law school

Law firms are taking a more hands-on approach to shaping the next generation employees and legal practitioners, and they aren't content to wait until the ink has dried on a law degree.

Case in point: Norton Rose Fulbright announced earlier this month that it had partnered with England's University of York to create a new law and technology course geared towards both third year law and computer science honors students. The program is scheduled to kick-off in January 2020 and will focus heavily on encouraging students to solve real-life access to justice problems.

According to Jeremy Coleman, innovation manager at Norton Rose Fulbright, the course wasn't designed as a direct pipeline for acquiring new and promising talent, but rather to elevate the bar within the industry in general.

“The universities were focusing very much on the legal aspect but not so much on the additional areas that I think we were seeing as being necessary for being a successful lawyer in the future,” said Coleman.

The future he's talking about appears to be largely digital. Third-year students at University of York  who choose to take the law and technology course as an elective will be presented with substantiated access to justice problems sourced from a yet-to-be announced government agency. Students will then be required to propose and build solutions that can help address the issue at hand using BRYTER, a platform that allows users to automate workflows and decision processes.

To be sure, the law and technology course at University of York isn't the only recent example of law schools building legal tech into their curriculum. Last year, the Chicago-Kent College of Law at the Illinois Institute of Technology approved a Masters of Law degree in legal innovation set to launch in fall 2019. Georgia State University also maintains a Legal Analytics Lab where students have the opportunity to engage with real-world problems.

Law schools' move to focus more on legal tech comes as law firms reevaluate what it means to be a lawyer in the today's market. Coleman said clients now expect advice that moves beyond cut-and-dry legalese.

“When [clients] are going through these massive digital transformations, being a legal adviser is often not enough. You have to have the consciousness of what is the influence that technology is going to have,” Coleman said.

For law firms, that means beginning to think strategically about the roles and services they'll need to grow into the future. There will always be a place for lawyers inside a law firm, but engineers and data scientists are becoming valued members of legal teams as well.

Even if law students can't build an app from scratch, having some frame of reference can be conducive to inter-firm communication. Jessica Burdon, a global innovation consultant with Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, stressed the need for smooth collaborations between lawyers and engineers.

“It's important to ensure that they can both work together in terms of product development. … For instance to deliver to clients mobile apps or different ways of managing mass claims,” Burdon said.

Last fall, Freshfields was one of the firms announced to be taking part in The Manchester Law & Technology Initiative, an endeavor by the University of Manchester to explore the application of technology and innovation within the legal sphere. Burdon sees parallels between the work firms are doing with legal tech startups and the flow of ideas between universities—and their students.

She explained, “If you take sort of an unabashed, creative mind, I think they can come up with some very interesting ideas,”