Law Schools of the future

Law Schools of the future

From “A VISION OF LAW SCHOOLS OF THE FUTURE”, by James L. Hoover(*)

Presuming to predict the future is dangerous. It seems especially foolish at the ends of centuries. The results do make for often humorous reading decades later. The best we can really do is describe what is possible now and evaluate the implications if new ideas or opportunities become widespread. As technology is now a major driving force in institutional change, our inability to describe possibilities even two years out makes these efforts even more suspect. This looks to be true even of that most resistant of institutions, higher Education , and to one of its most traditional of disciplines, legal Education .

Over the past twenty-five years my professional life has focused on legal education. For much of this time I have been a law librarian providing traditional research services to faculty and students, primarily at Columbia Law School. Over time the lines between research support and more active involvement in the larger educational role have blurred. Similarly, the ability of a Law library to provide services to today’s faculty and students became dependent on the most robust computer network and information services staff . Somewhere along the line I accepted responsibility for both the library and computer services. The last major piece was the emergence of a support group for faculty using technology in the classroom and as an adjunct to the classroom; this development was extremely important as we planned the renovation of existing classrooms and the construction of new ones integrating technology which currently seems potentially effective. The web is now where we look to deliver library, computer and instructional services.

Thus what is attempted here is not prediction but description of change and resistance to change. The technology generally works. What often does not keep up with it is focus on how to use it as a tool for education and how to support instructors properly so that they may experiment with it. Of course, some of this failure is financial but even more is vision and leadership. Fundamentally the issue ahead is how to deal with change; the technology is only the symbol of the change. Change happens constantly and all around us. What we need to do is make change part of what we are about as law schools. In that way we also take control of the change rather than just be subjected to it as a result of actions of others. We need to study the experiences and expectations of the students now working their way through high schools and colleges on their way to law school; we need to both support and study new teaching techniques being tried by our colleagues, often our younger colleagues.

What is possible now

Assume all law schools have some if not most classrooms wired for Multimedia presentation, network and Internet access by instructor; some classrooms will have network connections to the student desktop either wired or wireless. At least one classroom in each school, and likely more, will have distance Learning capabilities for either high speed line or Internet connectivity to other educational institutions or remote speakers or remote attendees. This will allow linked classrooms with other schools for jointly taught courses and courses from one location “broadcast”to multiple locations as Peter Martin is now doing from Cornell.

Students and faculty have access to networked services from offices, classrooms, library, lounges, and residences especially if on campus; these services are supported by the institution. Off campus connectivity to the law school’s network is provided either through ISP or supported by institution by dial access.

Schools are now seeing increased use of electronic communication beyond email to class discussion extending the classroom through such means as the web. There is facilitated support for real time and asynchronous discussions.

Research material online

We are seeing aggregation and de-aggregation of legal publishing at the same time. The past 10 years has been one of major consolidation of commercial legal publishing. Small niche publishers have emerged with new electronic services though none have yet become key providers. The probable loss or weakening of some aggregators may result as sources decide to publish electronically on their own given the web’s ease of distribution. Legal publishing is increasingly dominated by global publishers; this will result in the internationalization of legal tools as the profession itself internationalizes.

Primary resources

U.S. federal and state coverage is greatly expanding as court decisions, statutes, regulations and other government information is made directly available by agencies through the Internet as a regular part of the work of the agencies. These will often be the most up-to-date source but may not have the organizational or search sophistication of commercial services plus they will necessarily be limited to jurisdictional coverage. However, they will put great pressure on commercial providers for enhanced service

There will be continued gradual expansion in the online availability of primary materials for many countries. The emergence of major international legal publishers will speed this process for major industrial countries. Given the regional differences in the organization of the legal profession and, thus, the economics of using expensive online services, the growth of coverage will be spotty for some time. In many areas the major supplier of online legal information will be the government which can use the web. As with foreign legal coverage, there will be greatly expanded current international resources built over time from organizations, governmental and non-governmental. The globalization of the legal publishing industry will result in much more comprehensive and comparative resources such as multi-jurisdictional digests for the EU based on both regional and national law.

Scholarly material

Journals will have wide web availability, necessitated to attract quality articles as the web can speed up the publication process. There will be a test of the value of the selection and editorial processes of journals as authors have other alternatives such as self-publishing via the web; similarly, there will be a testing of the importance of formal publication for tenure and scholarly acceptance. Journals may need to go beyond mere publication and begin supporting wider range of scholarly communication such as discussion of publications amongst scholars or enterprises offering such enhancements will get articles rather than the journals that do not.

The development of electronic treatises will continue to be slow as the value of new types of information resources such as audio, video and integrated modeling or database manipulation develop. The need for constant update of these resources will be felt more strongly. These developments will change who authors treatises as traditional main-line scholars abandon them because they will take much more time as they become permanent projects. Treatises may require even broader authoring and may require a significantly different support structure either from the publisher or the supporting educational institutions.

For the individual there will be much expanded opportunity for self-publishing through new channels such as the web. Works in progress will be release-able to gradually expanding circles of readers; works may remain works in progress for longer periods of time as discussion within the scholarly community takes place even as the piece evolves. The lack of a peer or student journal review process may necessitate new measures of quality but these should be possible either through scholarly organizations or through electronic evaluation of use of the scholarship.

New resources

Significant increase in the use and availability of non-textual material including images, still and moving, and sound. Use of modeling based on data-sets will support new ways of evaluating alternative solutions to issues. Ownership of legal publishing by broadly based international publishers will challenge what is considered legal and non-legal. Lines will blur as the legal profession continues its current heavy use of materials well beyond traditional legal sources. This use will filter down more noticeably into the academic community.

Historical material will continue to have large gaps in the online environment. For U.S. law there will be a slow but continuous growth in electronically available secondary material. Full runs of journals will be available. Material in fields important in the practice of law will be converted as will important historical materials in those fields. Material in the public domain will be a ground much explored by scholars and libraries for resources of continuing significant value. Material still under copyright but out of print will continue to be the most vexing as publishers who will control the material will not necessarily see the financial return on converting but will be reluctant to give up an asset. Authors will have mixed feeling wanting both broad scholarly access with some concern for possible loss of revenue for those small number of publications which earn authors significant royalties.

For many other countries, however, much recent material will be available online but only slightly older material will not. Countries holding copyright in government publications will be pressed to convert them or allow others to do so. Some countries may even lack the historical collections from which to work; cooperative programs will be needed with major research libraries.

Retrieval/searching

New, more powerful search engines will assist in managing access to the explosion of resources. Added features will include automatic summarization, automatic translation of some degree of usefulness and value indication based on use made of the resource by others making similar inquiries. At the same time there will be a probable loss of some existing aggregators of legal material due to self publishing. The next five years will be quite tumultuous as new tools are developed to help researchers cope with the expansion of online resources. New research techniques will be needed on a continuing basis. New search interfaces such as avatars will become common and ease the use of multiple and increasingly complex databases. It will be interesting to watch their development and evaluate their effectiveness at assisting end users in yet another area where librarians are commonly called upon.

Geography

Law faculty have already become highly mobile with increasingly sophisticated access to a base of services delivered electronically for his/her home institution. Remote access to email, the web, centrally stored files and major legal databases are already assumed. Increasingly there will be access to enhanced services both direct to the end user and facilitated for research support. Students will have very similar remote access to resources and services and potentially even classes.

Impacts

Will law faculty become freelancers with little institutional tie? Already the number of faculty holding appointments at multiple institutions make them look increasingly like symphony conductors flitting from podium to podium. This mobility will decrease the base of faculty committed to the institution for the long term and providing the time and energy necessary to maintain a quality program in legal education. A star system may be evolving out of this phenomenon, which will pull at the fabric that holds faculty together as a community within an institution. At the same time the mobility and communication offered will allow the creation of communities spanning institutions. Scholars of similar interest will find it easier to collaborate both on scholarship and teaching beyond their own schools. The power provided by technology will pull faculty increasingly into non-educational activities while maintaining teaching and scholarly commitments. Efforts to control outside activities will become more difficult.

Students will have similar mobility and it will create issues of importance. It will be more difficult than it already is to hold their interest in the second and third years. Residential requirements will be under great pressure. What part of the law Learning process really requires residence. First year for Socratic and similar analysis development seems to require residence and probably second year as well as the next level of analytical process and detailed learning are laid. Third year could continue to benefit from residence but will be under significant pressure. If the third year includes greater amounts of professional/clinical work, variations on how that is conducted could include such models as externships. Teaching methodologies in this environment will be under significant pressure to change to hold student interest and keep them in the classroom. New techniques will also be needed when they are not in the classroom either because part of the class is elsewhere but together or when the students are dispersed. Even greater importance may be attached the first year as it may be the only time the students are totally residential or taking non-specialized courses and are taking courses only with classmates from their school. Institutional loyalty amongst alumni/ae could be affected when many of the courses they took were either taken remotely or taught by someone from another school; is this an appropriate factor to consider in determining residence requirements?

Fewer distinctions will exist between schools as curricular offerings are enriched via distance learning. Smaller schools may be able to purchase courses from larger schools or even other types of organizations to enrich their own curricula. The globalization of legal education is already following that of economies and the practice of law. There will continue to be more international and comparative courses including the use of faculty or special lecturers from abroad bringing expertise in other systems in person and via distance learning. Joint classes between schools will become common and also exist across borders. Real time distance learning will play a major role but asynchronous education may become a major tool initially to enhance real time classroom experience and later on its own.

New generations of students may require new teaching methodologies such as those described above. To hold the focus of students more challenging case studies and more practice-type activity in regular (non-clinic) classes may result. Distinctions between clinical and other classes especially after the first year may reduce considerably. Modeling and other visualization tools will be used in courses in and outside classroom to take legal analysis to new levels. Group learning, acknowledging both what happens already and how attorneys work in practice, will become part of the formal educational process but cannot be at cost of analytical skill building and intellectual challenge. Classroom time will continue to be very valuable; auxiliary teaching methods to cover “survey” material outside the classroom will be developed to allow use of classroom time for more in depth analysis.

Libraries/research

With ever greater resources to the desk/laptop of student and faculty – empowered end users – they already need to come to a library less and less often to access material. This will be especially true as research services, commercial or local, are available via the web and access becomes ubiquitous throughout all law school spaces. The new, more geographically open educational environment assumes equally open access to research material.

An important role for librarians will continue to exist and grow. They are the primary teachers of research techniques. This includes not only the ever-changing array of sources, but the actual organization of the research process. Librarians must develop new skills for assisting faculty with personal knowledge management through which a faculty member can keep track of the sources automatically set up to bring relevant information to her desktop and to then organize it in useable forms for current use and in the development of a personal resource for ongoing research. As the sources of legal information constantly change, as the research tools for identifying and managing those sources change, librarians must become leaders of change management with the school. It will be their challenge to develop the programs to assist faculty with the constant retraining that most are not now aware of needing.

Library collections will continue to be important. They are the training ground for new law students; they are selective resources of important material for faculty, alumni/ae and those within the university community who do not have access to commercial online legal resources. There will be growing importance of archival and special collection materials as distinctions among libraries and schools and to support specialized programs within schools. New types of resources including video, audio, and data will require new forms of indexing and retrieval. The development of search services for both textual and non-textual material will be an important challenge. While the discipline of law will not lead this effort, the time before it will need these materials will be surprisingly short. Critical issues of preservation including electronic materials will continue to haunt us. The scale of preservation projects in a conventional setting like microfilm is daunting; converting materials to electronic form with real search capabilities will be especially daunting, usually beyond the abilities of individual schools and requiring new levels of cooperation between institutions.

Information Technology:

Many of the newest challenges to law schools relate to information technology (IT) – both determining its appropriate role and how to support it. There are no rules or guidelines for schools to use in evaluating requests for information technology or in providing the organization and resources needed to support users in academic environments. There are, however, developing measures in the commercial sector to which we should look even if the lessons are painful. Perhaps no other part of a school’s operation must recognize forces outside the school.

Central among the primary information technology issues is providing and maintaining the infrastructure. The availability and quality of central university services varies so greatly that many schools have had to provide networking services internally. Schools need to use their institutional clout to ensure that adequate networking services are provided by the parent institution so that the school can focus on value added functions important to it. Business models are again important in amortizing the cost of both networking and end user equipment so that the resources will be provided for regular upgrade and replacement. Universities often have no existing procedures for such planning; they must develop them.

IT staffing levels, compensation and retention are again issues where the school cannot ignore what is happening elsewhere. It takes both adequate technology and qualified staff to meet user needs. Unfortunately, law schools now find themselves both paying much lower salaries than the commercial market and having such small, overworked staffs that they are increasingly unable to attract or retain qualified people. Computer folks may very much enjoy what they are doing but that does not mean they do not want to have lives beyond work. IT operations should be recognized as mission critical services needed 24 hours a day, seven days a week and staffed accordingly. There must be depth in staffing so that one departure or illness does not bring down an important function upon which the entire school relies. Schools are now operating utilities and must recognize what it takes for them to serve.

Because IT services within schools are so new, there are no boundaries on user expectations. The school must work to provide those boundaries as it will never have the staff to meet all requests. One function which needs to be within those boundaries is training. Many schools provide advanced and expensive computers to faculty and staff with no serious support on their use. While there are always early adopters who figure things out for themselves, most faculty need support from the school to use technology in teaching and research. It takes a great deal of time and energy to create useful classroom computer applications. Time and expertise beyond that of individual faculty will be needed in most cases to develop those applications. New incentives will be needed to encourage faculty to experiment.

Even students who each year bring greater experience with computer technology and greater expectations need training and support. While students use computers heavily, they do not generally understand the technical issues involved in computing and turn to the school’s IT staff for assistance. Increased use of laptops in networked environments only increases that need. In the current competitive environment for the best students support for their computing needs may be important in attracting them. As technology is used more frequently in the classroom and as an adjunct to it, students will need IT support to do their work.

Law School administration

The administration of law schools has already changed greatly from twenty years ago when there would be a Dean and an assistant dean. The library was the largest administrative unit and was the only one that cost much. Now there are many assistant and associate deans and many administrative units in most law schools; the library is just one of them and perhaps no longer even the largest. This trend is a complicated one that cannot be evaluated in detail here but has resulted from factors including increased faculty resistance to non-teaching and research responsibilities such as reviewing admissions files and career counseling as well as inadequate central university services.

As law schools look administratively more like other organizations, there may be efforts to try alternatives to save money or reduce administrative involvement of the Dean. One likely vehicle is outsourcing. Any number of areas might be candidates with information technology and library services being outsourced in the for-profit community already. Even career services and development might be candidates although somewhat less likely due to the desire to maintain close alumni/ae contact. Admissions is the one area that probably would not be a candidate.

The growing competitive environment among schools for students and faculty is already resulting in major resources being spent to create or maintain distinctions among schools.

Marketing and public relations will continue to receive attention for recruitment and fund-raising. They are just the latest administrative areas to divert time and resources from more traditional functions.

Conclusion:

Technology will offer legal education intriguing new opportunities. However, it will also offer even greater challenges. Higher education is resistant to change; legal education may be especially resistant. There are few incentives to faculty currently to try new styles of teaching or scholarship. It seems essential for law schools to formalize their goals and relate the use of technology to those goals. Technology alone without the connection will fail. Legal education in the next decade that does not understanding and making appropriate use of technology may also fail.

This will be a time when strong leadership and vision will be important to achieve the goals of law schools. This will not be an easy time to be a dean but it could also be wonderfully adventurous – not an adjective often used to describe law school faculty including deans.

1. James Hoover is Professor and Assocaite Dean for Libraries, Columbia Law School in New York.

Conclusion

Notes

See Also

References and Further Reading

About the Author/s and Reviewer/s

Author: international

Mentioned in these Entries

Education, Law library, Learning, Multimedia.


Posted

in

, ,

by

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *