Category: Uncategorized

  • Brian Inkster in Toronto

    Am at a legal innovation roundtable sponsored by Thomson Reuters, in TR’s building, Bay St, downtown Toronto, at the invitation of Monica Goyal, an innovator and practitioner in Toronto who works with Osgoode and is the founder of Aluvion.  Brian Inkster is the guest speaker, introduced by Mitch Kowalski, a chapter in whose book The Great…

  • Common entrance exams and the SQE: the wrong story

    The SQE is the Solicitors Qualifying Exam in England and Wales.  It’s an example of a common entrance examination, something a number of legal education regulators are interested in, or already practising.  I was discussing it last night in downtown Toronto, at Osgoode Professional Development, in the context of legal education generally, asking nine questions of…

  • Reflection beyond ePortfolios

    This has been a crazily busy eight-day visit to Australia but so productive.  It was marked by days of intense activities and meetings and more, making connections in ANU and UNE, giving an all day workshop on simulated clients (liveblogged in a series of posts on this blog), and a seminar on the SRA’s plans…

  • Lucy Evans: the experience of using SCs at Flinders Law School

    Before Lucy’s session I gave a brief history of the SCI initiative in my slides ‘The Simulated Client Initiative: A portrait of the outsider as teacher’, and they’re up on the SCI site. Back to Flinders…  Lucy described how the SC innovation was carried out at Flinders – based, as Lucy pointed out, on the…

  • Simulated Client workshop, Canberra, 16.8.17 – Keynote, Debra Nestel

    I’m back at ANU, Canberra, giving a series of workshops and seminars over three days, which I’ll liveblog or try to summarise in this and subsequent posts – part of my duties as an Honorary Prof at the ANU College of Law (I’m now with Osgoode Hall Law School). First up is an all-day workshop…

  • CLE Conference.  Final thoughts: doing and undoing

    In the FT back in March, John Gapper wrote an interesting article on why Standard Life offered a whopping £3.8bn for Aberdeen Asset Management.  It wasn’t a merger based on strength on either side (Standard Life acquiring Aberdeen’s niche skills; Aberden accessing Standard Life’s strength in developed markets) but on joint weakness.  That weakness, Gapper…

  • CLE conference, day 2, session 6

    Emily Allbon and Morris Pamplin, from City Law School now, on ‘Lagton Legal: Creating a transmedia story world for the LLB Legal Practice’.  This LLB is a fully-online supported distance learning programme, developed with CILEx for legal executives and others.  The students are returners to education, working while studying, with family and other commitments.  How…

  • CLE conference, day 2, session 3

    Presentations by Matthew Homewood, NLS, and Neetu Chetty (Varsity College, South Africa).  Matthew up first, on ‘Extending learning spaces using social media’.  He’s been collecting prizes by the armful recently, and he compared the situation re digital tech and legal education to the situation with initial teacher resistance to calculators in school classrooms.  Interesting.  He…

  • CLE conference, day two, session 3

    Third plenary, Craig Newbery-Jones, Plymouth University Law School, on ‘The courage to walk into the darkness, strength to return to the light.  Technological experimentation within legal education and legal practice’.  I’ve published Craig’s work in the past – he has a highly sophisticated view of digital technologies and their uses in legal education, well worth…

  • CLE conference, day 2, session 1

    First up today, Lisa Davies, on ‘Law PORT: an online training initiative to improve the legal information literacy skills of PhD researchers across the UK.’  Lisa is a law librarian from IALS.  She introduced what IALS Library does, including the roadshows.  To expand reach, their latest initiative is Law PORT – postgrad online research training.…

  • Keynote 2: Technology makes you a better lawyer, not a techie

    Second keynote, this time from Ludwig Bull, a student from Cambridge (when did you last attend a legal ed conference, or indeed any conference, where a student presents…?).  Avid readers of my blog will remember that I’ve already posted on his achievements.  He started his keynote with a 3-D model of citations of Donoghue vs…

  • CLE Conference, session 2

    The first parallel session and I’m blogging Janice Denoncourt from NLS on ‘Interdisciplinary legal education: embedding IP law in Business programmes’.  Janice has already been published on the subject but she adapts her interdisciplinary approaches very neatly for legal education. Janice is talking about IP law and legal education, and argues that law schools need…