University Forum – The Future Legal Education
In this Forum, a targeted group of international experts in legal transformation & legal education aims to identify possibilities for the future of legal education. The experts will establish curriculum content and create course materials.
The group represents law schools and other educational institutions, legal departments, law firms, lawyer / bar associations and students. The output will be available to all interested parties.
Digital transformation puts law schools and thereby deans, professors and students in a very challenging position. Law schools must serve today’s traditional mandate and give priority to the currently certified curriculum. This is in order to ensure that law students successfully pass their exams. Simultaneously, they must find ways to embrace the disruption that the digital transformation brings to the legal ecosystem. There are new ethical questions, new regulatory challenges, partner ecosystems. Furthermore, there is demand for new skills or even new roles & jobs altogether.
The gap analysis by the Forum will help to further the overall debate on developing and augmenting the education of legal professionals in a transforming legal ecosystem.
The curriculum will serve as an orientation for stakeholders in legal education, as to “what else” is required to successfully enter and thrive in the future legal ecosystem.
The online lectures will provide an immediate relevant insight into the new topics, i.e. the first tangible bridge across the gaps that the Forum identifies.
Five project phases
Forum participants are co-heading the project and carrying it out in the following five phases:
- Common Understanding: joint sessions of participants to clarify scope, objective, deliverables & timelines, as well as working teams / tandems.
- Research & Information Collection: soliciting & collecting input from participants & other experts (individually and in tandems).
- Consolidation, analysis & assessment: gap analysis (output #1).
- Discussion & proposals of future requirements: curriculum (output #2).
- Establishing the set of introductory lectures and courses, engaging key-experts for their delivery and deciding on the mode of production: online lectures (output #3).
Please feel free to also look at our collaboration with the New School of [Law].