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Recently, Jessica Berg and Michael Scharf, Co-Deans at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, contacted me to highlight the uniqueness of their first-year students’ required participation in a pro bono legal experience. Students assist in the provision of free legal services by, for example, conducting client intake interviews for the law school’s Legal Aid Brief Advice Clinic.  Jessica and Michael’s communication made me wonder if Case Western is alone in implementing a mandatory first-year pro bono requirement and how many schools require any pro bono work as a graduation requirement.

I hope this data will be helpful to any law school considering the possibility of implementing a pro bono requirement.

The ABA’s Directory of Law School Public Interest and Pro Bono Programs lists only five law schools with a first-year pro bono requirement. In addition to the pro bono requirement by Case Western,  The University of District of Columbia’s David A. Clarke School of Law requires 60 hours, Appalachian School of Law requires 25 hours, and the University of Arkansas, Little Rock Bowen School of Law requires 5 hours of pro bono service for 1Ls. The University of Nevada, Las Vegas’ Boyd School of Law requires its 1Ls to enroll in a community service program as part of a zero-unit course.

Another 30 law schools require 20 to 60 hours of pro bono service some time during law school in order to earn a J.D., meaning that over 17 percent of ABA-approved schools mandate pro bono service. That figure does not include the many schools, some with highly structured programs dating back to the 1980s and 1990s, which encourage, but don’t mandate, pro bono hours.  Some of those law schools report extraordinary student participation rates—as high as 90%+.

A note about my methodology: I did my best to search law school websites if the ABA Directory listing was missing or unclear, but I will be happy to make a correction if I missed a law school. Finally, I did not count schools with clinic or externship requirements, a topic which will be the subject of an upcoming blog post.

If we were to add all our students’ pro bono service and all the public service work our students do in our clinics and in their externships, the law school community is devoting an extraordinary amount of time and resources to making the world a better place and teaching students the life lesson of the importance of giving back.

Not too long ago, an engineering dean I know expressed admiration for the pro bono work done by law students and lawyers and asked me to explain why we are so successful in getting our alumni and students to contribute free legal services. I guess it is all a matter of perspective. At the very least, my research for this post (and for my upcoming post on clinic or externship requirements) will give me comfort the next time someone tells me a lawyer joke.

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Nearly all law schools include a commitment to access to justice as part of their mission statements or among their stated values.  UC Berkeley Law School has gone one step further in the area of consumer law. The law school has launched a new Center for Consumer Law and Economic Justice.  Funded by a spring 2018, $3.5 million gift from a Berkeley Law alumna, the center seeks to “ensure safe, equal, and fair access to the marketplace . . . [and to] create a society where economic security and opportunity are available to all.”

The Center already has jumped into action. On April 16, the first day of the Center’s official existence, the Center filed an amicus brief in Manriquez v. DeVos, a case seeking to compel the U.S. Department of Education to honor its promise to forgive the debt of tens of thousands of students defrauded by Corinthian Colleges.

In late June, the Center convened two groups of practitioners whose work focuses on protecting the rights of low-income consumers, including government enforcement attorneys, consumer advocates, and direct legal service providers. The partnerships will help keep enforcement agencies informed about the most pressing forms of fraud and abuse facing consumers and will provide a forum to share ideas and materials.

Finally, the Center has created four new consumer law courses, Consumer Litigation: The Course of a Case, The Law of Student Loans, “Carsumer” Protection Law, and Consumer Bankruptcy Law.  For more information about these very interesting courses, see the Center’s first 90-Day Report.

University of Cincinnati College of Law, The Help Center                                         

Roger Williams University School of Law, The Pro Bono Collaborative

This week’s post focuses on two different law schools’ efforts to address the access to justice issues in their communities.  As an article in the ABA Journal written in September 2017, explained, “In the U.S, the majority of our citizens cannot get legal help, whether that is for criminal charges, civil matters, or their small-business issues.” Increasingly, law schools are stepping up, and I could justify featuring probably two dozen law schools this week. The two projects I have chosen to focus on are the Pro Bono Collaborative at Roger Williams University School of Law and The Help Center at the University of Cincinnati College of Law.

The Pro Bono Collaborative is a partnership among the law school, local law firms, and community organizations, and it has been operating for more than five years. The students deliver legal assistance to local nonprofit organizations serving low-income people on a variety of legal issues, including expungements, special education claims, guardianships, housing, employment, and health. It has been cited as a model program by Stanford professor Deborah L. Rhode, the legal Services Corporation, and the National Center for Access to Justice.

The Help Center is of more recent vintage. The Ohio Supreme Court’s Task Force on Access to Justice originally suggested the idea of the Help Center. The product of a collaboration among the local bar association, the local legal aid society, Cincinnati-based law firms, the Clerk of the Courts, and Northern Kentucky University’s Salmon P. Chase College of Law, The Help Center, launched last September, provides legal advice to individuals dealing with small claims matters, collections, landlord-tenant issues.

The Report of the National Center for Access to Justice notes about a dozen other law student pro bono initiatives worth emulating.

It is very easy to dismiss one impressive bar pass rate as a fluke.  Even two in a row might possibly be dismissed. However, Florida International School of Law, ranked fifth among the 11 ABA-approved law schools in Florida, has enjoyed a bar pass rate, over the past six bar exams, that is first, first, first, second, first, and first in the state. In other words, we cannot even see the fluke line from where we are standing; instead, it’s time we recognize that FIU has found the bar pass secret sauce.

What is that secret sauce? It could not be simply having an academic support and/or bar pass program. Many U.S. law schools have implemented academic support and bar pass programs aimed at ensuring their students graduate and pass the bar exam on the first try. These programs have enjoyed varying degrees of success, but no law school has experienced anything close to the long-term, sustained success FIU has enjoyed.

The architect of FIU’s Bar Pass success, Professor Louis Schulze, has authored a law review article that provides some insight. The crux of Professor Schulze’s approach involves empowering law students by teaching them modern brain science principles and study strategies, convincing the students to implement those principles, and supporting their efforts to do so.

The full article is worth a read. Below, to whet your appetite for the full article, I detail three principles that animate Professor Schulze’s approach.  For example, as Schulze explains, most students study incorrectly for their exams and for the bar exam. Instead of finishing one subject and moving onto the next, students could greatly improve their recall if they were to study and re-study (four times in all) their course material or bar subjects. The term of art is “spaced repetition.”

In fact, there is evidence that changing subjects and study methods every 45 minutes or so has a positive effect on recall (known as “interleaving learning”). (This insight is not from Professor Schulze’s article but is based on recent articles that I have concluded are credible enough to share with my students.)

Second, according to cognitive learning theory and studies confirming the validity of the theory, students store knowledge in organized structures in their brains. This insight explains why course outlining helps learning; however, this point also explains why flowcharting works as well as outlining, why course outlines that are simply lists of rules without hierarchy are not very useful, and why students really should be trained to avoid commercial or hand-me-down course outlines.

Third, students who self-regulate their learning, who take control over their learning process by planning how they will study each concept, who implement those plans while constantly monitoring their learning, and who frequently reflect on the success of their plans and adapt where necessary learn better.

In short, by teaching students to be expert students, FIU has helped its students successfully navigate the bar exam.

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This week’s blog entry focuses on F.O.I., Fear of Innovation. While researching for another project, I came across the quotations listed below. Because they seemed so relevant to a blog focusing on innovation, I could not resist taking a one entry time out from my regular practice of writing about great law school innovations.

The quotes below reveal what I suspect we all have observed; educators have always been made a bit queasy by innovation. Given the breadth, depth, and ambition of the ideas I have had the opportunity to feature in this blog so far, it appears legal educators have chosen to feel the fear and move forward anyway.

I found all the quotes below in the book Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology: The Digital Revolution and Schooling in America by Allan Collins and Richard Halverson. The book was published in 2009 by Teachers College Press.  Quotes 1 and 2 are on page 30; Quotes 3 through 7 are on page 31.  The authors provide further background on the quotes in a footnote.

  1. From a principal’s publication in 1815: “Students today depend on paper too much.  They don’t know how to write on a slate without getting chalk dust all over themselves.  They can’t clean a slate properly.  What will they do when they run out of paper?”
  2. From the Journal of the National Association of Teachers, 1907: “Students today depend too much upon ink.  They don’t know how to use a pen knife to sharpen a pencil.  Pen and ink will never replace the pencil.”
  3. From Rural American Teacher, 1928: “Students today depend upon store bought ink.  They don’t know how to make their own.  When they run out of ink they will be unable to write words or ciphers until their next trip to the settlement.  This is a sad commentary on modern education.”
  4. From PTA Gazette, 1941: “Students today depend on these expensive fountain pens.  They can no longer write with a straight pen and nib. We parents must not allow them to wallow in such luxury to the detriment of learning how to cope in the real business world which is not so extravagant.”
  5. From Federal Teachers, 1950: “Ballpoint pens will be the ruin of education in our country.  Students use these devices and then throw them away.  The American values of thrift and frugality are being discarded. Businesses and banks will never allow such expensive luxuries.”
  6. From a fourth-grade teacher in Apple Classroom of Tomorrow Chronicles, 1987: “If students turn in papers they did on the computer, I require them to write them over in long hand because I don’t believe they do the computer work on their own.”
  7. From a science fair judge in Apple Classroom of Tomorrow Chronicles, 1988: “Computers give students an unfair advantage. Therefore, students who used computers to analyze data or create displays will be eliminated from the science fair.”

I hope these quotes have entertained you as much as they entertained me. I note that, in writing this blog post, I had the unfair advantage of using a computer.  Thankfully, no one is making me rewrite this post in long hand.

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Today’s blog post is a venture into an area of legal education innovation about which I am much less an expert and much more a novice. Having at least hosted a legal hackathon during my time as dean at UA Little Rock, I feel just brave enough to write about this innovation.

I am writing about an exciting development at the intersection of law, technology, innovation, entrepreneurship and access to justice, the Legal Technology Lab arose out of conferences held in 2014 and 2015 at UMKC School of Law, launched in 2016, and already has grown to more than a dozen projects. Here is a link to the LTL Project Portfolio, which includes, among other things, projects aimed at re-engineering legal and regulatory processes, the application of data analytics to legal decision-making, intelligent legal compliance, and Blockchain-enabled contracts.

(For those of you who, like me, you are relatively new to Blockchain and the related field of cryptocurrencies, I have committed the cardinal sin of linking to Wikipedia. It was the first thing I read on the subject to start my own education.)

I share three examples below to give you a flavor of the exciting work sponsored by the LTL.

  • Data Analytics and FCC Policy Making. “[T]his project examines around two million documents from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The project has identified key links between public inputs and agency action, thereby providing a policy-making influence map. . . . The project demonstrates the use of technical tools to make information located at the intersection of law, technology, and entrepreneurship useful and accessible. Citizens and lawyers can leverage these tools to more effectively manage one of the biggest challenge in start-up entrepreneurship:  regulation. . . . The FCC Media policy project shows how lawyers can marshal technology to level the playing field.”
  • Law Incubator-driven Data Analytics for Entrepreneurship Policy. “Through networks of university-based entrepreneurship law clinics in the US and Europe, and a US-wide network of legal incubators supporting entrepreneurial lawyers, the LTL Community has access to a collective set of data on entrepreneurs and start-ups and their barriers to innovation. . . . [The project] will focus on developing a system to produce, use and share high-quality evidence that can lead to better recommendations on law and policy changes, better decisions to improve how interventions are funded and delivered, and the dissemination of best practices that promote affordable access to quality legal services.”
  • Developing New Applications for Smart Contracts. “The use of computer code and a blockchain—the same technology that underlies Bitcoin—makes it possible for parties to express contractual promises in computer code and have those performance obligations automated . . . . The Smart Contracts Project is exploring a range of contracts capable of being rendered ‘smart.’ [T]he project is focusing on prototyping one or more . . . agreements with the aim of building examples of enforceable smart contracts that can interact with existing legal systems.”

For what it’s worth, I have bookmarked the LTL news feed.

Nova Southeastern University’s (NSU) Shepard Broad College of Law has established a curriculum it calls the NSU Law Leadership Academy that is designed to develop its students’ technological, financial, and global economic competencies. Students may elect to take a specialized list of courses that include, among others, Business Operations for Lawyers, Strategic Planning for Lawyers, and Law Practice Business and Technology Workshop. I will highlight two of the courses that most intrigued me.

First, NSU Law describes its course in Business Operations in this way, “In every area of legal practice, one or more of the parties in a transaction or dispute are business enterprises operating using a common set of disciplines and tools to share information, evaluate risk, and make financially-based decisions. This course provides law students with an introduction to these primary tools of quantitative analysis and research relied upon daily in the for-profit business, nonprofit, and public sectors. Lawyers who understand these tools can better understand the needs of their clients, provide additional strategies for structuring transactions and resolving disputes, and adding discipline to the operations of lawyers’ own law firms. Through simulations, exercises and discussions, students will explore how best to apply these tools to the practice of law.”

For those of you unfamiliar with the field often referred to as “Legal Operations,” take a look at a graphic created by Professor Bill Henderson of  the University of Indiana Mauer School of Law that depicts the Legal Operations Core Competencies. Professor Henderson’s compelling Legal Evolution Blog includes a section devoted to Legal Ops.

A second NSU class, Law Practice Business and Technology Workshop is intended to supplement NSU Law’s Law Office Management Course. As NSU explains, “This course provides hands-on experience for students on a number of key operational aspects of the practice of law, including the business foundation of successful law firm management; security and confidentiality of client information; marketing, public relations, advertising and social media; duties of technological competence under ABA ‘Ethics 20/20’ amendments to the Model Rules of Professional Responsibility; predictive coding and other eDiscovery issues; client intake and case management; and issues related to the scope and composition of representation, including the unauthorized practice of law and unbundled legal services.”

Together, the courses that compose NSU Law’s new leadership curriculum are an important step in nudging legal education towards its inevitable and dramatically different future. New attorneys will need to be adept in the use of constantly evolving business and technology tools and practices thus better preparing them to adapt to their clients’ changing needs.

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Having spent time with a wide variety of senior partners in major business law firms throughout California and Arkansas, I have lost count how many times I have heard them wish that law school graduates who enter into a business law practice would better understand the business aspects of business law, including finance, business strategy, and business analytics.  Given my own practice experience, working on a number of construction defect cases even though I knew nothing about construction or the construction business, also gave me an understanding that law students need to learn more than just law.

Northwestern’s Pritzker School of Law has taken up the challenge in a big way.  Beginning in Fall 2017, he law school has begun offering a suite of five courses through the university’s Kellogg School of Management: Accounting for Decisionmaking; Business Analytics; Business Strategy; Finance 1; and Leadership in Organizations.  The courses are taught by Kellogg faculty and are courses that Kellogg’s MBA students also take. Here is a link to a story about the new courses from the Northwestern Pritzker website.

Northwestern reports that in this, the first year of this new set of offerings, enrollment has been robust: 51 students in Accounting; 28 students in Business Analytics; 39 students in Business Strategy; 15 students in Finance; and 38 students in Leadership in Organizations.  These enrollment numbers suggest that the Northwestern Pritzker student population has responded very positively to this new opportunity.

As outgoing Dean Daniel Rodriquez argues in the linked story, great lawyers are T-shaped, possessing both deep knowledge of the law and broad knowledge of related fields, including, for future business lawyers, the world of business.

This week’s posting focuses on Georgia State’s new Center for Access to Justice, which was founded in 2016 to support those working to ensure meaningful access to the courts and equal treatment in the civil and criminal justice systems, with a regional focus on the South.”  This development is an exciting one; Georgia State is taking concrete action to understand and start to address our country’s access to justice issues.

The Center’s draft third newsletter, of which I received a preview copy, explains the need for such a center much better than I possibly could. Director and Associate Professor Lauren Sudeall Lucas and Assistant Director Dracy Meals start with Justice Black’s famous quote on access to justice: “[there] can be no equal justice where the kind of trial a man gets depends on the amount of money he has.” (Griffin v. Illinois, 351 U.S. 12, 19 (1956)). They then detail the need for the Center:

. . . 60 years later, 80 percent of state criminal defendants cannot afford to pay for a lawyer, and only those who are actually incarcerated are constitutionally entitled to appointed counsel. Many people facing misdemeanor charges can, if convicted, face significant fines and fees, the loss of benefits (including housing), or deportation. But they have no right to an attorney, and those who cannot afford a lawyer go without one.

In the civil justice context, there is no federal constitutional right to counsel despite the fact that civil cases can involve a range of critical issues, including housing, public benefits, child custody and domestic violence. Though certain jurisdictions provide a right to counsel under limited circumstances, in most of these cases, people who cannot afford a lawyer will have no choice but to go to court alone. Representing themselves through the complex legal process may mean that their claim is dismissed for a technical reason, or that they lose a meritorious case.

Much of the public, and often the litigants themselves, incorrectly believe that indigent people are not only legally entitled to a lawyer in any kind of case, but that getting one at no cost is simply a matter of making the request.

The Center for Access to Justice at Georgia State University College of Law is working to change that misconception, demonstrating through research how lower-income individuals have a fundamentally different experience with the civil and criminal justice systems, particularly in the South.

The Center has already hosted a conference, entitled State of the South, focusing on the intersection of access to justice in the context of overlapping civil and criminal matters, developed mechanisms and programs to support students interested in public interest or pro bono work, and taken on some significant research projects, including:

  • Conducting a pilot study of individuals’ interactions with dispossessory courts, which handle eviction proceedings (funded by a grant),
  • Commissioning an interactive Access to Justice Map of Georgia, and
  • Studying the civil legal needs of indigent criminal defendants (also funded by a grant).

The fact that the Center was able to secure grant funding for these projects makes the Center’s launch even more exciting.  U.S. law schools have done a poor job, by and large, in applying for and securing grant funding; Georgia State’s successes show there are opportunities we are missing.

More generally, at least in my opinion, the more law schools become part of the solution for access to justice issues (beyond our legal clinics and externships), the better.

 

 

As this article by Moses Ma, a business consultant, published by Psychology Today explains, the adage “Innovation loves a crisis” is a product of the brain’s neuroplasticity. When humans experience a major stressor, at least some humans react by stretching, by thinking and learning to a new degree. Ma uses the example of the Apollo 13 mission crisis as an example of how stress can lead to meaningful innovation.

Of course, good ideas are only valuable to the extent that we implement them. Ma argues in the linked article that innovation is even more a matter of courage than a matter of brains. I agree. In this 2014 article by Jeff Haden published by Entrepreneur, the author explains the “8 Qualities That Make Bosses Unforgettable.” (Confession: I really like this article and may come back to it in a future post.) Haden’s second quality of unforgettable bosses is that “They see opportunity in instability and uncertainty” and eighth quality is that “They take real, not fake, risks.”

The challenges facing legal education in the 2010s are not as dire or dramatic as those the crew and NASA confronted during the Apollo 13 mission crisis. And the changes law schools are making may be uninteresting to those who are not legal educators, but law faculty and deans have chosen to respond to our challenges by innovating. This blog is an effort to celebrate extraordinary innovations in legal education; most, but not all, of the innovations are ones that have been implemented during what all agree is a crisis in legal education.

In each blog entry, excluding this one, I will describe an innovation at a law school (other than an innovation at the law school where I work, University of Pacific’s McGeorge School of Law) and then share my views as to why the innovation is worth noting and even, perhaps, emulating.