Goodenough and Lauritsen, eds.: Educating the Digital Lawyer

Professor Oliver Goodenough of Vermont Law School and Harvard’s Berkman Center Law Lab, and Marc Lauritsen, Esq., of Capstone Practice Systems have edited a new book entitled Educating the Digital Lawyer (New Providence, NJ: Matthew Bender, 2012).

Click here to access an EPUB ebook version of the book free of charge. (If you need an EPUB reader, try the Firefox EPUB Reader extension.)

According to the introduction, the book chapters are based on papers presented at “a pair of conferences — one in October 2010 at Harvard Law School and one in April 2011 at Columbia Law School — that brought together several dozen academics and practitioners who are deeply interested in the technology of law and how law schools and other institutions should educate students and lawyers about it.”

Here is the table of contents:

• Brian Donnelly, What Does “Digital Lawyer” Mean?
• Marc Lauritsen, Lawyering in an Age of Intelligent Machines
• David M. Blaszkowsky and Matthew Reed, Meta-What? Lawyers, Legal Training, and the Rise of Meta-Data for Digital Securities and Other Financial Contracts
• Harry Lewis, Under the Hood of the Internet
• Jeanne Eicks, Educating Superior Legal Professionals: Successful Modern Curricula Join Law and Technology
• Brock Rutter, Survey of Existing Courses in Lawyer Use of Technology
• Fred Galves, Teaching Litigation Technology
• Ronald W. Staudt, Cyberclinics: Law Schools, Technology, and Justice
• Paul Maharg, Simulation: A Pedagogy Emerging from the Shadows
• Stephanie Kimbro, What Should Be in a Digital Curriculum: A Practitioner’s Must Have List
• Barbara L. Bernier and F. Dennis Green, Law School Reset — Pedagogy, Andragogy, and Second Life
• Michael G. Bennett, A Critical Embracing of the Digital Lawyer
• Gregg Gordon, The Digital Lawyer’s Evolving Education in Scholarly Research

HT @stephkimbro.

Apps for Justice Project Recognized

The “Apps for Justice” proposal — created by a team including Marc Lauritsen, Esq., of Capstone Practice Systems; Professor Ronald W. Staudt of the Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago-Kent College of Law; and John P. Mayer, Executive Director of CALI: The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction — to “expand programs in which [law] students write software as part of their [legal] education,” was recognized at this weekend’s Future Ed 3 Conference with an award of a virtual dollar venture capital investment.

The proposal includes further development of law-school clinical programs that use the A2J Author software created by CALI and the Center for Access to Justice and Technology.

Click here for more information about A2J Author.

HT @sglassmeyer and @johnpmayer.

Pro Se Assistance Tool Being Developed at Universiteit Twente & Universiteit van Tilburg

A new online service designed to help self-represented individuals decide whether to pursue litigation, is being developed by Dr. Ellen Giebels and colleagues at the Universiteit Twente Research Centre for Conflict, Risk and Safety Perception (iCRiSP), and researchers at the Universiteit van Tilburg Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies of Civil Law and Conflict Resolution Systems (TISCO), according to an announcement on the blog of Jurix, The Foundation for Legal Knowledge Based Systems, and a press release from Universiteit Twente.

According to the press release, the new application will address consumer law and divorce, and may later also address employment law. The system is intended to help pro ses assess their likelihood of success should they pursue legal remedies.

A noteworthy aspect of the project is the cooperation of psychology researchers, lawyers, alternative dispute resolution experts, and computer scientists from the very beginning of the project, to ensure that issues respecting users’ attributes as well as legal and ADR substantive and procedural issues, are addressed in the system from the start.

This project accords with a number of other recent efforts to develop online tools to assist self-represented individuals, including A2J Author — developed by CALI, The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction, and the Chicago-Kent College of Law’s Center for Access to Justice and Technology — and its implementation in the U.S. federal courts, E Pro Se.

For more information please see the Jurix post and the press release.

Staudt on A2J Author: Technology that Attacks Barriers to Access to Justice

Professor Ronald W. Staudt of the Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago-Kent College of Law, has published All the Wild Possibilities: Technology that Attacks Barriers to Access to Justice, forthcoming in Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review. Here is the abstract:

Predicting how technology will affect the future of the legal profession is difficult and unreliable work. I have made my share of such predictions in the past thirty years, including foretelling the death of the paper casebook in law schools and vast improvements in law practice that would be triggered by computers and document assembly software. Neither of these two prophesies has yet been fulfilled. Yet a real success story has emerged based in part on my persistent optimism that technology can improve the delivery of legal services. A2J Author, a modest software tool that allows lawyers to build guided Internet interviews for prospective clients, has been adopted across the United States and in several foreign countries as an interface for public access to legal processes. This Article describes the origin of A2J Author as a collaboration by courts, legal aid agencies, and funding sources. The Article explores the combination of factors that produced this technology, which successfully attacks barriers to access to justice. Finally, the Article speculates on whether A2J Author can begin to transform the delivery of legal aid and government services to low income people.

[Update 11 February 2010: A2J Author was co-developed by "The Center for Access to Justice & Technology (CAJT), [and] the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI).” HT @johnpmayer.]