Legal tech has become mainstream and even something of a buzzword. Huge sums of money are pouring into legal tech and legal automation research. Start-ups are popping up like mushrooms and everyone wants to claim he’s doing something with AI. How and to what extent legal tech is going to change the profession and legal services delivery nobody can really say with much certainty. Legal tech may be in the same phase of creative destruction as tech in general was during the dotcom bubble of the early 2000s. Yet it is important to understand that the tech revolution is part of a broader transformation of legal practice. Law has long been the quintessential gentleman’s profession with business practices more akin to that of a craft than of a modern, efficient capitalist industry. This has changed, partly as a result of globalisation but also as a consequence of the rise of in-house counsels (who have put pressure on law firms to become more efficient) and the entry new players like the big-four accounting firms (PWC, EY, Deloitte and KPMG) into the legal market. What this transformation means for legal education and legal training was the theme of a “Future of Legal Education” workshop that just took place in Barcelona.
While elite institutions – the Stanford, Harvard and Bucerius Law School of this world – have been very responsive to these challenges, the response at the median law school, certainly in Europe, has been at best tepid. Some law schools have added a course on law and technology here or there. But this is largely window dressing and goes very little distance towards addressing the fundamental rethink that these challenges pose for future lawyers. Law is a highly (self-)regulated business and protectionist impulses often drive lawyers’ response to change. Legal Luddites do exist (I’ve met a few of them) and maybe they are especially present in non-elite law schools. But although protectionist and anti-tech regulations – like the French ban on judicial forecasting or the German court ruling on smart contracts – may slow down the pace of transformation, it will not stop it. Legal education is increasingly perceived as archaic and outdated. Everywhere in Europe – look at the numbers in France, Germany and Italy – law school enrollments are down (even when university enrollment overal is up). In most European countries legal education is nearly free but this is a plausible sign that prospective students are responding to market signals (in the US, where legal education is prohibitively expensive, enrollments are at a historic low). It is time that law schools accept that legal education must be reengineerd from the ground up. As I have argued elsewhere, the challenges require a truly interdisciplinary curriculum, a greater emphasis on skills and innovative tech-supported teaching methods. Just as legal practitioners are learning to work with computer scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs to create tomorrow’s legal business models and services, law schools must embrace interdisciplinarity in their course offering as well as in their teaching personnel.
It is often said that change is the law of life. It is time it also becomes the law of legal education.