Digital technologies are an increasingly important phenomena in higher education and professional industries. Law schools have started to participate in rethinking how to train the next generation workforce/citizens at the interface of governance/technology. This post includes links to quantitative data for folks interested to learn more about the current law/tech situation in US legal higher education, and provides a few initial thoughts about the data.
Here is an excel sheet formatted study with a wide range of data on current US law school efforts around 'Law and Technology': Download US Law and Technology Higher Education Law Schools - Haskell:Fish In addition, for an alternative visualisation for some of the information, see: https://app.flourish.studio/visualisation/2736840
Note: The study was developed along with a PhD student, Jessica L. Fish, and funded by the University of Manchester Law School and its Law and Technology Initiative. Scholarship based partly on this data will be rolled out in the coming year, but the information provided is meant to be open sources/common for any colleagues however useful.
A Few Thoughts... (see below)
How to read the excel study: Running down the left hand column are all US accredited law schools in alphabetical order by region and state. Running horizontally are the following categories: names of courses (C), number of courses (D), specialised degrees/certificates/pathways etc (E), academic staff (F), institutes/centers/clinics (G), external collaborations (H), international collaborations (I), publications (J), other miscellaneous info, such as summer programmes and conferences (K), and promotional materials (L). The material is inevitably incomplete and we relied exclusively on what is available via the website. All data is hyperlinked for colleagues to explore in more detail.
Some initial findings:
- There is a significant gender gap that is biased toward men (90/35), most prevalent in the Pacific and Southern states, and which actually points to even more structural unequal gendered dynamics at play in the field (e.g., course concentration, professional status). These inequalities appears to be even more pronounced when factoring in race-oriented data.
- While many schools make some overture to technology (147), many if not most programmes remain underdeveloped. The different types of offerings are broken into Advanced, General Tech, Legal Skills, Business, Cyber, and Medical - with Advanced indicating a developed curriculum, some degree/certification, a centre/institute, etcetera, General Tech signalling a few curriculum offerings and maybe some other law/tech aspects, Legal Skills indicating a relatively light programme but including classes e-discovery (Legal Skills), Cyber referring to classes usually built around data/privacy, and so forth. There are only about 20 'Advanced' programmes in the US, and even here, many programmes reflect the ongoing early days of the field. Similarly, when looking at the type of pathways available for students, the most common is some sort of acknowledged specialisation ('curriculum' / 38), with a relatively smaller showing of certificate (10), LLM (17), Dual JD (9) or continuing legal education options (4) - and again, when looking into these options, there is substantial room for development (e.g., LLM programmes are often quite generalist). Likewise, many topics and programmes appear to be less innovative than they initially appear (for instance, cyber-based courses often appear to be merely updated courses taken from past curriculum modules). That said, there are some very exciting programmes with rich theoretical and skill based offerings, etc.
- Centres and other research based initiatives gravitate around words such as technology, innovation, as well as themes, such as data/privacy, cyber-, science and entrepreneurship. Some initiatives offer theory/policy oriented activities/scholarship that are often otherwise missing in programmes (for an impressive example, see Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society) and offer interesting insights into tracking the sociology of the profession (e.g., following the links of individual faculty members in column F begins to reveal a picture of where people network, prepare and advance their professional trajectories).
- There are significant ongoing lost opportunities in private/university partnerships, cross-disciplinary collaboration, blended theory/skill based learning (e.g., doc automation/no-code app building), scope of topics (e.g., organisational management studies), law school candidate and employer recruitment, etc... The noise of legal tech is based on real phenomena but there is still currently significant noise. At the same time, the field appears very unsettled with unique opportunities for US legal higher education.
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