Katz on Training Students for the Technology Infused Law Practice of the 21st Century

Professor Dr. Daniel Martin Katz of Michigan State University College of Law has published Training Students for the Technology Infused Law Practice of the 21st Century, at Legal Ethics Forum.

The post is published as part of LEF’s Symposium on Legal Education’s Response to the Economic Realities Facing the Profession.

In this post, Professor Katz argues in favor of legal education reform designed to equip law students to practice law in an increasingly technology- and data-focused business environment. He contends that

[l]aw school needs to transition from its liberal arts predisposition to a polytechnic research and teaching operation (you know one with peer review and grant $$). From both a scholarship and training perspective, it is time to get serious about science, computation, data analytics and technology.

For more information, please see the complete post.

For more detail on Professor Katz’s ideas about legal educational reform, please see his presentation, The MIT School of Law.

HT @computational.

Katz on Legal Education Reform: The MIT School of Law

Professor Dr. Daniel Martin Katz of Michigan State University College of Law has posted the slides of his recent presentation entitled The MIT School of Law: A Perspective on Legal Education in the 21st Century, at Computational Legal Studies.

In this presentation, Professor Katz describes recent trends that are making the U.S. legal services market more competitive, lower-priced, and more focused on information and technology. This new environment, he contends, will require future lawyers to have different skills and training — in areas such as quantitative methods and statistics, finance, supply chain management, decision science, and computer science — than U.S. law schools currently provide.

Accordingly, Professor Katz advocates the remodeling of U.S. law schools. In his view, law schools should switch to a quarter system; should hire faculty who can offer training in the areas identified above, and practice-oriented legal training as well as training in legal doctrine; and should alter admissions criteria to favor students with undergraduate majors in science and engineering. He contends that law schools should adopt curricula characterized by more requirements in a broader array of fields — including the areas described above — mandatory capstone projects with practice-oriented deliverables, and courses that “help students compete in the legal labor market.”

For more information, please see the presentation slides.