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Law 2050 (the Class) has Launched!
I am pleased to report that my Law 2050 class here at Vanderbilt Law School is now up and running. Our first two sessions last week consisted of a broad overview of the class and a brief history of the modern American law firm. The class has 45 very bright and enthusiastic students enrolled, and based on their personal statements they are keenly aware that it is to their advantage to learn more about today’s dynamic legal industry environment. Today and Tuesday we will hear from panels of managing partners and in-house counsel on their perspectives and practices. For those interested in the scope of the class, I have set out the syllabus after the jump.
Law 2050 Class Speaker Schedule
My Law 2050 time the past few weeks has been devoted to getting the Vanderbilt Law School class up and running, thus no blogging. As I mentioned in my post introducing the class, I have been overwhelmed by the enthusiasm invited guest speakers have shown. We have a wonderful speaker schedule planned. I will be blogging about these events as the semester progresses, but with the understanding that that these are busy people with fluid schedules, I wanted to thank all who have agreed to appear in case any have to drop out later due to unforeseen schedule conflicts. So, here’s the schedule as it stands today, and many thanks to all of you for agreeing to share your insights with our students:
Monday, August 26: Guest Speaker Panel – Law firm managing partners discuss the state of the practice
• Ben Adams – Baker Donelson
• Richard Hays – Alston & Bird
• Stephen Mahon – Squire Sanders
Tuesday, August 27: Guest Speaker Panel – Corporate in-house counsel discuss the drivers of change
• Reuben Buck – Cisco
• Jim Cuminale – Nielson
• Cheryl Mason – Hospital Corporation of America
Monday, September 23: Guest Speaker Panel – Legal Project and Process Management
• Larry Bridgsmith – ERM Legal Solutions
• Marc Jenkins – Cicayda
• Dan Willoughby – King & Spalding
Tuesday, September 24: Guest Speaker Panel – Law firm associates discuss life in the modern law firm
• Ashley Bassel – Bass Berry
• Daniel Flournoy – Waller Lansden
• Sarah Laird – Bradley Arant
• Chris Lalonde – Nelson Mullins
Tuesday, October 1: Paul Lippe of Legal OnRamp
Monday, October 7: Guest Speaker Panel – Alternatives to the Big Law model
• Walt Burton – Thompson Burton
• Lindsay Grossman – Axiom
• Eric Schultenover – Counsel on Call
Tuesday, October 15: Guest Speaker – Michael Mills of Neota Logic
Tuesday, October 22: Michael Bess, Vanderbilt History Department, on the Bioengineered Superhuman
Tuesday, October 29: Guest Speakers: John Murdoch of Bradley Arant and Nancy Lea Hyer of the Owen Business School – Implementing LEAN Law
Tuesday, November 12: Guest Speaker – Prof. Bill Henderson of Indiana University-Bloomington Law School
Announcing Law Practice 2050 — The Vanderbilt Law School Class
I am pleased to announce that Law 2050 will move beyond the blogosphere this fall to the four walls and PowerPoint slides of a law school classroom. With the tremendous support of my dean, Chris Guthrie, I have designed Law Practice 2050, a course designed to immerse students in the dynamic environments forcing change in the law and in legal practice, the goal being to develop the skills necessary for actively participating in and taking advantage of those changes. There are four distinct but related themes embedded in the course scope:
- Understanding the structural changes taking place in the private sector legal services industry (e.g., changing firm models; new fee structures; online services; outsourcing)
- Gaining familiarity with established and emerging legal technologies (e.g., e-discovery; routinized compliance software; data aggregation and analysis)
- Exploring new kinds of legal services and employment (e.g., legal risk management; legal knowledge management; legal process management)
- Anticipating scenarios of the future of law and building skills useful for identifying and developing future practice opportunities (e.g., climate change; 3D printing; robotics; demographic shifts)
Through a series of readings (e.g., Tomorrow’s Lawyers is required reading), individual and group projects, and guest speakers and panels, we will explore the forces acting to transform the legal services industry and survey established and emerging developments. We will also explore scenarios of future social, economic, technological, and environmental change and brainstorm their possible impacts on the law. Students will engage in active small group discussions, prepare reaction papers, make group presentations, and develop practice development proposals and legal industry case studies.
I have been overwhelmed with how willing people in the industry have been to contribute to the course as speakers and panelists. Currently we have scheduled a rich variety of outside speakers including:
- a panel of managing partners of three Big Law firms
- a panel of in-house counsel of three major corporations
- a panel of representatives from several lawyer staffing firms
- a panel of representatives from legal process outsourcing firms
- a panel of associates from three Big Law firms to discuss their perspectives
- speakers from several law+tech companies
- speakers on legal process and knowledge management
- speakers from several non-law disciplines offering visions of the future of the environment, technology, and society
I will be blogging about the course as we move through it and hope to get feedback from students, academics, and practitioners. More to come…
On the Training of New Lawyers (Part I)
I have just returned from three weeks of back-to-back conferences, exhausted but ready to jump back into Law 2050.
The conferences were not about the legal industry—they were environmental law and policy gatherings—but I found plenty of time to discuss the legal industry with practitioners and academics. A number of conversations led me to think more deeply about the training of new lawyers in the new legal environment. One was with a friend who had recently left 20 years of practice with a law firm to become the general counsel of a mid-sized energy company. One of the first steps he took in his new position—following the trend among corporate clients—was to inform all his outside law firms (including his old firm) that he would not pay for any first or second year attorneys working on matters for his company, no exceptions. I asked him how he thought new lawyers at law firms handling complex litigation and transactional work will receive adequate training as this trend spreads throughout the industry. His answer boiled down to, “not my problem.” Well, maybe it’s not his problem, but it is a problem.
For the past 60 years the training of new lawyers—and here I mean training in complex corporate litigation and transaction environments—has been financed by law firm clients in a tacit, though sometimes explicit, agreement between the firms and their clients. This arrangement worked best when there was an expectation of long-term engagement between a firm and its clients as well as long-term employment of a lawyer at his or her firm. The idea was that the client would foot the bill to train a new lawyer at the front end and in return would after some years be able to work with an experienced attorney knowledgeable in the client’s business affairs. Both of those expectations began to fall apart in the 1990s, however, as clients diversified their firms and lateral movement by lawyers became the norm.
Although it is now widely discredited by legal “rethink” pundits, the old system worked—it produced very capable senior attorneys. So, what to put in its place? What system will produce just as capable senior attorneys under the condition that clients will not pay for new attorneys working on their matters? As I have observed in other posts, the answer clearly is not to replicate the Axiom and Clearspire model of firms staffed solely by senior attorneys. Their approach, though hailed in the “rethink” media as brilliant, obviously is unsustainable as an industry norm.
A Challenge for Silicon Valley: Ace My 1L Property Law Exam
We know they can beat human champions at chess and Jeopardy, but can the algorithm gurus in Silicon Valley program a computer to beat my 1L law students on my Property Law exam. I doubt it.
This challenge goes to the heart of the “reinvent law” and “law+tech” movements. There’s no doubt that plenty of the work that lawyers traditionally have performed can be substantially taken over or made far more efficient by computers. E-discovery is the obvious example. And there are domains of law steeped in technical rules and linguistics amenable to algorithm programming. The bizarre world of estates and future interests, for example, could very well be reduced to a program that could crunch through problems on my exam, spitting out the correct descriptions of present possessory estates and future interests about as effectively as any lawyer trained in the field (I would buy that program, give it to my students, and drop that section from the course!). But that’s because it is a field consisting entirely of rules and linguistics, with precisely correct answers to each problem and little room for higher-level reasoning.
Where I think the computers would flunk my exam is on the written essay portion. Bear in mind I do not construct insane factual scenarios on my exams–the kind with aliens invading Earth. I use practical scenarios taken from current news or my practice experience and put the students in situations not unlike those practicing attorneys face. To be sure, domain knowledge is essential for success on these questions, and the doctrine behind it could be stuffed into a computer program. But then what? Some of my questions go something like: “How likely is X to prevail on the Y claim?” or “Is there any problem with what the government has done to Y?” Of course, there is an attack strategy I teach my students for such questions–an algorithm of sorts–which I suppose could also be stuffed into a computer. That is what some Silicon Valley legal shops are trying to do for certain fields, as Lex Machina is for patent litigation. The problem is that the fact scenarios on my exam, as in the real world, can be quite nuanced, or they can be incomplete, requiring a decision tree approach with multiple branchings. Well, maybe Silicon Valley can program that too. But then there are questions asking students to advise clients what to do to solve problems, requiring that they explore and compare a variety of options and devise a game plane. Also doable for computers? Maybe so, but I am getting more skeptical as we go along. The most difficult type of question for me to imagine a computer solving effectively is one requiring students to invent new rules for new kinds of property issues, such as how to treat wind as a property interest given the rise of wind power. These questions require consideration of the theory and policy of property law as well as analogical reasoning to identify rules that work well in similar situations, transport them into the new context, and test how well they fit. Try that, Watson.
I can’t reveal the contents of my exam–it’s not being administered until this Friday and some of my students read this blog. But if anyone in Silicon Valley is up to the challenge, I’ll gladly send it to you and grade the computer’s answers.
Quantum Lawyering
One of the barriers to data storage and processing in existing technology is its binary form: the basic component of computing–the “bits”–are limited to binary encoding as a 0 or a 1. Busting through the binary digital constraint would open up a completely new world of computational power. The March 8 issue of Science includes a special section on the line of research designed to do just that–quantum information processing (QIP). QIP uses quantum mechanics to enable an infinite number of states that could be encoded on each quantum bit, or “qubit.” Given the properties of quantum-mechanical objects, it will be an immense challenge to create the physical architecture to support qubits in computer technology, but if the past of computer science is any indication, we’ll get there.
The chasm between binary and quantum computation technologies captures the limits of the emerging law+tech movement. As a number of previous posts have covered, the law+tech movement is designed to leverage the robust data storage and processing capacities now available to shift some kinds of lawyering services from humans to computers. Many of the tasks that can be shifted are routine, such as e-discovery and automated contract drafting. Some of the tasks, however, are quite sophisticated, such as contract risk assessment and patent litigation planning, and some of the innovations coming out of law+tech are opening up capacities human lawyers could not hope to achieve, such as the data visualizations Ravel Law is experimenting with.
Whether you look at this as good or bad for the legal industry, it’s coming so get used to it. But as much as the law+tech innovators promise to change the way legal services are delivered, they can’t promise what I would call “Quantum Lawyering.” What do I mean by Quantum Lawyering? (more…)
Law 2050 