Tag: LawHacks

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Transitions

Let me give you an image of me as a starting-out lawyer.  I’m on the phone with a client – a terrifying proposition in itself.  Client is talking about something incomprehensible (some Wall Street acronym or something) and assuming I not only know what it is but have an informed and expert opinion about the thing as it relates to the client.  I am googling this thing while on the phone, hoping the client can’t hear me typing.

Transitioning to law school to practice was like that.

One of the reasons L21C exists is that I wanted to try to fill what I think is a gap in legal education in preparing students for this transition, from law student to professional.  Law school does not provide students with much understanding of or information about the practicalities of practice, or about what the ecosystem of the legal services world is like.  It’s a big chasm indeed from pondering the significance of peppercorns to billing, spreadsheets, attempting to tame clients, navigating the internal politics and ego-bruises of working in multiple teams, and googling financial jargon as quietly as possible.

I often hear that it’s not an appropriate goal for law school to prepare students to be “practice-ready,” that there is no substitute for real-world experience and hands-on training.   As far as it goes, I think this is true, even just obvious.  It doesn’t follow, though, that law school can’t do more to prepare students for the transition to practice.  We can, and we should.

That’s the aspiration of L21C: to make students, if not “practice-ready,” at least a bit more ready for the challenges, surprises and mysteries of the coming transition to practice.  To demystify the mysteries, make at least some of the surprises less surprising, and, I hope, stir up some excitement about the challenges.

L21C is also transitioning this year.  Last year it was a completely brand-new course, still a prototype really, and I really was not sure what to expect.  This year is … well, honestly not that different, but it’s no longer completely brand new and I have a little bit more idea what to expect.  Last year’s class was a fantastic group who did some truly inspirational work.  Therefore, my expectations are very high.  I’m looking forward to equally great things from this year’s group, possibly even greater.  Go on, challenge yourselves!

The design of the course is substantially the same as it was last year, but there are some modifications.  The first few weeks are more structured, with fewer guest speakers and more lectures and activities that I planned.  In the later weeks we have many really amazing guest speakers, a panel, a field trip to Kamloops Innovation Centre, and plenty of time built in for teams to work on their LawHacks projects.  The idea is that in the first part of the semester students will get a solid understanding, from the lectures, readings and class activities, of the themes we are covering, and in the later part of the semester the group will be very well equipped to engage with the wonderful leaders and thinkers who are joining us as guests.

Of course I can’t end a post about transitions without mentioning the central focus of this course, the Big Transition: what’s happening to the profession itself.

Richard and Daniel Susskind, the authors of one of our course books (The Future of the Professions), say that the legal world “will change more radically over the next two decades than over the last two centuries” and the legal profession is “on the brink of unprecedented upheaval” (pp. 66-67, internal citations omitted).

Jordan Furlong, writing in the Canadian Bar Association Legal Futures Initiative publication Do Law Differently: Futures for Young Lawyers – another of our course texts – says “[a]lmost everything about career choices and employment options for new lawyers is in flux,” and that the generation of lawyers entering practice now “has both an obligation and an opportunity that its predecessors never experienced.”

David Scott, the co-chair of Borden Ladner Gervais, has said that the lack of access to justice for ordinary people is the legal profession’s equivalent of global warming.

These are the big, systemic transitions that we are going to learn, think and share ideas about in the course.  I hope that the discussion will carry on outside class – and will engage the wider community.  That’s what the blog is for, and I’m really excited to read posts and comments by our new class of L21C partners, as well as everyone else who wants to join the conversation.

This time of year people often say that September, not January is the real new year.  It’s a time of transitions.  Here we go!

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Artificial Intelligence: Shaping the Future of Law

I very much enjoy Sci-Fi movies about artificial intelligence, but I am not particularly keen on being replaced by a machine that can spew out better legal arguments in a milli-second based on an algorithm. The majority of our class discussions have focused primarily on technological innovations in the legal field. Artificial intellegence has been hailed as the future of law. It’s all very exciting, until the foreboding feeling sets in and you’re reminded that not only do you have to compete with 4.0 Bobby for a job, but with a machine as well. According to Michael Cross in his article, Role of Artificial Intelligence in Law, “ a computer is as fresh and alert at 2 am as it was at nine o’ clock the previous morning.” Yeah, well, no arguments there. Computers will always be faster, more efficient and accurate at any given time of the day.

The abstracts from the 14th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence & Law sum up the relationship between law and artificial intelligence eloquently. Both fields are involved in the process of creation. AI systems are built, experiments are designed and paradigms are replaced. In law, legislation is drafted, precedents are set and beliefs are balanced. Both fields struggle with the complexity of modeling human behaviour. AI aims to recreate human behaviour, while the law intends to drive human behaviour. The meeting of law with AI was inevitable. But where does that leave the plethora of graduating law students and lawyers?

Throughout this class, we have all been reminded of the concept of the “legal sherpa” and helping the ordinary lay person navigate the convoluted path of the law. A more refined role for AI in law is to provide strategic legal guidance. Programs such as ROSS a digital legal expert, built on IBM Watson helps attorneys with their legal research based on plain word searches. This serves as a valuable tool to help guide lawyers in their everyday research. In the end this will make legal profesisonals more effective because they will be able to complete their tasks more efficiently therefore charging the client less for services.

London firm Hodge Jones & Allen has pioneered a predictive model of personal injury case outcomes to assess the predictability of their current caseload. The program will assist the firm in determining which cases have a greater chance of success, therefore allowing the firm to direct their client towards either settling or proceeding with a claim. This is an example of a legal technological advancement in action and in the future personal injury firms and perhaps others as well, may greatly benefit from using such programs.

This new technology will not hinder or replace legal professionals at all. In fact, I see it helping to make the jobs of lawyers easier and more enjoyable. It will also help them bring a wider array of services to their clients in a quicker and more streamlined manner. These advancements will thrust lawyers into more advocacy-based roles because those types of positions cannot be fulfilled by AI, at least not for now. In conclusion, I do not believe that lawyers will ever fully be replaced by AI but it can serve as a useful tool that can better the practice of law.

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Money Can’t Buy Me Happiness… But It Can Buy Me a Boat

If you were to play a game of phrase association with a group of lawyers (and law students for that matter) and give them the phrase “mental health”, I would posit that many of the answers would deal with clients. You would be likely to hear many things: not criminally responsible, fitness to stand trial, and other job related answers.

The troubling part of this thought experiment is that lawyers (and law students) have a strikingly high occurrence of mental health issues but would be very likely to point to the mental issues of others. As is pointed out in the New York Times article by Douglas Quenqua, lawyers are over three-and-a-half times more likely to suffer from depression. The reasons and causes for this are unknown but oft hypothesized. The fact that getting into law school (I would argue it starts even when trying to get into law school) results in an immediate spike in the likelihood of developing depression is a scary proposition. I’m sure that many students understand that they are getting into a difficult profession and one that involves a great deal of stress.

There is something to be said for the fact that lawyers are among the highest paid professions. There is an allure, a draw, and something to be said for the idea that lawyers get into the profession to make more money than they might in another field. This is possibly done at the expense of some personal relationships and free time. Most lawyers go into the job with open eyes and decide to do it despite the downsides.

Lawyers are often of a certain personality type, and I would argue that this personality type is also the reason why lawyers have a higher risk of depression. They are less likely to admit there may be a problem, less likely to seek treatment because of it, and more likely to continue trigger behaviours that exacerbate depression symptoms (read: stress out and drink). Too often depression is seen as a weakness instead of the chemical imbalance that it truly is. The chemical receptors in the brain that allow you to feel happiness do not connect as frequently in a person that suffers from depression.

Quenqua’s main thesis of his article was that lower paid lawyers reported being happier than the more well paid legal professionals. He states that lawyers in the public sector (public defenders and legal aid lawyers) were more likely to report being happy. The most likely rationale for this disparity between public and private is that private sector lawyers are far more likely to be working longer stressful hours. One aspect of public sector and in-house counsel legal work that is often touted as a recruitment tool is that of work-life balance. While not conclusive I believe this is because the expectations of both hours and “billable” work is reduced. As a corollary, the public service lawyers drank less than their higher income counterparts; as noted earlier, alcohol is a depressant. The alcohol may be a “chicken or the egg” argument; the higher-paid lawyers drink more, thus resulting in more unhappiness, or the unhappiness triggers more drinking.

I also take issue with the program at George Washington university, when attending law school many students are unsure of what sort of practice they will be in when they graduate. This is true of most students and speaks to the variety of legal work out there; however, the other major factor at work is the uncertainty of the job market. Many lawyers report finding a firm that they liked following graduation and the firm having an opening or a need in one field or another and “ended up doing x”. I would suggest that while giving students a taste for all the different opportunities is noble, it may also result in a student getting their heart set on one potential stream (abandoning a more broad course load), come out of school seeking only one type of opportunity, only exacerbating the problem of finding a job after law school.

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The Future Of The Legal Education: Specialization Or Degradation Of The J.D.

As the legal field continues to expand, general practitioners are expected to know more in their respective fields to better assist their clients. A lawyer is expected to enhance their knowledge by keeping up with the evolution of the legal sector. Harry Arthurs recognizes the dangers that future lawyers may face in The Future of Legal Education: Three Visions and a Prediction.

He suggests a possible option where “The bar may one day recognize not just one class of members, but many. Members of each class would have different educational credentials…that general practitioners will one day be licensed to appear as advocates in certain tribunals and the lower courts, and to do routine real estate transactions, simple incorporations and uncontested divorces—but not undertake appellate litigation, patent applications or tax planning”.

He further elaborates “They might offer a skills-based one-year degree for paralegals, a stripped-down tow-year ‘basic’ degree for general practitioners, an enhanced four year degree for specialist practitioners, and conversion courses for those who want to upgrade their credentials”.

On the one hand, I can see this as a form of specialization in a specific area for law students. Those that know what area of law they want to practice can choose to study that, right from the beginning while avoiding all the unnecessary courses that they will never use for their chosen area of practice.

However, on the other hand I see this as undermining the value of legal education and hence a J.D. By creating this separation in the legal education, many of the basic competencies will be omitted from one’s legal education. On a basic level many of the different fields of law interact with each other, and competencies in all these areas are crucial for a practitioner to come up with the best solution for their clients.

There is obviously a wealth of knowledge available in studying law. In my opinion, due to the enhanced level of education required to sufficiently practice in each specific area of law, I think in the future, a LLM in the chosen area of practice will be mandatory after a JD, in order to obtain an articling position in the desired field.

With each area of law expanding everyday, I think it would be ridiculous to cut down on the legal education. The only way to keep up with the evolving nature of the legal sector is to increase the education required, and thus satisfying the necessary requirements of becoming a competent practitioner. Of course, this is just my view.  What do you think are some ways our legal education will evolve to better accommodate us in being competent in our areas of practice for the future?

 

 

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Access to Justice in Canada: Students with high hopes to help the low-income

“[Canada is] increasingly failing in our responsibility to provide a justice system that [is] accessible, responsive and citizenship focused.”

The above was a statement by our Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin of the Supreme Court of Canada, about the inability for Canada’s families to obtain affordable legal counsel. The Chief Justice has also stated that “legal-aid funding and coverage is not available for most people and problems, and the cost of legal services and length of proceedings is steadily increasing”, and that “statistics show that people who get legal assistance in dealing with their legal problems are much more likely to achieve better results than those who do not.”

As Canadians, the majority of us believe access to justice is a fundamental right. Contrary to this belief, Canada is witnessing a gap between the fundamental right and the stark reality that the wealthy the are the ones that can afford a lawyer’s legal services. With specific reference to British Columbia, cuts to BC Legal Aid have taken a toll on access to justice, especially for those with low-incomes. A list of cuts from 2005-2010 can be found here.

In 2013 the Canadian Bar Association released the ‘Reaching Equal Justice Report’. The report states that there is a need for more federal funding for civil legal aid. It says that the Canadian Bar Association will reach its goal for Canadians living at and below the poverty line to be eligible for full coverage of essential public legal services by 2020. Additionally, the report puts forth that all law schools in Canada will have a student legal clinic to help low-income people by 2020. The Canadian Bar Association advises that all 31 targets mentioned in the report are expected to be completed by 2030. A video about the proposed legal aid system can be watched here.

It is important to note that change does not fall solely on governments or the bar association. As the report says, law schools and other stakeholders must be involved. It is obvious that “tinkering” or making a few changes here and there will not be enough. The report states that “the civil justice system is too badly broken for a quick fix. People fall between the cracks at an unacceptable cost. Injustice is too deeply woven into the system’s very structure for piecemeal reforms to make much of a dent.”

It is obvious that now is the time to use the resources we have, like our Canadian law students, to help improve Canada’s access to justice for low-income people. With 18 law schools in Canada teaching common law, these numbers have the potential to create a significant positive difference. If that is not motivation enough, pro bono work by law students helps not only those who find themselves facing a legal conundrum, but also the law students involved. The students typically receive training to be more understanding, companionate, and patient, and in turn become more competent lawyers to enter the work force.

From what I could find, only one Canadian law school (Osgoode Hall Law School at York University) has what they call a public interest graduation requirement. If pro bono work by law students is part of the answer, why are we not making full use of this potential resource? Is it lack of resources, lack of incentive, or lack of an enforced requirement?

In correspondence with TRU Law’s Professor Dhand (who is currently the Project Leader on a Law Foundation Large Project Grant for a poverty law clinic), she informed me that the school is implementing the Community Legal Advice Clinic in 2016. The Community Legal Advice Clinic will assist low-income earners in the Kamloops and Interior region with legal problems – initially in the area of residential tenancy law and housing issues – with direct client services. The clinic will run approximately two to three days a week and can be found at the Centre for Seniors Information in Kamloops, BC. Additionally, Professor Dhand advises that TRU Law has the Legal Information Service, located on campus, where she supervises and mentors 60 student volunteers each year, who provide legal information, resources, and public legal education workshops in all areas of law. Lastly, Professor Dhand also teaches TRU Law’s Community Lawyering course where students receive instruction about the substantive and procedural aspects of community lawyering such as client interviewing, strategic litigation, legal research, and ethical issues.

It is clear that TRU Law is taking steps towards improving the ability for low-income British Colombians to access justice, well before the Canadian Bar Association’s goal of 2020. Are there additional steps that TRU Law and other law schools can take to facilitate access to justice for the low-income? Should TRU Law’s Community Lawyering class be a required course for students?

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Insipiration for LawHacks

Georgetown Law’s Center for the Study of the Legal Profession gives students an opportunity to design and develop access to justice apps in a course called “Technology, Innovation and Legal Practice.”  Yesterday the ABA Journal ran an article on “Legal Rebel” Professor Tanina Rostain, co-director of the Center, who created and teaches the course.  Students show off their apps in the Iron Tech Law competition, where they can win prizes in Excellence in Design, Excellence in Presentation and all-round best app.

Here’s an excerpt from a law review article (1) co-authored by Professor Rostain (internal citations omitted):

“In 2012, a team of students in our class on “Technology, Innovation and Law Practice” built a web-based application (app) called ‘Same-Sex Marriage adviser.’  The app, which covered fifty states and the District of Columbia, used an automated interview to help users determine whether they could get married or enter into a domestic partnership in their home state and, if so, how such a relationship might affect their other legal rights.  The app described available state law benefits, such as hospital visitation and inheritance rights, possible disadvantages, such as the requirement to register, and limits on any federal benefits available as a consequence of the Defense of Marriage Act.  After going through the interview, which usually took about three minutes, the user received a brief overall assessment statement.  The user could also view a customized full report that described the information the user had provided and set forth more specific detailed guidance based on this information … In designing an automated adviser that could help same-sex couples determine whether they could and might want to formalize their relationship, the students sought to build an app that served an important unmet need.”

That particular app may need updating after this summer’s SCOTUS ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges – but you get the idea.

Of course, as you’ve heard me say probably more than enough times, the LawHack project in our course does not have to involve creating an app, or using technology (although it certainly can).  But in other ways it has a lot in common with the Georgetown course and competition.  For example: devising effective and creative ways to meet important unmet needs.  Thinking through how end-users can interact with legal system to get the outcomes they need.  Giving users meaningful access to law by organizing and tapping into the “tacit knowledge” that lawyers use to advise clients and translating it into a more accessible, user-friendly, and cost-effective form.  (For more on what all this means, see the article.  It’s great.)  And, of course, the importance of both a good, effective design and excellent presentation (for extremely useful tips on that, don’t miss Adam LaFrance’s comment on the LawHack assignment description).

In case you need more inspiration, the ABA journal piece notes that Dustin Robinson, one of the students in the first Iron Tech Law competition in 2012, “immediately took a job in Chicago as a legal solutions architect with SeyfarthLean Consulting, a subsidiary of the Seyfarth Shaw law firm.”  (You may remember that Mitch Kowalski discussed Seyfarth Shaw and its consulting arm in his presentation yesterday.)  And in each of the past two years another student from the course has also gone to work there.

Law is changing, and some doors may be closing – but others are opening.

(1)Tanina Rostain, Roger Skalbeck & Kevin G. Mulcahy, “Thinking Like a Lawyer, Designing Like an Architect: Preparing Students for the 21st Century Practice” (2013), 88 Chi-Kent L Rev 743.

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LawHacks: The Main Assignment

The main project that participants in L21C will work on for the next three months is called “LawHacks.”  It’s a group project that will culminate in a pitch, “Dragon’s Den” style, to a panel of judges.  The challenge is to come up with innovative ways to provide legal services and do law better.

Here are the detailed instructions:

 

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The Problem

The idea behind LawHacks is crowdsourcing solutions to a problem. The problem, in very simple terms, is finding better ways to be lawyers.

To elaborate:

  • From a certain perspective, there is an oversupply of legal services: it’s becoming harder for some firms to compete and stay profitable, there’s softening of demand (and expectations of better deals on price, speed and efficiency) from traditional purchasers of legal services, and the job market is getting tougher.
  • At the same time, there is an undersupply of legal services: there is a huge amount of need for help with legal problems that is not being met. Business clients still need legal services, but they are facing their own pressures to ensure that each dollar spent on lawyers is justified. Ordinary people generally have severely limited access to legal services, or no access at all.

So the problem is how to bridge that gap, between shrinking profitable work for lawyers and unmet demand for our skills and help.

The gap is connected to other challenges facing the profession, including: attrition of talented and highly trained people, especially women and minorities; narrowing access to the legal profession linked to the cost of legal education and a shrinking supply of articling positions; and the difficulty that some lawyers experience in achieving a satisfying and well-rounded life.

There are lots of smart, talented people who want to help solve clients’ legal problems and have the knowledge, intelligence and creativity to do it, and there lots of potential clients who need them, yet in many ways our current system for connecting one side of that equation to the other is not functioning well.

This is what is known as a “wicked problem.” It is multidimensional. It does not have a single “right” solution (although there are surely solutions that are better and more effective than others). Wicked problems are tough to solve – or even impossible to solve completely – because they involve a complex mix of contradictory and changing requirements, and a solution that deals with one dimension may reveal or create other problems.

 

The Proposal

Your task is to come up with a strategy, idea, tool, product or something else that helps address the problem.

Essentially, you are developing an innovative technology, in the broadest sense of the word:

Technology is the collection of techniques, methods or processes used in the production of goods or services or in the accomplishment of objectives (Wikipedia)

This does not have to mean technological solutions in the narrow sense (for example, designing an app or using modern communications technology) – but of course, you are welcome to incorporate “tech” elements like these into your project.

You choose your own direction.

Your team can choose which of the many dimensions of the problem you want to focus on.

Here are a few suggestions for directions you might want to pursue. They are suggestions only, intended to spark your imaginations, not to constrain you.

  • New approaches to regulation of the profession and/or business models (see readings for October 14)
  • New approaches to charging for legal services (see readings for October 21)
  • Technological solutions to enhance access to justice for disadvantaged groups (see readings for October 28)
  • Reformed approaches to legal education and the law school curriculum (see readings for November 11)
  • A plan for improving diversity in the profession and the retention of women and minorities (see readings for November 18)
  • A better way of disseminating legal information to those who need it
  • A new approach to funding legal education to improve access to the profession and give graduates more freedom in their choice of career options
  • A plan for getting better and more complete information about unmet needs for legal services

 

How you turn your idea into a proposal to present to the judges is really up to you. There are two main things to keep in mind:

  • You have to explain to the judges why it matters – why is it important to do the thing that you are trying to do?
  • And you have to convince the judges that it will work – is this a practicable solution that will produce useful results?

 

The Pitch

Teams will pitch their LawHacks to a panel of “dragons” in the last two class sessions, November 25 and December 2.

Each team has a total of 40 minutes allotted for its pitch.

The overall goal, similar to “Dragon’s Den,” is to persuade the dragons that your project is worth “investing” in. Unlike in Dragon’s Den, however, your project does not have to be a business proposal intended to generate profits (although it can be – and if it is, you should be prepared to show the dragons how it will make a profit). You should persuade the dragons that this project will give a good return on investment – whether that is measured in the traditional way (profit) or as a social investment that creates benefits for the community.

The total time consists of:

  • The “elevator pitch”: 5 minutes. This is a very quick explanation of the essence of your idea.
  • A more detailed presentation: 15 minutes. This is where you walk the dragons through the specifics of your proposal. Think of it as something like a TED talk.
  • Interview with the dragons: 20 minutes. The dragons will question you about how your proposal will work, what problems there might be and how you plan to address them.

How you set up your presentation and what tools you use is completely up to you. You can use live talk by the whole group or any number of members of the group; Powerpoint; Keynote; Prezi; video; a web site; a demo of any prototype you have created; or any combination of these or anything else.

  • You need to have a realistic plan for putting your idea into operation; just a vague idea is not going to cut it with the dragons.
  • You should gather relevant information and research to support your proposal, show why it’s needed and that it is feasible.
  • You should give due consideration to how your idea might exacerbate problems, or reveal new ones, while solving the problem you are focusing on (this is characteristic of wicked problems). Be prepared to convince the dragons that you have a plan to mitigate the difficulties, or that your idea is a net positive even if it might have some unavoidable costs.

 

***IMPORTANT: Materials to Submit in Advance***

You must prepare at a minimum, a two-page summary of your proposal for the dragons and the rest of the class, and submit it one week in advance of your presentation.

You are also allowed (but not required) to prepare any other materials you like and submit them to the dragons to help them understand your idea – but use your judgment and avoid overloading them.

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