Earlier this semester, I helped organize an event for first-year law students where we brought in speakers to teach them about contract drafting. To draft a contract, a lawyer will almost always be working with some existing template. This template will then be modified manually or with the help of some technology solution. In the event, we modified an existing template by using PracticalLaw and ended up with a mock non-disclosure agreement.

After the event, we gathered feedback from the attendees. The feedback showed that the first-year law student attendees were not taught what they expected. They expected to learn how to draft a contract from scratch. They were not aware that in the real world, contracts are never drafted from scratch. They are almost always just modified existing templates.

Law school does very little to expose their students to how the law interacts with technology in the real world. If I had not spent my last summer working at a law firm, I too would have been confused that a contract draft workshop is more of a copy and paste exercise than applying principles you learned in first-year contracts class.

It has long been a critique of law school that it doesn’t teach you how to be a lawyer. It simply teaches you how to think like a lawyer. That is fine as understanding how to be a lawyer is part of the articling process, and it is essential first to learn how to think like a lawyer in law school. However, to properly think like a lawyer, it is essential to know technology’s role in the practice of law.

Experts at McKinsey estimate that 23% of legal work can be done with technology that already exists.[1] This number will undoubtedly climb as the technology available to legal professionals expands. The way a lawyer “thinks” will not be the same in 20 years as it is now. Because of technology, certain things that lawyers do now will be taken over by technology in the future, and new responsibilities for lawyers may arise. If law school is meant to teach a student how to think like a lawyer, it should be teaching students how to think like a modern lawyer and not a lawyer from the 20th century.  A modern lawyer should understand the role technology plays now and be able to anticipate the growing role it will play in the future.

Integrating technological realities into the law school curriculum is not tricky. For example, in a contracts class, a teacher should point out that in reality, applications build contracts, and it is a lawyer’s job to use the concepts they have learned to review the validity of a contract (not to build it from scratch). In a family law example, law students should understand that systems will calculate support payment numbers. Their role is to use concepts learned to verify that number and understand what goes into that number. Knowing how the concepts learnt will be applied in the real world will lead to a better learning experience for students.

I am not suggesting students need to learn how actually to use legal tech applications. Since there are so many different tech solutions in the legal world, it is unrealistic for students to learn specific applications on the off-chance the firm they work at employs that application. I only suggest that teachers make an effort to explain to students how technology interplays with the concepts they are learning and how technology will affect the way these concepts are used. Schools currently require teachers to give real-world applications of what students are learning. Such a change would only require administrations to ask that some of these real-world application examples be related to the use of technology.

Going through law school to understand how technology interplays with the law will produce much better lawyers. Although I am not yet an articling student, I know from talking to people that there is time spent reworking how you view the law once you understand technology’s role. If students understood how technology interacts with the law from the get-go, they could better hit the ground running when they enter the legal profession. Less time spent learning the technological realities of a modern-day legal practice means more time can be spent learning to be an effective lawyer. This will lead to better efficiency for firms, better results for clients, and a less stressful articling experience for the students.

Source(s):

[1] Hess, A. (2020, February 18). Experts say 23% of lawyers’ work can be automated-law schools are trying to stay ahead of the curve. CNBC. Retrieved November 19, 2021, from https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/06/technology-is-changing-the-legal-profession-and-law-schools.html.