This week, we look at an internship program that will help law firms and corporate legal departments afford tinkering with New Law toys.

I'm Roy Strom, the author of this weekly Law.com briefing on the changing legal market, and you can reach me at [email protected].

Elmer Thoreson is a third-year law student at Indiana University Maurer School of Law.

He knows how he wants his law career to begin: As an associate at a law firm that will let him split time between traditional transactional work and creating automated legal workflows. In other words, he wants to do what he's doing right now.

Thoreson is in the midst of a seven month internship at Chapman & Cutler, where he is being called the “practice innovations intern.” He is working with a team that includes Eric Wood, a partner who has spent the past few years creating templates to automate much of the firm's document production. Thoreson is getting law school credit and real-world experience.

“I think this is definitely part of where the practice of law is going,” Thoreson said. “And because it's coming to exist, you can't train people the same exact way they always have. If you have a brand new job, why would you train people in the same way you always have?”

Good question! That also happens to be the heart of the idea behind the internship program that placed Thoreson at Chapman & Cutler, which is paying him roughly $1,350 per week. The internship was created through the Institute for the Future of Law Practice (IFLP), whose leaders (legal education heavyweights Bill Mooz, Bill Henderson and Dan Linna) are attempting to develop a new pipeline of tech-savvy lawyers. Read more about it from Henderson and Linna.

For what it's worth, I think the idea makes a lot of sense. I've often said that younger lawyers like Thoreson (or Chapman & Cutler's Wood, for that matter) are the type of innovative thinkers that law firms need to empower if they want to see real change. And these interns are (fairly) cheap! It costs less than $40,000 to pay a student $1,350 each week for seven months.

One reason that's an important part of the IFLP strategy is because there are few places where it is economical to train young lawyers on the types of skills Thoreson is gaining. It's hard to justify asking an associate getting paid $190,000 a year to do things other than bill clients. That's probably why firms rarely do it. But it's easier to send an intern off to figure out how software from HighQ or Kira Systems could apply to a firm's workflow.

“They're at a price point where you can actually afford to train them,” said Henderson, an Indiana law professor and legal innovation trailblazer.

IFLP currently has about 45 internship positions going to law students from Colorado, Indiana, Michigan State, Northwestern and Osgoode Hall in Toronto. Next year, it will take students from Brigham Young, the University of Calgary, Chicago-Kent, Miami, Richmond, Southern University in Baton Rouge, Suffolk University in Boston, Syracuse and Vanderbilt.

To accommodate those students, the program is looking to double the number of internships to about 90. A lot of forward-thinking law firms, in-house legal departments and law companies are already engaged.

The legal departments include those from Archer-Daniels-Midland Co., Cummins Inc., DHL International, NetApp Inc., Univar Inc., Walmart Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc., the latter of which is supporting six interns. Barnes & Thornburg; Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner; Honigman Miller Schwartz and Cohn; Canada's McCarthy Tétrault; Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe; Seyfarth Shaw and Thompson Hine are some of the participating law firms.

Still, there are plenty of firms not on the list who talk frequently about being leaders in legal innovation. Hire an intern! At the very least it's another chance to send out a press release.

Roy's Reading Corner

On New Law: Hot off the presses! UnitedLex Corp. announced Thursday its sale of a majority stake to European buyout firm CVC Capital Partners. The size of the deal was not announced, but UnitedLex CEO Dan Reed said it would provide UnitedLex with $500 million to invest in technology, M&A and in solutions for their clients.

UnitedLex also said it had closed $1.5 billion worth of contracts in the last 18 months. Those contracts have been the type of long-term deals that make private equity firms feel comfortable. One question is the type of timeline the new investors expect to operate on. Big Law change can happen slowly, even if UnitedLex has closed some of the biggest deals in the industry thus far.

On Pace of Change: Speaking of slow change, Ron Friedman writes on his blog about whether the legal industry is undergoing evolution or revolution. He says “innovation” has become the “meme of the year” for the legal industry. (Surely, I'm partly to blame!) And he mentions the “trough of disillusionment” that has overtaken hype in the development of driverless cars and IBM's Watson.

Friedman concludes: “Like robot lawyers last year, however, the legal innovation buzz this year focuses too much on revolution. … Plus the WSJ reports on Watson and self-driving remind us that not all innovations work and, even when they do, much must change for widespread adoption. And lest we forget, even as legal innovators try to foment revolution, large law firms steadily evolve.”

On Evolution Rather than Revolution: I hear you, Ron!

On that note, here is a story I wrote this week that is decidedly in the “law firm evolution” camp. Holland & Knight has been using a database-led approach to business development for its private equity practice. By matching its money-spending clients with its money-seeking clients, the firm is hoping to gain business. Nothing too crazy!

That's it for this week! Thanks again for reading, and please feel free to reach out to me at [email protected]. Sign up here to receive The Law Firm Disrupted as a weekly email.