Peer to Peer Magazine

PEER TO PEER: THE QUARTERLY MAGA ZINE OF ILTA 60 training, a legal technology/informatics class can help law students understand how to look at legal problems from a computational and engineering perspective, and to understand the context in which technology is likely to be adopted within the legal profession. Most law students are unlikely to become code-generating engineers. They are likely, however, to be early adopters (or promote incorporation) of new systems and to work with engineers in developing new systems. The more they can see the computational perspective of legal problems, the better they will be at transforming current manual practices into (semi-) automated systems. Understanding legal technologies will help tomorrow's lawyers find completely new ways of interacting with the law. For example, what type of data come into a law firm or a court? How are the data processed? What data are sent out? What can be moved into the cloud, or componentized, and with what side effects (e.g., privacy, security)? Students in legal technology must be able to extract legal requirements for systems that range from e-discovery to ODR to FEATURES There are many practical skills most law students do not practice in law school, such as building a business plan/model that defines the target market for legal services, calculates the cost of client acquisition, builds a marketing strategy and sets a pricing model. Neither do schools teach project management, outsourcing management, etc. What is critical now for law students to know before going into practice? Many law schools do a decent job of preparing future lawyers to use technology to conduct research and case preparation online. Vendors, such as Lexis and Westlaw, have helped facilitate this. However, exposure to technology generally ends there. Here are some basic technology skills that would benefit most law school curricula: How to design the information architecture of a law practice, including understanding data structures, law firm metrics and how ethics rules apply to the use of technology Basics of cloud-based practice management systems, including the use of multiple applications and technologies, and their associated interoperability Selection of technology vendors, products and services, including the review of service-level agreements and understanding how the selection might affect compliance with the rules of professional conduct or ethics opinions Basics about secure client portal technology, the online delivery of legal services and unbundling practices How to use collaboration technologies that allow for legal teams to communicate remotely, such as virtual deal rooms, client intranets and other tools developed for the growing field of ODR Use of technology for client development, including online marketing tools, collaborating with branded networks, online lead generation, creating and maintaining firm websites and blogs, use of social media and the ethical issues and best practices around these tools Basics about payment systems for online billing and the collection of fees Use of technology that speeds up the processing of standardized legal work, such as document automation and assembly tools and expert systems How to develop evaluative methodologies to compare the features, efficiency and quality of tools In most cases, these skills cannot be added easily to a law school curriculum that focuses on substantive law. Many of these skills require not only separate credit hours for the time to cover them adequately, but also a different teaching method that often includes simulations and more hands- on exposure to the use of the technology. A handful of law schools have added law practice management classes, and a few have expanded this to include programs in legal technology.

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