Tomorrow's Legal Teams Roles, Education, and Training

Tomorrow's Legal Teams Roles, Education, and Training Date: 1 October 2021 The big picture... - The impacts of Al and digitalization on law are still at a very early stage - What is happening now may be a poor guide to what will happen subsequently as the technology and its usage evolves - CF the arrival of PCs in the 1980s. - This makes 'future proofing' legal education a hard task! Lots Of Factors Are At Play - These include: • New business opportunities and markets for legal services • Emergence of new roles around technology • Re-bundling of existing tasks and jobs to support efficiency • New business and ownership models that may bring with them new job structures and models of employment contract and management. • All these may re-shape the structure of traditional law firms and legal careers over time Change Will Be Multi-Speed - The pace and scale of digitalization will vary probably across: • Sector and sub-sector (e.g. commercial v. criminal law) • Firms within sector • Occupation and jobs within it (partners (management), lawyers, paralegals, admin, court admin, magistrates, judges, etc.) Potential Responses From Legal Education - Do nothing and wait and see - Re-design Bachelors and Masters programs (new entrants cover about 2% of the workforce) - Start to introduce Al and the law into CPD offerings Where to focus Al in legal education - The Shadbolt Dilemma: • Courses focused on specific software packages and technologies • Courses aiming to produce general awareness of the technology and its potential uses and to create an understanding of the issues it raises - Do we aim for lawyers who can code, or do we bring lawyers and computer science people together to developed a shared understanding and language? - How best can we design an intervention in the curriculum that helps develop the generic skills employers say they want: • Teamworking • Communication • Cooperation • Business awareness and entrepreneurship Our Research and Aims - Context - Aims / motivation - Methods Our Results - The common core of law-tech knowledge and skills • Mindset understanding • Data-oriented thinking • Commercial awareness • Agile systems and design thinking • Law and ethics of digital technology What Might This Mean For Law Schools? - NB also • T-shaped employees (Smathers, 2014) • Delta-shaped lawyers (Runyon and Carrel 2019) • O-Shaped Lawyer Group (2020) What Might This Mean For Law Schools? - Clear that however useful the other alphabet skills may be, they are no substitute for the stem of core legal knowledge (Spencer and Smith (2020); Susskind(2013), interviewee: 'we'll continue to look for really strong academics'). - Other desirable skills are also part of a University education, e.g. 'strong technical capabilities and intellectual agility', 'ability to analyses documents and think 20 steps ahead', 'take a giant pile of documents and analyses it thoroughly', 'resilience' and 'comfort with unfamiliar areas'. (O-Shaped Lawyer and interviews). So maybe all that is needed in some instances is more conscious labelling? But Three Things Law Schools Might Usefully Consider: - Lattice career structures, and reduction in focus of employers as source of CPD = ideal opportunity for universities to step into this gap. Hence the Oxford Law-Tech Education Programs (OLTEP). - Universities are able to draw not just on market demand, but also a strong, objective and independent peer- reviewed research base. So ideally placed to have an input into education but also guidance of the field itself. - Lots of potential for interdisciplinary 'law &' courses, especially Law & Computer Science. Inherently multidisciplinary nature of universities makes them ideal for this.