Unlocking Opportunities: The Importance of Legal Tech in Universities and Continuing Education
Stellium is constantly advocating for the legal industry to finally recognize the benefits of technology and embrace it to its full potential, or else it will risk falling further behind the significant digital transformation efforts of virtually all other industries. However, this advice doesn’t only apply to lawyers and firms, but also to the universities responsible for educating the next generation of legal professionals.
The simple fact is that in order to survive in today’s increasingly complex digital landscape, lawyers must possess a wide range of skills that allow them to effectively navigate and utilize various technological tools and platforms. And if law schools hope to produce competent and proficient future attorneys, they’ll need to act fast to acknowledge technology’s growing influence on the legal profession and adapt their teaching methods accordingly.
Bloomberg's Law School Innovation Initiative
Fortunately, while most universities are still far from where they need to be in terms of developing new curricula around legal tech, others appear to be making considerable progress, and support from reputable institutions and publications provides evidence that the issue has not gone entirely unnoticed. For example, in 2022, Bloomberg Law inaugurated its Law School Innovation Initiative, a program dedicated to identifying and honoring law school faculty, staff, and administrators whose pioneering contributions to legal tech awareness and education are currently setting the stage for broader adoption.
One law school that has currently emerged as a trailblazer in the field of legal studies is Georgia State University, whose Legal Analytics and Innovation course could very well serve as a blueprint for countless similar programs in the future. Speaking to the importance of education around subjects such as legal analytics, Assistant Professor of Law at the university, Susan Navarro Smelcer, provides a simple and effective analogy.
"Imagine Grammy has ten grandchildren who write her 90 letters, and they write about what’s new in their lives, about their schoolwork, hobbies, and where they spent their most recent vacation,” says Smelcer. “While she is interested in everything her grandchildren do, she needs only certain information on which to base her actions: whom to send money to, whom to ask for pictures, and so on. Analytical tools could help her to organize the letters and conceptually cluster the information contained in them.”
Expanding on the benefits of legal analytics tools, Smelcer adds that automating the analysis of hundreds, or even thousands of legal documents "can reveal patterns not apparent to the human brain — connections between words, combinations of words and phrases, and references — that help to extract rules from unstructured and inherently messy legal language.”
Accelerating Progress
While the legal industry has been notoriously resistant to change, particularly as it relates to the adoption of new technologies, we’ve now come to the point that it's bordering on irresponsible for law schools not to equip their students with the skills needed to succeed in the age of widespread digitalization. In fact, technology has become so central to legal work, and to society as a whole, that it might not be unreasonable to make the completion of legal tech courses mandatory at universities around the country.
More specifically, such courses should cover a wide range of increasingly relevant topics, including AI in law, contract automation, legal project management, and data analytics. To ensure that these subjects are being presented from a place of sufficient and well-established know-how and understanding, it might even make sense for legal educators to collaborate with computer science programs to offer interdisciplinary courses that merge legal knowledge with technological proficiency.
Such a partnership would expose students to cutting-edge technologies such as large language models, machine learning, and blockchain, and provide law students with an opportunity to imagine how each might intersect with the legal profession in both the near and distant future. And by making these arrangements mandatory, law schools would have a far better chance of ensuring that graduates are well-versed in some of the most important technologies of our time, and are, in turn prepared to confidently navigate an increasingly dynamic and competitive job market.
Making Room for Change
At the end of the day, the legal industry’s need to get on track with advancements in technology is as much about survival as it is adapting to societal trends. By disregarding technology’s increasingly critical role in society, legal professionals aren’t simply missing out on cost or efficiency-related benefits, but also opening themselves up to an array of potentially dire consequences.
For one, both individual clients and corporate employers have already begun to expect more from legal representation when it comes to leveraging technology, and as this gap in skillset expectations widens, lawyers risk being viewed as increasingly incapable of satisfying client and employer demands. Moreover, as the number of alternative service providers and fully digitalized legal startups entering the industry continues to rise, it’s only a matter of time before traditional law firms find themselves almost entirely unable to stand out against their tech-savvy competitors.
Overall, while it’s true that the industry’s tech problem isn’t going to solve itself overnight, the least we can do is begin updating law school curricula to reflect the growing demands for digitalization, and, most importantly, to prepare the next generation of attorneys for the realities of the modern legal profession. Because, in many ways, the future of legal work is already being shaped, and whether law firms fail or flourish in the digital age will depend not only on what we do but what we teach.
