UC Hastings Law Patent Class

San Francisco-based UC Hastings College of the Law recently announced its new course offerings for the spring semester, including two new courses centering on technology and its potential applications to the law.

“Using Artificial Intelligence in Legal Practice,” a new course taught by Duke University School of Law professor Francis McGovern, will help students build familiarity in using AI-based research platforms such as Lex Machina and Ravel Law. Another course, “Legal Tech Startup Skills,” will guide students through the process of launching their own legal technology startup companies.

Alice Armitage, professor of law at UC Hastings and director of the school's Startup Legal Garage, will teach the Legal Tech Startup Skills course. “It's essentially a business course. I'm teaching them all the things you'd learn in an incubator or accelerator program,” she said of the course.

Both courses are part of LexLab, the university's new innovation hub launching next spring. Armitage explained that UC Hastings took some of the basic principles of the Startup Legal Garage, which has students assist in providing legal services to Bay Area startups, and aimed to spin them into a broader institutional resource for startup entrepreneurs, most notably in the legal technology space.

The Legal Tech Startup Skills class will culminate in the development of a pitch deck for a potential legal technology startup.

Armitage noted that even if students don't manage to successfully launch the world's next legal technology success story, they'll likely be better prepared to work with clients in and around the technology sector. “They'll be better lawyers working for startups if they've been through that process,” she said. “It's increasingly true these days that the practice of law is increasingly client-focused.” As she explained, law school graduates who can relate in some way to the processes and procedures of launching a startup may be better prepared to advise clients in modern ways.

Armitage is no stranger to the world of startup entrepreneurship. “My startup didn't end up being a success, but it was a really interesting process of learning. I'm taking what I know personally having been through that process and trying to teach the students what that is,” she said.

Startups in the legal technology space tend to fall into two broad buckets, according to Armitage: law firm operations and management ideas, which includes things such as e-discovery, document management and permissioning, task automation, and access-to-justice ideas. These ideas range from self-serve legal tools such as LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer to information guides and the like.

However, legal tech entrepreneurs rely on slightly different skill sets than lawyers. “Lawyers don't really work a lot as teams. You do when you practice law, but you don't in law school, so we're going to work a lot in teams,” Armitage said of the class.

McGovern is hoping that his AI course can be similarly practical-minded for students. “The concern I had was that in the next five to 10 years, a great deal of the work that first- and second-year associates at firms do can be done by legal robots,” he said. Taking a similar tactic as the women working for NASA's computations department in the 2016 film “Hidden Figures,” McGovern hopes to get his students working with, not against, technology. “If I can teach law students how to use the bots, they can leapfrog into, in effect, the third year,” he said.

Although AI is among the more confusing technology trends on the market to date, McGovern hopes that students can build enough of a literacy with the technology that they can check its basic assumptions. “You need to know enough about how it works to guard against the downsides,” he said.

UC Hastings joins a number of law schools looking to broaden curricular offerings around technology in the spring semester. University of California, Berkeley School of Law will offer an interdisciplinary course centering on legal questions surrounding blockchain in the spring, and Northwestern University's Pritzker School of Law also announced it would bring on ROSS Intelligence's AI tools for student use.

Student demand is driving some of these initiatives at law schools. Although Armitage capped the Legal Tech Startup Skills course at 15, there are students clamoring for access to similar curriculum. In the past, she noted, she knows that interest extends well beyond the number of students who can enroll in these courses. Faculty have certainly taken note.

“I'd say this is a movement nationwide in the most innovative law schools. I don't think it's everyone yet, but it's like the beginnings of the revolution. There are rumblings everywhere,” Armitage added.