Law-School-Hackathon Nihat Dursun/iStockphoto
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The dual winners of Wolters Kluwer's second annual Leading Edge Prize for Education took two very different approaches to the challenges facing the next generation of law students—but both walked away with a $10,000 prize.

Spearheaded by Dean Carla Pratt at Washburn University School of Law and Camille deJorna, deputy for legal and global higher education at the Law School Admission Council, the winning project, named "The Underrepresented Experience: How Low Income and Minority Students Successfully Navigate the First Year of Law School" will examine how the support of a small cohort of students from similar backgrounds can impact law school success.

Those efforts will specifically look at members of the Council on Legal Education's CLEO Legally Inspired Cohort program, which provides scholarships and academic support in a group admission model for underrepresented students from diverse backgrounds.

"Winning the Leading Edge Prize will enable us to study how a cohort of students succeeded in the first year of law school, despite having had less preparation for law school than is generally expected," said deJorna in a press release.

Meanwhile, the co-winning project "How Can We Educate 2L and 3L Students to be Better Equipped for Practice?" is focused on skill-building. That effort is a collaboration between Chancellor John Pierre of the Southern University Law Center and Hari Osofsky, dean of Penn State Law in University Park, and will involve the development of an educational webinar series called "Tipping the Scales."

The topic of legal technology will be a key feature.

"The reason that will be important is because technology is going to change how legal services are delivered and in fact how business services are delivered. You cannot discount that impact and so we have to be able to get our graduates to be extremely knowledgeable about these things and to get them trained with all of the skills necessary," Pierre said.

Nicole Pinard, vice president and general manager of legal education at Wolters Kluwer's Legal & Regulatory U.S., echoed those sentiments, but also admitted that it was difficult to choose two winners from the pile of submissions the prize received.

Still, in evaluating potential winners Wolters Kluwer was focused on more than just the immediate benefits that a project could reap for law students, who will eventually have to graduate, pass the bar and find employment somewhere.

Case in point, last year's two winners split the difference between improving the success rate of young attorneys in law school but also building bridges for the career to follow. There was The Pathways Project—a data-driven initiative to determine factors that may be undermining students performance in law school or the bar exam—and a program called Expanding Access to Justice and Practical Legal Training, which focused on both connecting new attorneys with more experienced mentors and facilitating access to justice.

"There's a trajectory here, and we can't have blinders on and just focus on the education process," said Pinard.