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What did your law school do last week to celebrate Constitution Day? At McGeorge, students and faculty ate popcorn while viewing and discussing RBG, the documentary showcasing the challenges and achievements of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Meanwhile, BYU Law commemorated the signing of the Constitution by announcing the launch of its Law and Corpus Linguistics Technology Platform, including three new and historically significant corpora. This platform is designed to advance the field of law and corpus linguistics, a methodology that uses naturally occurring language in large collections of texts called “corpora” to help determine the meaning of words and phrases.

Because corpus linguistics is new to me, I rely below on the experts to explain it. (I do have a McGeorge colleague, Brian Slocum, who has published quite a bit in this area.)

Associate Chief Justice of the Utah Supreme Court Thomas Lee, who is teaching a class on law and language with an emphasis on principles of corpus linguistics at Harvard Law School explains, “Corpus Linguistics is new to the legal community, and it holds significant and largely unexplored value in the courtroom when evaluating ordinary meaning.” “When a case presents a problem of lexical ambiguity, corpus methods offer judges an approach that is empirical and transparent, rather than intuitive and opaque. Early judicial decisions employing this methodology have highlighted these benefits. It is exciting to hear of new developments that will make corpus linguistics more available and accessible to practicing attorneys, judges, students and scholars around the world.”

The new corpora will be especially useful to those who study the meaning of the Constitution. “The method of corpus linguistics, which employs large-scale data sets (corpora) that provide evidence of linguistic practice, provides an important tool for the recovery of the original public meaning of the constitutional text,” said Lawrence Solum, Professor of Law at Georgetown Law and an internationally recognized author and expert in constitutional theory.

Designed specifically for lawyers and scholars, the new Law and Corpus Linguistics Technology Platform for linguistic analysis includes:

  • The Corpus of Founding Era American English, which contains over 140 million words, allowing the user to examine context to see how words from the Constitution were used at the time of the founding (1750 – 1799). This resource provides judges with evidence for the original meaning of the Constitution, even though we are more than 200 years removed from its ratification.
  • The Corpus of Early Modern English, which contains more than 40,000 texts from 1485 to 1800.
  • The Corpus of Supreme Court of the United States contains more than 130 million words from 32,000 Supreme Court documents.

These resources are free and available to legal professionals, judges, scholars and the public.

The Law and Corpus Linguistics Technology Platform features a user-friendly interface offering the ability to search these corpora by terms and phrases with filters for year, primary author, genre (legal or non-legal document, court proceeding, speech, diary entry, novel, etc.) and source. The corpora also support collocation searches, which enable the user to gain insights into word meanings and relationships between words.

BYU has taken a leading role in advancing the field of law and corpus linguistics. In 2013, BYU Law offered the first course on law and corpus linguistics in the United States, taught by Stephen Mouritsen. In 2016, BYU Law organized the first academic conference on law and corpus linguistics in partnership with Georgetown Law, and BYU Law has continued to host an annual conference on the topic. Last year, BYU Law created two research fellowships dedicated to law and corpus linguistics. This fall, adjunct BYU Law professor and.

The 2019 AALS Annual Meeting will include a session focusing on corpus linguistics, Corpus Linguistics: The Search for Objective Interpretation on Saturday, January 5, 2019 from 1:30 pm – 3:15 pm. The Section sponsored on Law and Interpretation is sponsoring the session.

This fall, New York Law School (NYLS) launched a new initiative entitled the Business of Law Institute. The Institute seeks to create a pipeline of new lawyers to join the growing legal tech sector and assist the efforts to bridge the access-to-justice gap.

The initiative grew out of a research project NYLS commissioned. Ari Kaplan Advisors conducted a four-month study that captured both qualitative and quantitative data, from leaders at major law firms, corporations, and legal technology companies. The study also included focus groups with law students and broad research on the legal tech marketplace.

The goals of the Institute include:

  • Developing, in consultation with industry experts, a series of curricular and extracurricular experiential course offerings to train NYLS students to be effective practitioners in the business of law.
  • Building a pipeline of jobs for students who are interested in the intersection of law and technology, especially as corporate legal counsel.
  • Providing Evening Division students with specialized training as part of their J.D. studies to expand their skill sets.

Subject areas that the Institute will explore include risk and compliance, privacy, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, blockchain, e-discovery, and technology-assisted review. “While traditional legal education remains paramount,” according to NYLS Dean Anthony Crowell, “today’s law school graduates will gain a competitive advantage if they enter the job market ready to meet the technological and operational needs of their employers.”

NYLS’s Business of Law Institute will offer a mix of courses and programs, beginning this fall:

  • The first course in development is The Business of Law Workshop and Seminar,which combines classroom instruction on timely regulations and technologies with hands-on work experience in a corporate legal department.
  • The Institute will establish a technology-centric Learning Lab, where students can gain exposure to industry-leading legal tech tools, including the e-discovery software Relativity.
  • The Institute will also offer upper-level seminars such as Compliance and Bank Regulatory Matters, Smart Contracting and Artificial Intelligence, and Cybersecurity and Risk Management taught by outside experts in these fields.
  • The Institute will launch a master class series featuring guest lecturers on topics related to regulatory structures, business concepts, and industry-standard technologies.
  • Finally, to assist practicing attorneys in staying ahead of the legal tech curve, the Institute will offer continuing legal education programs focusing on legal tech.

In previous posts, I wrote about the intensive access to justice efforts at the University of Cincinnati School of Law and Roger Williams School of Law and Georgia State University’s Center for Access to Justice.  This week’s posts also addresses access to justice initiatives, but this time framed by a law review article that describes an effort that is distinctive in five meaningful ways.

First, the article was co-authored by five law professors (in the order they are listed on SSRN), Professor Lisa Pruitt of UC Davis School of Law, Professor Amanda Kool of Harvard Law School, Professor Lauren Sudeall Lucas, who directs the Georgia State Access to Justice Center, Dean Danielle Conway of the University of Maine School of Law, and Professor Hannah Haksgaard of the University of South Dakota School of Law, and a Medical School Professor, Michele Statz of the University of Minnesota, Duluth, School of Medicine.

Second, the article describes law school-based rural access to justice initiatives in three states, California, Maine, and South Dakota. In California, the One Justice’s Justice Bus takes students, as well as attorneys, into rural communities to provide one-time legal services. In Georgia, Georgia State’s Alternative Spring Break Pro Bono Initiative is planning a 2019 rural-focused access to justice clinic.  In Maine, the University of Maine School of Law (Maine Law) partnered with the Maine State Bar Association, the Maine Board of Overseers of the Bar, and the Maine Justice Foundation to plan and launch the Maine Law Rural Lawyer Project. With seed funding from the Maine Justice Foundation and in-kind contributions from the remaining three partners, Maine Law launched The Rural Lawyer Project, which places law students with practitioners in communities that would otherwise have limited access to legal services. Maine Law students work in the summers under the guidance of practitioners and are exposed to all facets of rural practice, including, but not limited to, legal research and drafting, dispute resolution, general practice case management, real estate transactions, trial practice, and ethics.  In South Dakota, the Project Rural Practice launched a program in the summer of 2017 to place first- and second-year law students in summer jobs at rural law firms. Using a $25,000 grant to partially fund summer internships in rural counties, the career office at USD Law works to connect law students and small-town practitioners with the goal of exposing students to rural practice and connecting them with the rural legal community.

These initiatives are similar to two projects at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, William H. Bowen School of Law.  The first, which the law school calls its Delta Clinic, is a more or less traditional legal clinic in every way except its location—in the area of Arkansas, the Delta, with the most severe access to justice deficit in the state (given the area’s 4,000:1 population to lawyer ratio). The Delta Clinic students prepare divorce complaints and motions for fee waivers for low-income client, obtain service on defendants, represent the clients in divorce hearings, and write final divorce decrees. The second, the law school’s new Rural Practice Incubator, is designed to support Bowen alumni in launching viable small or solo practices in rural, under served Arkansas communities. The 18-month program supports incubator attorneys with training, resources, mentoring, and guidance to assist them in building their professional careers as rural attorneys. Incubator attorneys are encouraged to implement innovative legal service delivery models to increase access to justice for low- and moderate-income rural Arkansans. Each participant will provide a minimum of 100 hours of pro bono or low bono legal services during the program.

Third, the article provides hard data on the severe access to justice issues faced by American rural communities. The article points out that rural communities feel budget cuts to legal aid much more severely than their urban peers, that racial and ethnic minorities are over-represented among those in rural communities who lack meaningful access to justice, and that the access to justice problem is much more than a deficiency in legal aid lawyers given the severe shortage of rural lawyers of any stripe, and that the rural lawyer population is shrinking.

Finally, the authors suggest four new approaches to rural access to justice: (1) continuing to gather and analyze data regarding the rural lawyer shortage and efforts to address the shortage; (2) continuing to develop local, patchwork solutions that include but are not limited to technological solutions; (3) establishing state and federal financial incentives to encourage law school graduates to enter rural practice and developing collaborations with retiring rural practitioners; and (4) continuing and expanding law school efforts to recruit, train, place, and support law school graduates interested in rural practice.

Given the rural lawyer shortages about which the authors write, such efforts seem necessary if we are ever to realize meaningful access to justice.

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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.

UCB-Boalt-School-Law

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.