P2P

48 P E E R T O P E E R : I L T A ' S Q U A R T E R L Y M A G A Z I N E | F A L L 2 0 2 1 racism. Whatever shape these projects ultimately take, it is essential they be based on reliable data rather than opinion or unproven assumptions. Data must be sourced from practitioners working with people of diverse backgrounds, ranging from disadvantaged individuals who have struggled with the court system to judges who have ruled on related cases. With the goal of effecting meaningful, incremental change, a new fellowship program has been created by the LexisNexis Rule of Law Foundation (LNROLF) in partnership with the Historically Black Colleges and Universities Law School Consortium (HBCULSC) and the African Ancestry Network (AAN) – an Employee Resource Group within LexisNexis Legal & Professional (LNLP). The AAN/LNROLF Fellowship is part of an ongoing commitment by LexisNexis to work towards eliminating systemic racism in the law. Twelve recipients, consisting of law students from the HBCULSC Law Schools, including Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University College of Law, Howard University School of Law, North Carolina Central University School of Law, Southern University Law Center, Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University, and the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law, have been awarded fellowships to identify the underlying causes of systemic racism in the legal industry and develop a set of pragmatic solutions that can work together to combat it. We believe law and technology, combined with mentorship and collaborative support, will be instrumental in bringing better solutions to the industry more quickly. Law students who have a passion for making change but who don't know how to build an app or fine-tune data modeling will have an opportunity to work directly with data scientists and software engineers. Fellows can tap into a global corporate network to exchange ideas across multiple countries. The fellowship program is also notable because of its focus on multiple issues and their interrelationships rather than a single aspect of the problem. Each fellow is tackling a separate issue and working to develop tangible, tech-based solutions that will make a difference in specific areas of the law. At the same time, fellows will be working collectively to build an interconnected set of initiatives that impact the larger goal. Project focuses include judicial bias, pro se litigant challenges, consumer bankruptcy issues and other diverse but interrelated problems. "The first step towards taking practical action," says Feven Yohannes of Howard University School of Law and a 2021 AAN/LNROLF Fellow, "is understanding what aspects of the way clients present themselves in legal situations contribute to the disconnect between people of diverse backgrounds and the law. The path to inequality in justice starts at a very basic societal level and is seen with issues like underfunded schools creating a known school- to-prison pipeline, the hyper-sexualization of black girls, F E A T U R E S "Fellows can tap into a global corporate network to exchange ideas across multiple countries."

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