Skip to content

Resources and Reports

Resources

These are preliminary versions of prompts for re-visioning and renewing legal education for the 21st century. These are prepared by Michael Madison at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law; comments and suggestions should be directed to him.

[1] Economics. 

A blunt summary of the bleak finances of US law schools today, as they rely on a program design (faculty, curriculum, pedagogy, expected outcomes) developed for an early 20th century industrial economy. Posted on June 22, 2024; updated July 8, 2024.

  • The introduction: “This document attempts to demystify the opaque financial and cultural systems that drive US law schools today. It takes as a given that many (but not all) law schools are under enormous financial pressure, for reasons that relate to financial pressures on the legal profession as a whole (external factors, in other words) but that also relate to the evolution of structures of higher education and legal education through history (internal factors). Among practicing lawyers and even many law professors, law schools are, proverbially, rolling in dough. For reasons that will be explained below, that isn’t true. Law schools are awash in red ink. The questions are why, and what might be done about that?”

[2] Curriculum.

A specification for a year-long “welcome to law and law school” curriculum that may be implemented at any law school, as a “gap-filler” that extends and deepens orientation through the first year and links it to ongoing “professional identity formation” programming or as a gateway to more substantial revision of the entire law school program. Posted on June 22, 2024.

  • The introduction: “This is a specification, which means that it lays out a concept that animates an educational program, lays out the purposes of the program, and identifies the required or expected elements of the program. Metaphorically, it borrows the idea of a specification from the field of computer program development. Before writing code, good developers produce a specification for a program; the coding itself follows – meaning that the specification might be implemented, in code, in multiple different ways. Here, the program is a year-long introduction to law school, law, the legal system, and the legal profession for students entering a US-style JD program. The program is intended to sit alongside and complement brief “welcome to law school” “orientation” programs, the traditional first-year analytic curriculum (courses in Contracts, Torts, Criminal Law, and so forth), and the now-traditional first-year curriculum in legal research, writing, and analysis. The concept at work here and the requirements that flow from that concept are designed both “horizontally,” meaning that they should work together to generate a comprehensive, top-to-bottom and beginning-to-end experience for beginning law students, and also “vertically,” meaning that they should link up with complementary experiences that law students will go through during their second and third years.”

[3] Innovators.

A list of “law labs” operating in law schools around the world. Directors of these academic units are often the most creative, imaginative systems thinkers in legal education. As a pool of talent, law lab directors offer leadership for new models of legal education. That implies large-scale system reform, rather than evolutionary or incremental advancement on the legacy “Langdellian” or Harvard Law School model that persists as the core of the US system. They offer vision, energy, and execution in program design and inspiration and training for a new generation of legal leaders. Law labs are sources for many of the best ideas for institution- and sector-wide renewal for legal education and post-graduate training. Posted on June 22, 2024.

[4] Thought Leadership and Practice. 

We collect brief perspectives on the future of law and legal education from the key players associated with Future Law Works.

Reports Overview

Conversations at Future Law Works workshops are summarized in the following brief reports.

The full text of each Report is reproduced below.

Report on the 2018 Law’s Futures roundtable: big themes

[1] A shared vision?

Amid pressures for change, legal education should respond collaboratively to change and should drive change collaboratively.  Collaboration should take place both within legal education (among law schools) and across the university (richer partnerships with other units). Law schools themselves must build cultures of growth and resilience as parts of institutional ecologies.

Key questions:

  • Why does legal education matter?  What’s the mission?
  • How do we maintain focus on the paramount goal, which is working toward the betterment of society?
  • What do we mean, today, by “legal education”?
  • What is law’s place in the university or in any other educational setting?
  • How does legal education complement other educational and professional institutions, including contemporary law schools?

[2] Legal education outcomes?

The focus of education and training should be on producing adaptive, resilient graduates rather than only on producing graduates with specific functional skills.  New graduates need technical and technology skills (beginning with elementary and foundational skills, such as how to build and use a spreadsheet), but cross-cutting knowledge is equally if not more important.  Mentorship should be a critical part of the program.

Key question:

  • How should legal education build and draw productively on links to professional worlds, including but not limited to the world of law practice?

[3] Institution building?

Program and curricular design should focus on project-based learning, on a range of experiential opportunities (including but not limited to externships), and on modularity in design and content.  Developing new and effective programming is best supported in organizational settings that encourage piloting and that encourage working with small-scale experiments – lots of them. These may include labs or virtual labs; they may include organizational settings à la Bell Labs that are directed to experimentation and innovation.  Pooled results and insights are far more likely to produce useful interventions than outcomes limited to a single institution.

Key question:

  • How can higher education and legal education build a community or network of labs, to study challenges and investigate solutions (pragmatic and financial models, tools, and strategies) on a pooled or shared basis? 

Report on the 2019 Law’s Futures roundtable: topics and possible projects

[1] Who participates?

Students. What is the demand for legal education?

  • A project: build data-driven models of who is coming and why, what people are doing after law school and why, and who is not coming to law school and why not.
  • A project: strategize how to build different kinds of diversity (cognitive, demographic, professional, other) into law to improve the impact of law on society.

Professionals. What are companies, law firms, and other providers doing in law teaching and training spaces, and why? What should they be doing?

  • A project: produce a law scan, which maps the ecology of legal services and legal information needs to the ecology of institutional providers.
  • A project: advance regulatory reform (addressing licensure, among other things) to expand the population of people who are trained and competent to provide law-related services and information where those are needed, and to eliminate regulatory structures based on prestige- and reputation-models of law and lawyers.

Educational institutions. How should law schools be organized, programmatically, to train and support effective new professionals in a changed environment? How would unbundling and otherwise re-arranging institutional arrangements for delivering legal education affect outcomes?

  • A project: examine how offering undergraduate law degrees affects other aspects of the higher education ecology, affects the legal services ecology, and affects society as a whole; compare the US experience with experiences in countries where law is a first degree.
  • A project: collect and study strategies for combining multiple university schools and disciplines in collaborative degrees and other training relating to law; examine “polytechnic” legal study in non-US universities; examine how law can contribute to other fields (even serve as a kind of “hub” for law-related study) in addition to how law can borrow from other fields.
  • A project: map the modalities for delivering legal information and services (via a trained lawyer, via technology, in some combination or otherwise) to the types of education and training needed to make each modality effective.

Reformers. Legal education reform is siloed (poorly integrated with the rest of the legal profession, and with higher education), populated by a collection of “usual suspects,” usually drawn from institutional leadership, and not diverse.

  • A project: identify and organize institutional support for “positive deviants” throughout the ecology of the legal industry; build institutions for collaboration, activism, and experimentation.
  • A project: build a light structure to link multiple institutions and innovations into a loose “movement.”
  • A project: for future gatherings and activities, be purposeful about diversifying the collective and about holding people accountable for diversity-related outcomes.

Clients and communities. How should they participate in education reform conversations and projects? These could include specific companies and other organizations; professional associations; NGOs; legaltech entrepreneurs and investors; and government organizations, among others.

[2] What should legal education “be”?

Outcomes – individuals.

  • Teach “critical thinking” in law as part of “critical thinking” throughout education, including undergraduate education.
  • Move explicitly beyond teaching “thinking like a lawyer” to embrace understanding complex systems, including but not limited to law.
  • Move beyond a conventional “toolbox” approach to teaching; legal rules and principles are tools, but new graduates must also understand system- and society-level values and practices, including the changing roles of law and lawyers in society.
  • Leadership education is critical for graduates. Other key competency areas, beyond knowledge acquisition, include: change management, project (and resource) management, technology literacy, and engaging in controversial conversations.
  • New graduates need to understand the difference between the traditional “counselor” mindset of “avoid that risk” and the contemporary, client-based mindset of “how do we accomplish that goal?”
  • Competency inventories for professionals are important and useful but can be overwhelming as guides to curriculum design. Programs and curricula need to be organized strategically.
  • Legal education should be pluralistic in terms of competencies, subject matter domains, and degrees and other certifications, so that effective training is matched to graduate success and social impact in multiple forms.

Outcomes – institutions.

  • Legal education should be boundary-spanning both within universities and across universities. Collaborating with other law schools (like collaborating with other schools generally) is difficult but rewarding.

Outcomes – assessment.

  • Legal education needs to develop the habit and power to assess outcomes that matter; today, law schools lack good techniques even for assessing learning outcomes that law schools have traditionally prioritized – i.e., “thinking like a lawyer.”
  • Assessments at the individual level can be keyed to reformed regulatory frameworks; assessments at the institutional level can be keyed to broader social goals. Access to justice. Climate change. Effective assessments should target what the community needs, rather than what lawyers traditionally have been experts in.

Pedagogy and program.

  • Students should spend less time in traditional classrooms and more time on applications: via work (clinics, externships), via writing, via simulation and lab work, and in other environments, including gamification.
  • Pedagogy should be structured around identifying baselines, understanding interventions, and assessing the interventions.

[3] How are we going to get there?

Strategies/tactics for law schools.

  • Accelerate the adaptation process.
  • Just do it. Build and test pilots, using regulatory flexibilities. E.g., IFLP, LWOW, Ryerson in Canada.
  • Accept that scaling successful pilots is difficult; money for public goods is scarce.
  • Leverage online resources. Imagine the Khan Academy for the bar exam.
  • Lay down our swords. Collaborate across law schools; collaborate with the community in building labs, incubators, etc.
  • Accept failure, but be rigorous about conducting post-mortems.
  • Where possible, within frameworks for institutional finance, move away from tuition discounting and toward direct aid to students.
  • Locate pathways to exercise power within complex ecology of the legal industry and higher education. Focus on the role of undergraduate education? Diversifying the number and types of certifications and degrees conferred by a law school? Leverage calls to change the JD curriculum? Work with financial constraints? Focus on transformations on the functions and social roles of trained lawyers? Address licensure?

Strategies/tactics for this group.         

  • What is the role of this group, and how do we activate and mobilize its energy, along with others?
  • Learn from Christensen: it is easier and faster to innovate “from the outside” rather than trying to reform “from the inside.”
  • We can and should bring focus to an uncoordinated conversation about the future of law and legal education.
  • Attract interest from higher-order, higher-level participants as endorsers, sponsors, partners.
  • Rely on project-based strategies, and build on concrete successes toward a broader vision.
  • Include collectively-oriented approaches and move beyond information sharing; collective action problems are enormous but need to be addressed. From the outset, a light structure is important so that the efforts of this group are directed toward aligning what we do with achieving needed improvements in the world.
  • The effort should leverage publicness and publicity.
  • Be explicit about building and relying on new incentives, new metrics, and new financial models. E.g., what if law schools were measured by social mobility achieved by their graduates?

One conceptual model of collaborative innovation.

The Law University (a loosely organized confederation of clusters, with shared aims and goals), in which each member of the group is an informal “fellow,” defined roughly by the following nodes (working groups, goals, projects, responsibilities):

  • Law Works – to support innovation labs & experiments in legal education.
  • Law Learn – to support curriculum & pedagogy.
  • Law Leadership – to connect with formal organizations, such as AALS.
  • Law Impact – to focus on assessment and data.
  • Law Ventures – to study and build new models for clinics, law labs, and incubators.
  • Law Undergrad – to design new pathways into law.
  • Law Advocate – to focus on regulatory environments.
  • Law Governance – to address identifying and overcoming institutional barriers inside and outside law schools and universities.
  • Law Dividend – to conduct and update law scans; to identify gaps between service and need; and to bring services to where they are needed.
  • Managed chaos – the rest.

Outcomes – Institutional design.

  • Turf matters. Looking at the ecology of law, legal services, the legal industry, and education, faculty governance in the law school setting is a clear barrier to institutional adaptation, evidenced by the fact that corporations, law firms, and other organizations are moving ahead quickly with their own education/training models.
  • Within law schools and universities, economic incentives need to be aligned with institutional goals.
  • Law schools are too dependent financially on training students to complete a single credential – the JD. Other fields, such as health care/medicine, are more diverse.

[4] What are our next steps?

  • Define leadership and relationships with other institutional players, disruptors, and reform activities, avoiding hierarchy in order to maximize nimbleness and pace. We need structure.
  • Build a track record and demonstrate results. We need tasks and measurables.
  • Work online as much as possible, in terms of provocations and conversations, facilitating and energizing work groups, and community building.
  • Be disruptive and nimble.
  • Avoid more elaborate workshops and presentation-heavy formats. Quick show-and-tell formats – or give-and-take formats – may be more effective.