufficiently educating students in these basic skills. (My own hobbyhorse in this regard is the use of online citation managers such as Zotero – or rather what I suspect is the lack of use by students.)↩
- [3]I became aware of this when at ANU, and writing about the subject there. Working with the Centre for Higher Education, Learning and Teaching there on the use of the Higher Education Academy’s professional framework in Australasia, I came across the substantial and thorough work of Maori educationalists in New Zealand, who rewrote the professional skills framework of the HEA so that it would be relevant within to the indigenous as well as other cultures of HE in Aotearoa. In doing so they had the valuable example of Maori health models and other models to draw upon. The social patterns, in other words, had been established in other disciplines and professions, and made it easier for such work to be acknowledged and legitimised.↩
- [4]Sher, R.B. (1990) Professors of virtue: the social history of the Edinburgh Moral Philosophy Chair, in: M.A. Stewart (ed.) Eighteenth Century Studies in the Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, Oxford, Clarendon Press, pp.117-8, citing Adam Ferguson, Lectures, 1775-6. I quote this and other extracts from Ferguson’s work and analyse their contexts in chapter four of Transforming Legal Education, as well as the source of the Latin tags (to know, and to say how you feel) in the work of the Roman poet, Horace. Ferguson’s lectures and mss, including his letters, are archived in Edinburgh University. His lectures, edited, appear in Ferguson, A. (1792) Principles of Moral and Political Science: Being Chiefly a Retrospect of Lectures Delivered in the College of Edinburgh, in Two Volumes. Edinburgh, Strathan and Cadell.↩