Peer to Peer Magazine

33 WWW.ILTANET.ORG Learning the 21st-Century Lawyer's Cra by Designing Applications CASE STUDIES KEVIN G. MULCAHY Kevin G. Mulcahy is an adjunct professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center and is the Director of Education at Neota Logic. Kevin assists law firms, corporations and other organizations that use the Neota Logic development platform to create applications that leverage professional expertise. Contact him at mulcahy@neotalogic.com. » Support applications for professionals that assist with case analysis • Does the client appear to be a victim of wage the? • Does the client qualify for veterans affairs health care or disability benefits? No programming experience is required for this course. Students typically develop their applications in a no-code development platform for rules-based artificial intelligence applications, although those who have experience working in traditional programming languages are encouraged to use that knowledge to build their application. Developing Professionals by Developing Applications Contrary to what many law professors might expect, as students learn to design legal applications, they are working toward many of the goals associated with the traditional law school curriculum, in particular, clinical legal education. The application design process, which requires detailed legal analysis and strong client counseling skills, requires students to think like lawyers to ensure their applications think like lawyers. Early in the course, we encourage students to think of legal regimes as systems that can further specific aims and confer particular powers, rights and obligations. Then we teach students to create soware systems that help users address legal needs by incorporating legal rules. Most important, by designing and building applications that provide specific legal guidance, students learn to think like 21st-century lawyers. The students must anticipate the concerns users might have about their legal issues and understand the options available to address them. By incorporating this knowledge into an automated application, students learn to address the circumstances of the users with sufficient granularity to provide meaningful guidance. The applications must be validated and maintained over time, so lawyers with subject-maer expertise must be able to review them easily and confirm their accuracy. Because the law changes continually, applications must be built so that new authors can edit and update them efficiently. The applications need to communicate effectively with users in stressful situations and who might come from limited educational backgrounds, so students also need effective writing and strong visual design skills. Law students in this course learn how to create what many legal clients now require: systems that are an extension of the lawyer, providing customized guidance and work product on-demand. Leveraging Expertise Systematically The applications created oen direct users to an appropriate professional at the sponsoring nonprofit organization who can use the results of the online session as a starting point for providing further services. The applications are also effective at leveraging an organization's limited resources. For example, a student-created intake application for the Virginia Legal Aid Society recently conducted its 10,000th interview; the thousands of hours of lawyer time this has saved are now redirected to helping more clients in need. Ongoing Effects The TIAJ course culminates with a spirited "Iron Tech Lawyer" competition in which the student teams present their completed applications to a panel of judges who select the best application based on criteria including effectiveness and creativity. When the competition is over, there is more than one winner because the applications are deployed to address real-world legal challenges, leveraging the legal skills of the students over and over again. What beer way to prepare for 21st-century legal work! P2P TANINA ROSTAIN Tanina Rostain is a professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center (GULC). Her current work focuses on the proliferation of legal technologies in law practice, particularly in the areas of access to justice and open government. She is co-founder the Justice Lab at Georgetown and was named a "Legal Rebel" by the ABA Journal in 2015. Contact Tanina at tr238@law.georgetown.edu. The students must anticipate the concerns users might have about their legal issues and understand the options available to address them.

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