Venture capital money has been increasingly focused on legal technology, but there's one issue with those investments—VCs inherently expect a return. For ideas that don't have that high of a return on investment, particularly those focusing on access to justice initiatives, is there a place in the market for innovation?

Gordon Smith, dean of the J. Reuben Clark Law School at BYU, and Kimball Parker, attorney at Parsons Behle & Latimer and founder of legal research company CO/COUNSEL, think that law schools can be the perfect home for this sort of innovation. On June 19, BYU Law School announced the creation of LawX, a legal design lab that will seek to create solutions, through software and other means, to address pressing issues relating to access to legal services.

Parker will lead LawX, which will see its first class of second and third year law students this upcoming fall. The program will be a semester long, and each semester will focus on a different issue to solve—the first semester's students will tackle ways to help defendants without a lawyer answer a complaint in Utah.