Fordham Law Dean Matthew Diller | Photo courtesy Fordham University Law School

The legal profession is sometimes criticized as being willfully resistant to change. Some within the industry even wear this stubbornness as a badge of honor; partners may boast that, if their white-shoe law firm has weathered economic and social vicissitudes for decades or even centuries, then surely the firm's continued existence is inevitable. In my more than 30 years in the legal profession, the only inevitability I have observed is the accelerating pace of technological change and the need for the legal professional to change with it.

When I first went into legal practice at the Legal Aid Society in 1986, the major technological development was the fax machine. So fancy was this new technology that we newly minted Legal Aid lawyers needed to secure permission from the office manager before using it. The widespread adoption of the fax machine and the release of personal computers (such as the Commodore 64 I used as a law clerk) in the mid-1980s made clear to us that technology was on the march. And we had better move with it.

More than three decades later, some industries—such as retail, travel and finance—show major tech momentum; others, including legal education, need a little push. Lawyer and entrepreneur Paul Lippe described this reality in a 2016 article for the South Carolina Law Review. “Over the last generation, law and lawyers have fallen further behind other fields in their level of innovation, the use of new tools to improve productivity, and thoughtful design to respond to complexity,” Lippe wrote. “While some of this is inherent in the nature of law, much of it needs to change if lawyers hope to retain the respected role of their profession.”

Law schools must do better to adapt their curricula to technological change. If they don't, they risk underserving the students in their care and, by extension, disappointing the future employers of those students. Ultimately and most egregiously, they risk failing the clients those students will one day represent.

These curricular enhancements need not completely supplant the skills training that law firms provide their new associates. And they must not take the place of core, foundational classes that students need to understand the law. But along with this fundamental understanding, schools need to expose students to the 21st century tools and concepts of the legal profession.

What's most important for new lawyers—and always has been—is knowing how to analyze a problem, break it into its component parts and find solutions in the face of ambiguity. Now, though, they also need to understand how new technology intersects with both the problems and the solutions and how it sometimes changes the questions entirely. For example, lawyers need to understand how they can analyze judicial opinions on a linguistic level in a way that wasn't possible before and how that capability may transform their approach to a case. They need to capitalize on the power of artificial intelligence to change the way they look at the issue and potential paths forward.

Legal educators must help their students become more confident learning new technology. The resulting level of comfort will hold these future lawyers in good stead as they advance in their careers, where they will be expected to know how to safeguard private and privileged data, among other best practices in the law. Additionally, the increased focus on technology at law schools will help incubate new ideas for addressing critical access to justice. For example, simply sending texts to remind defendants of court dates is a low-cost solution some courts have started to use to decrease “failure to appear” violations.

Law schools now recognize the importance of tech competency. Some now offer technology-based classes on law practice technology, smart contracts, computer programming for lawyers, artificial intelligence, quantitative analysis for lawyers and blockchain. Others have developed new degree programs, including Cornell Tech's LL.M. in law technology and entrepreneurship, and Stanford Law School's LL.M. in law, science and technology. Still others are establishing centers of scholarship and policy, launching legal clinics or building innovative tech hubs, such as BYU Law School's LawX, a legal design lab that allows students to create products and other solutions to remedy issues related to legal service access.

At Fordham University School of Law, our curriculum includes courses on governing in an algorithmic society, surveillance and privacy, compliance in the information age, cybersecurity and e-law in global settings. We study how decision-makers should look at information and consider who is responsible for what and how time-endured values—like free speech—are impacted by modes of communication and conduct that are so transformed. One of our professors takes her students on fieldwork trips that explore theoretical and international perspectives on IP and technology. Students in our IP clinic work directly with entrepreneurs and artists in the areas of litigation, deal-making, trademark registration, patent application and risk counseling. Our legal librarians teach a law practice technology course that gives students hands-on experience with the tools of e-discovery, document and case management, courtroom technology and competitive intelligence. Our Center on Law and Information Policy recently issued a study conducted with the University of Michigan that addresses privacy risks of online services.

These initiatives at Fordham and our peer law schools are not faddish or gratuitous; they are the future. More than simply asking of its users a basic knowledge of the latest gadget, technology reorients the very thinking of lawyers. It changes the way we conceive legal problems, the types of questions we ask and the information that we gather. In other words, technology does not simply usher in new tools; it heralds a new process of thought, a different system of analysis. We must, therefore, heed the digital call—not to show that we are somehow trendy or device-savvy but rather to demonstrate that we serve our clients with the full range of perspective and understanding that is available to us.

Matthew Diller is dean of Fordham University Law School.