By Margaret Hagan and Jorge Gabriel Jiménez.

Legal Design has become ‘a thing’ over the past years, and it is part of the lawyer’s day job in innovative law firms, non-profits, and government agencies. We at Stanford’s Legal Design Lab have been building a curriculum over the past six years to teach a mixture of service design, agile technology development, policy prototyping, and organizational change to our students.

These type of classes help to change the mindsets of students — opening up new ways of working, solving problems, and building a career. The Lab-based classes mix hands-on, client-facing work of clinics, with the systems thinking and research of policy labs, and the development focus of startup classes.

One of the core missions of the Legal Design Lab is training students and professionals in human-centered legal design. This past year, we thought about how we can scale up our impact in this mission, aside from offering more courses at Stanford. (Side note — we are fairly maxed out here already, offering new courses every year, and every quarter).

Even if our local courses have impact on our wonderful Stanford students and community partners, could we leverage them somehow to have larger impact — on a larger number of the next generation of legal professionals?

The Alumni Opportunity

We saw a huge opportunity with our students, many of whom are LLMs or graduate students who, after graduating from Stanford, leave California for other states or countries. What if, as we trained them in our classes, we could also equip them with the resources and abilities to set up similar classes in other universities and groups?

Last school year in particular, we had a number of stand-out students that were eager to apply their learning of their legal design courses beyond the d.school. While they were taking Intro to Legal Design, they asked if it might be possible to replicate the class back in their home countries, where they had already been teaching before coming to Stanford for an LLM.

These students, Santiago Pardo and Manuel Mureddu, had the insight that guided us in an experiment over the past year. They were empowered to use design methods and make a change in their own lives, communities, and (especially) on their legal career. This is how the idea was born.

How might we harness the interest of the former students and make the legal system more meaningful through human-centered design at a regional scale?

Setting up a Global, Parallel Legal Design Class

At the same time as our Lab was talking to interested students about how they might teach legal design, we were also scoping out the next year’s classes. We’ve been teaching various classes on Prototyping Access to Justice, Design for Justice: Eviction and Fines and Fees — and we wanted to think about expanding out beyond just law students and ‘justice issues’.

After conversations with different professors on Stanford campus, including in Sociology and the Med School, we identified the potential for a course on how emerging technologies and human-centered design could be used to help people going through problems with housing, medical care, and debt. As we developed out this new interdisciplinary class, Justice + Poverty Innovation, we thought if we could link this in with the students’ idea.

What if we could teach the same course on legal design and access to justice in partnership with other universities around the world? What if law students in different countries could have a similar experience to a Stanford’s student, with the same essential curriculum structure and teaching resources, but with local partnerships and justice challenges?

The initial idea was inspired by a franchise model: to create something of a ‘franchise course’ where the Lab would be the ‘franchisor’ and could provide the syllabus model, support to teach the class, and the materials to the teaching team in each university (the franchisee) who would do all of the groundwork to establish the course, find local partners, recruit students, and facilitate the course. It wouldn’t be about a financial arrangement, but more of an Open Access model: we provide our structure, insights, and best practices in setting up a legal design lab class, and the other universities can learn from it and adapt it to their local context.

Santiago Pardo (Colombia), Maribel Cruz (Guatemala), and Manuel Mureddu (Mexico) accepted the challenge to teach the course in their respective countries.

The characteristics of the course

The courses taught at the different countries needed to include six components:

• Content and overarching goals. The main goal is to teach students the design process, and how to use it to solve problems in the legal and justice system. Students would know what human-centered design is, and how to use it to understand how to communicate better, how to create new products and services, and how to reform social systems at the end of the course.
• Hands-on. The class would be hands-on, and the students would create new proposals, designs, and strategic plans. The students would have to take leadership in scoping out milestones, partnerships, and what they would be developing. The class would provide structure, coaching, resources, and connections to support them.
• Partner and real-world problem. Each university needed to work with a client or partner that needed to tackle a real-world problem related to justice. The partners included the Constitutional Court in Colombia, NGOs related to justice, and the legal clinic of the university.
• Interdisciplinary. To inspire creative thinking, the course will bring together students and faculty from different disciplines, and backgrounds. The teaching team should be interdisciplinary, and ideally the class can be cross-listed as well.
• Intercultural communication. The students and professors from the different courses would have the possibility to communicate and receive detailed and cooperative critique on their design process.
• Opt-in culture. The students and professors participated in this course because they chose to. It shouldn’t be required.

What happened? The networked class experiment

Finding an anchor university in each country

The first task for each of our class ‘franchisee’s was to find an anchor university that would be willing to host the course in each city. The teaching team had the objective to convince the law school dean of a university to teach a class with the characteristics outlined before. Teaching interdisciplinary courses is not common in Latin America with a tradition of rigid curriculums of Continental Law. After some meetings to explain the course, the Deans decided to join the project. The Universidad de Los Andes (in Colombia), Universidad Francisco Marroquín ( in Guatemala), and Universidad Anáhuac — Querétaro (in México) all accepted to host the course of legal design and access to justice. We were delighted that our students were able to secure such wonderful law schools to offer new classes.

Other schools from the different universities also supported the project in more particular ways. In Colombia and Mexico, the design school recommended specific professors to join the teaching team, to balance out the law school instruction with design expertise. For example, Francisco de Santiago, faculty from the design school in Uniandes was part of the teaching team. In Guatemala, the school of business, and political science encouraged their students to take the class, to ensure more of a healthy student mix.

The interdisciplinary approach of the class

In all three of the new classes, it was the first time that the Law Schools partnered with the other schools like the Design School to develop a course. This partnership benefited from having an interdisciplinary course with students from different backgrounds. In Colombia and Mexico, the course was composed of a mix of Law and Design students, while in Guatemala it was a mix between Law, Business, and Political Science students. It was challenging to find the right schedule that did not conflict with other student’s activities at the different schools. It turns out that listing classes across departments is a significant logistical barrier — -not to be underestimated!

The teaching team in each country also reflected the interdisciplinary approach of the course which allowed the students the opportunity to learn the value of working with a multidisciplinary team. Having a ‘teaching team’ was valuable but also required an extra effort of coordination among them to work together. In most of the countries, it was the first time that they worked or taught together.

Spread the word: a new type of class will be taught at our university

There was a minimum number of students that needed to enroll in each University to be able to open the course. The advertising campaign included posters, e-mails, articles on the university news, on-site presentations, and videos. We reached the goal at all the universities: an approximate of twenty students enrolled in each country.

An inspiring and challenging experience for the teachers

For the teaching teams, it was a new type of course to scope out — so that was a rewarding challenge for them as well. In a regular course, the teaching part depends mainly on the professor. They have a large, consistent control over what will be taught, discussed, and evaluated.

An experiential class requires an additional effort from the teaching team to convince partners and set up contacts between students and key stakeholders for each of the challenges. Also, it is necessary to work on a significant problem to tackle for the students to be interested in the class. This means a lot of logistical work, community partnership work, and customization of the class as the teams develop their particular proposals.

In Guatemala and Mexico, the teaching team had to change the initial partner in the first weeks of the course. The initial plan was that students from Stanford would travel to Colombia during spring break. However, we could not get the funding to make it happen. At the same time, students from Latin America could not come to Stanford since there was a small number of students who were able to afford traveling and to stay one week in California. However, there was the possibility of having different cross-cultural interactions between the students.

Students from Latin America were able to do an early design review to the students from Stanford.

Margaret Hagan traveled to Colombia and taught a class to the Colombian students from Universidad de Los Andes. She also got to do a design review of their work, and connect it back to the Stanford students’ projects.

Vice News from HBO interviewed our students at the d.school for a report about how technology is disrupting law.

Margaret also talked about the basics of Legal Design with the students of Francisco Marroquin University.

And most recently, students from Guatemala could receive feedback from the Latin American teaching team.

What have we learned so far?

It’s been about a year since we first began talking about having a global network of legal design classes. And it’s been four months since the classes began. This is what we have learned:

1. It is possible to teach a course collaboratively of legal design, especially when we partner with a teaching team with prior knowledge in design principles.
2. Students (particularly the younger generations) are eager to work in multi-disciplinary teams to tackle real-world problems.
3. The participants of the class (including the teaching team) can learn from the application of legal design to other contexts and cultures.
4. Courses listed in different schools at the same university help to change the culture of teaching and push the change for a more interdisciplinary teaching environment. For example, Universidad de Los Andes started his Legal Design Lab as a collaboration of the Law School and the Design School and with the support of Stanford’s Legal Design Lab.
5. It’s hard to connect students from different classes, different countries, and different languages/time zones. The costs, logistics, and class dynamics all worked against us on this front. We didn’t want to require cross-class check-ins too much — students are already overbooked with their projects, and it’s quite hard to ask them to do reviews or conversations virtually with other teams. In future iterations, we’d need to do some culture-building across schools to get more student-to-student connections!

We’d love to continue this project in the future. Major refinements could be around more cross-cultural activities among students and professors, better on-boarding for new Legal Design Lab affiliates to know how to teach this type of course, finding a common, specific theme each year, and more feedback from the network of professors to co-create a set of legal design activities.

What’s next?

This course is a test run. Universities in Europe and Asia have expressed their interest to join the second cohort of collaborative courses on Legal Design. However, we still need to evaluate at the end of the quarter which the next steps would be. This is an example of how a network of academics can scale the use of legal design at a regional level and design a path toward a more experiential and creative Legal Education. Are you interested in teaching a legal design course? Write to us!

Special thanks to the teaching team of each University for their excellent work!

Mexico (Anáhuac-Querétaro): Manuel Mureddu, Bernando Perera, Lucía Peña, Aline González, Teresita Suárez, and Maria Teresa Camacho.

Guatemala (UFM): Maribel Cruz, Carla Silva, Patricia Forero, and Luis Arturo Palmieri.

Colombia (Uniandes): Santiago Pardo and Santiago De Francisco Vela.

Networking out Legal Design Labs from Stanford to the world was originally published in Legal Design and Innovation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

[This is Part 3 of 3. You can read part one on why we need a Legal Data Commons here and the key models for a Legal Data Commons.]

How might we harness available data from legal aid organizations, courts, legal technology companies, and others to enable research and development that promotes access to justice?

In our first post, we proposed to build a “Legal Data Commons” to achieve that goal. In our second article, we summarized the different models to share legal data, and in this post, we will mention what is needed to build a legal data commons and how can people involve.

Our Stanford group of the Legal Design Lab and Codex is proposing a Data Commons for Law and is seeking out people and organizations who would like to work with us on making this a reality. Let us know your interest in the project, what kinds of expertise, work, or data you might be interested in contributing, and other thoughts! Fill this form to let us know.

What is needed to build a legal data commons?

A properly designed data commons for the law could have a direct impact to enhance access to justice. These are some of the requirements:

1. Data sharing agreements with legal data contributors. As a first step, it is necessary to have sharing agreements with legal data contributors, including courts, legal aid organizations, and legal tech companies.
2. Sustainability plan. To be successful, a Legal Data Commons must have a robust sustainability plan that addresses how the commons will be financed and supported from year to year.
3. Legal and technical infrastructure. Creating a data commons involves designing the governance structure, operating plan, and protection provisions of individuals.
4. Populate the commons. Facilitate the data providers to get the data into the data commons.
5. Interoperate with other commons. Interoperate with other commons that can accelerate the research on access to justice.
6. Model and build intelligent systems. Support the development of intelligent systems or applications that could be useful in terms of addressing access to justice problems.

How do we get there? Concrete next steps for stakeholders.

In this section, we identify practical first steps to help establish a data sharing structure. Creating a formal structure always involves the participation of different stakeholders, including possible data contributors, future users, and data service providers. What can each of the stakeholders do to make this project a reality?

I have data to contribute to the commons.

We are looking for contributors from legal aid groups, courts, legal technology startups and other holders of legal data. If you have — or think you might have — data to contribute, we would love to hear from you. Consider the following next steps:

• Identify datasets to share. Assemble a team to take an inventory of legal data that you have that could aid research & development and advance access to justice. Then construct an inventory of datasets that you would be willing to share with the commons.
• Consider how to protect personal information. Consider in advance any steps that would need to be taken to protect personal information in your data set, including whether data must be de-identified before sharing.
• Contact us to explore how to share data. Contact the Legal Data Commons team to discuss data that you may want to share and how best to contribute it to the commons.

If you are a data holder who is already sharing your data, we would like to know your story to raise awareness about the importance of sharing legal data to enhance access to justice.

I want to use legal data for R&D.

We are looking for users or future users legal data for access to justice research, interventions or applications. If you are a current or potential user of legal data, consider the following next steps:

• Share your data experience. How are you using legal data (or other related data) today? What are some positive outcomes you have experienced? What roadblocks have you faced in accessing data that might be better addressed through a data commons?
• Tell us what legal data you would like (and for what purpose). What types of legal data would you like to use that is not currently accessible? What are some potential useful sources of legal data that are likely to contribute to the commons? For what purposes and use cases would you like to use legal data that we may permit through a legal data commons? How can we connect data contributors and data users?

By sharing your experiences and intended uses, we can tailor the data commons to address the widest array of needs, adopting best practices while attempting to overcome or avoid challenges that other data commons have faced.

I want to help create the legal/technical infrastructure for the commons.

Any person who thinks that this project should happen could help to take it to the next level. As concrete next steps, you could:

• Join a working group. If you are a student, an advocate or an expert on data or data sharing you could join the working group we are establishing to discuss the opportunities, challenges, and requirements surrounding the creation of a legal data commons. This includes how to curate the data, clean it, prepare the contracts and assessments, and build an anonymization tool.
• Offer technical infrastructure. A data commons requires technical infrastructure, including server space and software. If you have access to free or affordable technical infrastructure, we would like to hear from you!
• Assist with the legal infrastructure of the legal data commons. As discussed above, a data commons requires both technical infrastructure and legal infrastructure, including model data sharing agreements, data use agreements, privacy policies, and other forms, as well as an overall governance structure that promotes sharing, access, and sustainability, while mitigating against legal risks. If you can help create the legal infrastructure for the legal data commons, or have experience working on past data commons, we would appreciate your insights and contributions.

In this brief, we have described the essential requirements and how a legal data commons could enhance access to justice. From the different data commons, we could learn that it is never a single organization the one who develops the entire project.

Generating a data commons requires a multi-stakeholders effort from universities, non-government organizations, at least one significant data contributor, and the support from one or more donors.

A properly designed data commons with a clear theory of change to enhance access to justice could be a powerful tool for a justice system change. Several sectors are already taking advantage of data commons. We believe investment in a Data Commons is a key infrastructure to allow access to justice innovation and better legal services to flourish.

Who wants to work with us on this?

How can we build a Data Commons for Law? was originally published in Legal Design and Innovation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

[This is Part 2 of 3. Stay tuned for part 3 coming later this week. You can read part one on why we need a Legal Data Commons here.]

How might we harness available data from legal aid organizations, courts, legal technology companies, and others to enable research and development that promotes access to justice?

In our previous post, we proposed to build a “Legal Data Commons” to achieve that goal. In this article, we will summarize the different models to share legal data, and on a third (and last) post we will mention what is needed to build a legal data commons and how can people involve.

What models could we adopt for legal data sharing?

The idea of building a data commons or sharing data for research is not new. There are data commons for social science, humanities, human health, ecology, chemistry (or molecular) data, and earth and space science.¹ In this section, we highlight a few potential models and lessons learned that could be valuable in developing a Legal Data Commons. Specifically, we describe the following three models: (1) an informal sharing setup, (2) a data cloud, and (3) a data commons.

As we see more specific data-gathering and -sharing initiatives come together in law — including these:

• Measures for Justice’s work in gathering US criminal justice system performance data,
• University of Michigan’s Criminal Justice Administrative Records System that gathers information about individuals in the justice system and their outcomes,
• USC’s Children’s Data Network about linking administrative data about kids in the foster care system
• Princeton’s Eviction Lab gathering housing court and eviction data around the US

We see a potential in finding a more intentional model to network different initiatives to gather data, share it, and build research and innovation ecosystems around it. Here we present some models that can be options for us in the legal community, to build a more intentional data ecosystem.

Model 1: Informal Data Sharing

In this model, stakeholders — e.g., like-minded universities, legal aid organizations, and LSC groups — would informally share the public datasets they have gathered together and encourage others to join the effort. This model would require the least time to launch, but is not a permanent solution and includes some scaling challenges. For example, some organizations might not feel comfortable hosting or sharing sensitive information in this setup.

To mitigate risk in an informal sharing arrangement, we would need to have a legal infrastructure in place to address governance, basic sharing principles, and intellectual property. This could be done in two ways (separately or blended) — through a consortium with no central entity, or a lightweight nonprofit with a central entity.

Option A for Informal Data-Sharing: Consortium (No Central Entity)

In this option, data-holders would set up a new third-party, ad hoc network with a shared set of governance principles enshrined in interlocking agreements between all entities. If an individual or organization wants to share data with ‘the consortium’ they could sign a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the consortium. If an individual or organization wants access to the data that the consortium holds, they could sign a standardized agreement to use the data. The consortium model is a stop-gap to a more permanent solution, and as such the owner of the data would have the right to decide if he moves the data to another entity at any time. While this proposal arguably involves the least set-up time, it also includes several unknowns. For example, it is not clear where the data would be stored or how access and permissions would be implemented.

Option B for Informal Data Sharing: Lightweight Nonprofit (Central Entity for IP/Governance)

In this option, rather than establish an ad-hoc, contract-based consortium, data-holders would establish a nonprofit to handle decisions about governance, management, storage, and distribution and data, as well as intellectual property. The nonprofit board would be comprised of different stakeholders (non-profit, universities, among others) that would manage the nonprofit. However, the data sharing arrangement would remain primarily contract-based and the capabilities of the system would be more limited than a full-scale data cloud or data commons.

While the informal sharing setup is not a permanent solution, it could be the first step toward a data commons, enabling stakeholders to share public legal datasets, curate resources, and facilitate collaboration.

Model 2: Data Cloud

Another potential model for legal data sharing is a data cloud. The primary difference between informal sharing and a data cloud is that the data cloud would be centralized and formalized.
Data clouds support big data and intensive computing for analyzing information with collaborative tools inside the cloud. Below we share two existing models for data clouds that could be helpful for a legal data commons: ICPSR at the University of Michigan and the Dataverse Project based out of Harvard University.

Example A of a Data Cloud: ICPSR

The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) “advances and expands social and behavioral research, acting as a global leader in data stewardship and providing rich data resources and responsive educational opportunities for present and future generations.”² Specifically, ICPSR provides “data access, curation, and methods of analysis” as a service to researchers.³

Overview: ICPSR was established in 1962 at the University of Michigan as a means of sharing political science data; specifically, survey data from the American National Election Studies. At its founding, data sharing in a consortial framework was viewed as a radical act — a sharp departure from past practice where research data was jealously guarded. Since then, the ICPSR has grown into one of the largest data consortia in the world, with over 780 member institutions and support from several large government agencies and foundations. The ICPSR is funded by membership fees, grants, and contracts, with annual revenues of $18.8 million in 2017 (with $17.7 million in annual expenses).⁴ ICPSR is governed by a 12-person council and its work is largely conducted by five standing committees and specialist advisory committees.

Contributing data: Anyone with relevant data can deposit it into ICPSR, and ICPSR provides two ways to deposit data, both of which are free to upload and come with user support, training, and use of the ICPSR Bibliography. The first option is self-publication (via openICPSR)⁵, which provides tools for data contributors to clean their own data for submission. openICPSR is free up to a 2GB contribution limit, after which it requires a subscription. The second option is curated data, in which the ICPSR team will help curate, clean, and present an archive of open access legal datasets, which makes data more accessible and usable.⁶ There are three choices for curated data deposits as shown in the following chart:

Using data: ICPSR provides researchers with means of discovering data on the website, including searching by studies, variables, and publications. The consortium also provides student researchers with helpful tools and educational materials to conduct research.

What can we learn from this project?

• Managing large repositories of data is time and cost intensive, requiring significant resources (which may be obtained through multiple revenue streams)
• To make a large-scale data cloud useful, it is important to provide robust discovery capabilities

Example B of a Data Cloud: The Dataverse Project

The Dataverse Project (Dataverse) is a Harvard-based, open source web project that uses containers to share, preserve, cite, explore, and analyze research datasets.⁷

Overview: Dataverse was developed by the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) at Harvard University in 2006, and mainly hosts data created or recollected by researchers. Dataverse is open to all researchers worldwide in all disciplines, and as a consequence has been very successful. It hosts more than 70,000 datasets, and it has around 60,000 downloads per month. In addition, because the software is open source, enabling anyone to set up their own dataverse, 26 institutions around the world also currently use Dataverse. A Global Dataverse Community Consortium (GDCC) was formed to provide formalize collaboration among these dataverses and coordinate efforts in a community-oriented fashion.

Contributing data: Dataverse works by enabling researchers and other data contributors to place datasets into “dataverses,” which are containers that store datasets, documentation, code, and metadata. Harvard offers its own dataverse — the Harvard Dataverse — and permits any researcher to upload datasets in any format and receive an academic citation for their research. In addition, any institution or individual researcher can download open source Dataverse software to create their own customized dataverse. The following graphic shows how dataverses work:

Source: Merce Sosas, The Dataverse project, 2017.

Importantly, Dataverse solves a problem that has long dissuaded researchers from contributing data to shared repositories: choosing between (1) receiving credit for their data by controlling distribution themselves without long-term preservation guarantees, and (2) having long-term preservation guarantees by sending the data to a professional archive but without receiving credit for their data. Dataverse removes the need to choose, serving as a virtual archive while giving the researcher full credit, web visibility, and long-term preservation guarantees.⁸

Moreover, to promote privacy, Dataverse uses DataTags, a suite of tools to help researchers share and use sensitive data in a standardized and responsible way.⁹ The DataTags system asks a data provider a series of questions to identify the laws, contracts, and best practices that should be applied to a given dataset. After conducting the analysis, the DataTags system assigns iconic labels that represent a human-readable and machine-actionable data policy, and issues a license agreement that is tailored to the individual dataset. This graphic explains how DataTags works.¹⁰

Source: Merce Sosas, The Dataverse project, 2017.

Finding and using data: Dataverse’s open source software provides easy tools and powerful search functionality for researchers to find data they need. Users may browse, search, and perform analysis on dataverses and published datasets without logging into the system. The Dataverse Project also provides a list of known dataverses around the world. Once a user has found the data they seek, they may view, cite, or download data. Users may also explore data using the TwoRavens interface or visualize data using WorldMap, both of which are open source.

What can we learn from this project?

• It is possible to provide long-term preservation guarantees and individual credit to researchers who contribute data.
• DataTags can help researchers share and use sensitive data responsibly.
• Building and supporting a strong community is essential to a successful project.

Model 3: Data Commons

Example A of a Data Commons: Open Commons Consortium

The Open Commons Consortium (OCC) has created an ecosystem of data commons, managing or working together with other data commons of scientific, medical, health and environmental research information.¹¹

Overview: This ecosystem provides a long term home for scientific data and specializes in supporting data-intensive research projects for researchers who need large-scale resources. Other data commons managed by OCC include the Open Science Data Cloud¹², Matsu Data Commons¹³, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration¹⁴, and the National Cancer Institute’s Genomic Data Commons¹⁵.

Contributing data: Data clouds within the OCC have application processes in place to contribute data. For example, the Open Science Data Cloud provides a public application form that asks for the contributors’ name, information about the data set, permissions, acknowledgements, and publications.

Finding and using data: Data on the OCC is accessible through an application programming interface (API). This application is a difference from the Coleridge initiative that only permits browsing the data through a portal. Users may either download data on the data commons or apply for compute power to conduct research within the commons itself. Once granted access a grantee is expected to abide by community guidelines and security best practices.

What can we learn from this project?

1. Datasets in the commons must have stable, persistent digital IDs that include access control for the data and metadata and can return the metadata.
2. An API can make it easier for individuals to find and use data, and to authenticate users who are accessing data.
3. Portability is important to permit sharing and transporting of data across data commons.
4. Data peering agreements between two data commons service providers are an effective way to transfer data at no cost so that a researcher can access data stored at another data commons.
5. Allocating, time-restricting, or charging for access to compute resources is a reasonable way of mitigating/offloading the costs of managing a large dataset.¹⁶

Example B of a Data Commons: Coleridge Initiative/ADRF

The Coleridge Initiative is another successful data commons that its advantage is the ability to link public and private datasets for research or innovation projects.¹⁷

Overview: The Coleridge Initiative manages the NYU Administrative Data Research Facility (ADRF). The ADRF provides (1) a secure environment for data storage from government agencies; (2) administrative tools that allow data to be discovered, documented and used; and (3) training to ensure that the data repository is useful and usable by researchers, government staff, and agency decisionmakers. According to Coleridge, the ADRF has been used by 200 government agency staff and researchers, and has hosted almost 50 confidential government datasets from 12 different agencies at all levels of government. The Coleridge Initiative is supported by donors including the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Overdeck Family Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Contributing data: The primary data contributors to the ADRF are government agencies. To combat strong disincentives that U.S. federal government agencies face with respect to data sharing across programs or with external parties, the Coleridge Initiative provides a secure platform for controlled and protective sharing, certified by FedRAMP. FedRAMP is the government’s process for assessing and authorizing cloud service providers. ADRF provides government agencies with greater control over and visibility into how their data is being used.

Finding and using data: Coleridge understands that getting data from different agencies is not enough. The system enables users to contribute content about the data itself (limitations, variable definitions), preprocessing (code and lookup tables), analysis (code snippets), how the data has been used (research topics), who has used the data, and code that has already been used to process and link the data.

What can we learn from this project? The crucial aspects that have made the initiative successful are these:

1. Secure environment. Provide a safe environment within different government agencies (data providers) can place and share their data.
2. Operational system. Create an efficient and secure system for the people, data, and projects that interact in the data commons.
3. Training to use the data commons. The training program for the employees of the government agencies (data contributors) develops the skills and knowledge necessary to take the best advantage of the wealth of data that is available.
4. De-identification process. All the micro-data is added to the data commons have certain elements (e.g., names, Social Security Number, business identifiers) de-identified before being made available.

A community of users. The data commons service provider has created different tools that facilitate effective communication between teams or users of the system.

~~~~~~

Have you seen any other models, forms of governance, or structures that we should add to this list? Please comment below to let us know!

Also, stay tuned for the last article on what is needed to build a Legal Data Commons. (And read our first piece on why we need a Legal Data Commons).

1. Kristin R. Eschenfelder & Andrew Johnson, Managing the data commons: Controlled sharing of scholarly data, 65 Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 1757–1774 (2014).
2. About ICPSR, National Incident-Based Reporting System Resource Guide, https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/content/about/ (last visited Feb 22, 2019).
3. Id.
4. See 2016–2017 ICPSR Annual Report, https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/files/ICPSR/about/annualreport/2016-2017.pdf.
5. openICPSR: Share your behavioral health and social science research data, https://www.openicpsr.org/ (last visited Feb 25, 2019).
6. Start Deposit, National Incident-Based Reporting System Resource Guide, https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/deposit/ (last visited Feb 26, 2019).
7. About, The Dataverse Project — Dataverse.org, https://dataverse.org/about (last visited Feb 26, 2019).
8. Idem.
9. Harvard University Privacy Tools Project, Differential Privacy, https://privacytools.seas.harvard.edu/datatags (last visited Feb 26, 2019).
10. Merce Crosas, The Dataverse project, 2017.
11. Robert L. Grossman et al., A Case for Data Commons: Toward Data Science as a Service, 18 Computing in Science & Engineering 10–20 (2016).
12. A Petabyte-scale Scientific Community Cloud, — Open Science Data Cloud, https://www.opensciencedatacloud.org/ (last visited Feb 19, 2019).
13. Maria T. Patterson et al., The Matsu Wheel: a reanalysis framework for Earth satellite imagery in data commons, 4 International Journal of Data Science and Analytics 251–264 (2017).
14. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, https://www.noaa.gov/big-data-project (last visited Feb 19, 2019).
15. Home, Home | NCI Genomic Data Commons, https://gdc.cancer.gov/ (last visited Feb 19, 2019).
16. Robert L. Grossman et al., Supra., pp. 5.
17. The Coleridge Initiative, https://coleridgeinitiative.org/ (last visited Feb 19, 2019).

The Key Models for a Legal Data Commons was originally published in Legal Design and Innovation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

[This is Part 1 of 3. See Part 2 on Models for a Legal Data Commons. And part 3 is coming later this week]

How might we harness available data from legal aid organizations, courts, legal technology companies, and others to enable research and development that promotes access to justice?

We propose to build a “Legal Data Commons” to achieve that goal. In a second part, we will summarize the different models to share legal data, and in a third (and last) part we will propose what is needed to build a legal data commons and how can people can be involved.

I. Background: Why a Legal Data Commons?

The rise of cloud computing and advanced analytics has had a dramatic impact on the ability of researchers and policymakers to craft and evaluate policies based on real evidence.¹ Further, access to large and multifarious datasets can improve researchers’ abilities to reveal valuable insights that can drive policy outcomes. Unfortunately, while many policymakers are showing a greater appetite for evidence-based or data-driven policy, attempts to evaluate policies face the barrier of balkanized or inaccessible data.²

In response to these challenges, coalitions of stakeholders have come together to develop “data commons” that share data publicly or semi-publicly for research and other purposes. For example, in 2009, the Open Commons Consortium launched the Open Science Data Cloud as a science cloud with multidisciplinary scientific data for researchers.³ But data commons are not limited to scientific data. In fact, today, there are more than twenty-five controlled data repositories of knowledge commons for the humanities, social sciences, health, and earth/space fields.⁴ Moreover, while the U.S. government has long provided data privately for research purposes, the last decade has seen tremendous growth in government “open data,” first as a matter of federal policy⁵ and today as a matter of law through the OPEN Government Data Act⁶. A similar effort is playing out in the local context.⁷

Despite the tremendous technological advancement in other sectors, the legal world lags behind. This lag is attributable in part to legal culture and professional regulations, but also because of the lack of open access to data. Specifically, while there are several publicly available legal databases,⁸ most of the data from courts, legal aid organizations, and legal tech companies are not readily accessible for reasons including cost, use restrictions, or concerns about confidentiality and consumer protection.

Consequently, open legal datasets are scarce for research and development, including for the development of artificial intelligence (AI)-based legal technology that could advance access to justice. Some examples of data-driven projects to advance access to justice include:

• Stanford’s Open Policing Project,⁹ that aims to help researchers, journalists, and policymakers investigate and improve interactions between police and the public,
• Princeton’s Eviction Lab, that gathers data on housing court and eviction to give more insight into the system,
• Code for America’s Clear My Record project that both helps people to clear their criminal record, and that works with governments to automate this process
• MD Expungement,¹⁰ a web application that lets a person or advocate identify if someone qualifies for Expungement of their criminal record, and
• Learned Hands,¹¹ a project to train machine learning models to identify people’s legal issues from text or transcripts of their stories about problems.

We believe that a legal data commons — built with privacy and accountability “by design” — could solve the data issue and advance research and innovation objectives while addressing legitimate confidentiality concerns.

II. What is a “data commons”?

A ‘data commons’ refers to knowledge that is collectively owned and managed by a community of users, usually over the Internet. In a data commons, users co-locate data on a cloud computing infrastructure that commonly uses software, tools & apps for managing, harmonizing and analyzing data for the final user.¹²

A data commons represents an evolution from earlier data structures, such as databases and data clouds, and provides unique advantages for researchers, as described in this chart:

Credit: Robert Grossman¹³

In order to succeed, a data commons must have a few important characteristics:

1. A data commons must engage key stakeholders: (1) a service provider, which operates the data commons; (2) a data contributor, which provides the data for the commons; and (3) data users (e.g., researchers, policymakers, application developers, and others), which access the data commons to advance their work. A single organization may represent one, two, or three of these roles at the same time, and all are required for the data commons to function.
2. A data commons must be secure to preserve permissions, protect data subjects, and prevent corruption of data. This is particularly important where the data involves sensitive personal information, such as health records, children’s information, financial/credit data, or legal information.
3. A data commons must be usable, permitting many actors to contribute and use the system. A usable system requires significant investment in back-end and front-end systems, storage space, and clear policies and procedures related to data access and usage.
4. A data commons must be scalable and extensible to permit new features and datasets over time (including updated data in existing data sets).
5. A data commons must be interoperable to permit analysis across datasets and through a variety of tools.

III. Why do we need a legal data commons?

Today, the power of machine learning to drive research and policymaking depends largely on availability and adequacy of data.

The legal ecosystem — including courts, law firms, legal tech companies, legal aid organizations, and universities — produce a vast amount of data that could be useful for modeling and building intelligent systems, and most especially in terms of addressing access to justice problems.

Unfortunately, too much of this legal data is unstructured, balkanized, or otherwise unavailable for research and development purposes. As a result, the primary beneficiaries of machine learning in law are those private parties who have access to large databases and can afford to conduct in-house analysis, but rarely share the data for research and development purposes.

Available data sources fall into several general categories, each with its own challenges:

Even if this legal data were accessible, however, it is isolated, making it more difficult for discovery and analysis. A legal data commons could resolve this problem and allow researchers to process link data and apply modern analytical approaches to cross-legal-organization problems. A legal data commons could achieve several critical goals of the access to justice community:

1. Research that could more quickly lead to access to justice interventions
2. Comparison across different legal datasets (and attendant network effects)
3. Access to public records from courts and other government stakeholders
4. Better machine learning technology to close the justice gap.

In the coming week, we will follow up with more details on how such a Data Commons for Law might come into being, and how it might operate. See Part 2 on Models for Data Commons for Law.

1. Daniel Esty & Reece Rushing, The Promise of Data-Driven Policymaking Issues in Science and Technology(2015), https://issues.org/esty-2/ (last visited Feb 12, 2019).
2. Lauren Greenawalt, What Will It Take to Achieve Truly Data-Driven Policy?New America(2018), https://www.newamerica.org/weekly/edition-214/what-will-it-take-achieve-truly-data-driven-policy/ (last visited Feb 14, 2019); Jane Yakowitz, Tragedy of the Data Commons, 25 Harvard Journal of Law & Technology 1–67 (2011).
3. Robert L. Grossman et al., A Case for Data Commons: Toward Data Science as a Service, 18 Computing in Science & Engineering 10–20 (2016).
4. Kristin R. Eschenfelder & Andrew Johnson, Managing the data commons: Controlled sharing of scholarly data, 65 Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 1757–1774 (2014).
5. Transparency and Open Government, National Archives and Records Administration, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/transparency-and-open-government (last visited Feb 12, 2019).
6. OPEN Government Data Act, https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1770
7. For example, New York City’s Criminal Justice Reform Act (CJRA) allows low-level misdemeanors (e.g., parking violations) to be diverted from the criminal justice system to a civil court, with the future evaluation in mind. The law could potentially reduce racial and geographic disparities among low-level offenses. To measure this, the bill requires the city’s police department to publicly report, each quarter, counts of criminal and civil summonses issued by offense, race, and geography, among other factors. The quarterly reports, with additional policy evaluations, are helping the council and the public to see if the CJRA is meeting its goals, and informing future policy discussions on how to improve or expand the policy. Impact of NYC’s Criminal Justice Reform Act, John Jay College of Criminal Justice(2018), https://www.jjay.cuny.edu/news/impact-nycs-criminal-justice-reform-act (last visited Feb 14, 2019).
8. 10 Best Legal Datasets for Machine Learning, Gengo AI (2018), https://gengo.ai/datasets/10-best-legal-datasets-for-machine-learning/ (last visited Feb 12, 2019).
9. The Stanford Open Policing Project, openpolicing.stanford.edu, https://openpolicing.stanford.edu/ (last visited Mar 20, 2019).
10. Matthew Stubenberg, Maryland Criminal Record ExpungementMaryland Expungement, https://www.mdexpungement.com/ (last visited Mar 20, 2019).
11. Learned Hands, Learned Hands, https://learnedhands.law.stanford.edu/ (last visited Mar 20, 2019).
12. Robert L. Grossman et al., A Case for Data Commons: Toward Data Science as a Service, 18 Computing in Science & Engineering 10–20 (2016). The ‘commons’ concept derives from decades of economic, social, and legal research about shared resources, broadly defined to include everything from natural resources (e.g., water, arable land) to knowledge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons. A ‘knowledge commons’ — as Elinor Ostrom conceptualized — includes all intelligible ideas, information, and data in whatever form in which it is expressed or obtained. Charlotte Hess & Elinor Ostrom, Understanding knowledge as a commons: from theory to practice(2007). A data commons is a type of knowledge commons.
13. Robert Grossman, Crossing the Analytics Chasm and Getting the Models You Developed Dep…LinkedIn SlideShare(2018), https://www.slideshare.net/rgrossman/crossing-the-analytics-chasm-and-getting-the-models-you-developed-deployed?next_slideshow=1 (last visited Feb 19, 2019).

A Data Commons for Law was originally published in Legal Design and Innovation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s the Tuesday of Jane’s last week as Stanford’s Legal Design Lab Fellow. She enters the meeting room at Stanford Law School with a big smile. After catching up about her recent trip to Israel, we started our interview.

Design is like the orchestra conductor that helps you know which technology to play at different times.

What’s your passion, Jane?

My passion is helping our society to be more compassionate. When I was in high school, I was introduced to the civil rights movement. That’s how I became interested in social inequality and chose to study sociology at UC Berkeley. Berkeley is where I first saw so many homeless people suffering in the streets, and at the same time I noticed that many people did not seem very concerned. I became interested in how homelessness had become so serious in our country, so I wrote a research paper on the social and political factors behind it.

What got you interested in legal design?

As a first-year at Stanford Law, I took Introduction to Legal Design. I found it more engaging than my other classes, because my team was tackling a real-world problem on something meaningful. In my second year, I became more involved in the Legal Design Lab, such as participating in some workshops around court innovation. In my last year of law school, I took another legal design class, Prototyping Access to Justice.

What did you like the most about your Legal Design Fellowship?

I haven’t reflected enough on it yet, but I really liked the amount of choice I had; I chose my project for the year. The fellowship is an ideal learning experience. Unlike the usual school program where you have a lot of one-size-fits-all requirements, this fellowship gave me a lot of room to explore my interests and to dive deeply into areas that I am passionate about. It’s also exciting that the lab is committed to the public interest.

Tell me about the project that you developed this year for the fellowship.

During law school, I met a lawyer outside of Stanford who was using design to promote access to justice through her nonprofit Project Legal Link. When I applied for the fellowship, I brainstormed with this lawyer, and together we proposed that I would spend the year helping her and other legal nonprofits create a unified intake system in the Bay Area. Right now, we are doing a pilot of that project with housing law providers in Alameda County.

Which moments will you remember from this fellowship?

There were many memorable moments, but one was when I got out of my comfort zone to do public speaking. At the beginning of my fellowship year, we held a law + design summit at Stanford. At that event, Jose Torres (the previous Legal Design Fellow) was leading a breakout session, and I was helping him. In the middle, he suddenly told me he had to leave and asked me to take over. I was pretty nervous, but I followed the booklet we had for the session and it wasn’t too hard — actually, I found myself having fun.

I remember you leading it. I met you at that session.

That’s right! Over the past year, I have had more opportunities to do public speaking. I presented at our legal design lunches on campus and spoke at a legal aid innovation conference in San Francisco. Last month, I spoke at a national conference of court managers in Georgia, presenting an hour-long slide deck that I had put together. I gradually became more comfortable with public speaking. I find it fun nowadays.

What’s next? What do you want to do in the future?

My immediate plan is that I will be starting a housing attorney job in October at a legal aid nonprofit in San Jose. In the long term, I am interested in starting my own nonprofit law firm. I want to address the legal needs of low-income and middle-income Americans. I would focus on the bread and butter areas of civil law, like family, housing, consumer, and immigration.

Your idea of a nonprofit law firm is interesting. How do you think law firms could be more innovative?

The legal industry is stuck in an old era, in an old way of thinking. Many things that law firms currently do are due to inertia. At the same time, legal organizations can easily become overwhelmed by the array of “innovations” out there. I like how design thinking is a problem-solving method to create solutions and test them in the real world. In that way, design thinking is action-oriented. Design is like the orchestra conductor that helps you know which technology to play at different times.

More specifically, Margaret Hagan has promoted the concept of user-centered design, one that involves the user at every step. I’ve come to see that this type of participatory design is a good way for organizations to know how to tackle a specific problem. It is easy to be overwhelmed without it.

How do you see legal design fitting into the larger picture of law practice today?

We know design has permeated industries beyond tech and digital services. To their credit, some law firms and government agencies adopted design thinking some time ago. While I haven’t measured the adoption rate of design thinking in the legal sector, I see more and more picking up on the idea. It depends a lot on the type of legal organization we’re talking about, and how flexible the culture is.

What advice would you give to a current law student?

My biggest piece of advice is, “Don’t do something just because everyone else is doing it!”

There is a strong herd mentality and a lot of fear among law students that terrible things will happen if you don’t do x, y, or z. I’ve noticed that this fear is strongest among students who come straight through college. I recommend that students seek out the people who inspire them in their particular areas of interest and to pick up their cues from these role models.

Another tendency of law students is to put off the things they really want to do for years and years. There is a tendency in law school to feel like you’re locked into a series of steps that consume your whole life, but at the end of the day, much of it could be a waste of time. Feed your soul now! Go after your personal interests, even if the benefit to your legal career is not obvious.

What that looked like for me during 1L was making time for my health, visiting my family, and meeting people at Stanford outside of the law school. For example, I joined Power2Act, a Stanford club that advocates for students with disabilities. I met graduate students from other departments at InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. I took a beginning voice class at the Music Department. I went to a Cuban dance club, where I learned that salsa can be done in a circle! I also went on dates and got married in my third year.

To be clear, I’m not saying that everyone needs to do these particular things. I’m just saying that everyone should think for themselves about what would make their three years of law school meaningful, and make time for that. You’ll thank yourself later.

For the last part of the conversation, I asked Jane to tell me the first word that came to her mind when I said the following words:

Homelessness — “Passion”

Stanford Law School — “Important”

d.School — “Fun!”

Design — “Thinking”

An Interview with Jane Wong was originally published in Legal Design and Innovation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In February 2018, Michigan State’s Legal RnD and Stanford University’s Legal Design Lab co-hosted a workshop on Building a Better Lawyer, with support from Thomson Reuters.

Workshop participants came from corporate legal departments, law firms, courts, law schools, start-ups, legal publishers, and legal technology companies. The participants worked in small teams, using design thinking methodology and lean process, on the challenge of:

How can we improve how lawyers are trained, and how they serve the client and public?

As facilitated by the team from Michigan State and Stanford groups, the teams identified key problems, opportunities, and target stakeholders. They then brainstormed, prioritized, and vetted a handful of ideas for new initiatives. The goal of the session was to have diverse participants surface key points to focus on, and to generate an agenda for change.

This piece summarizes the insights and ideas that emerged from the innovation sprint. It also reflects the discussions that emerged after the sprint, that synthesize the work and identify takeaways, big visions, and near-term pilots. We present them here for review and further action.

8 Big Ideas for Building a Better Lawyer

The main goal of the workshop was to generate a set of near-term proposals for how law school could better improve graduates to practice, and to improve the profession. We challenged the teams to be ambitious yet practical — to come up with new concepts for building a better lawyer that might be feasible within the next five years.

Each of the teams spent the afternoon drafting, testing, and refining a proposal for a new way to train lawyers or deliver services. The shortlist of ideas that emerged from the teams are as follows:

1. A Problem-Solving Law School. Lawyers tend to fight and not to conciliate or collaborate. This should be learned through experiential training with a project-based methodology. This might be an entirely new track or type of law school, that aims towards creative problem-solving and dispute prevention and resolution — as opposed to adversarial approaches.

2. Scenario training. Train lawyers and students through realistic, fictional scenarios in which, over the course of a few days, they work with a team to tackle a complex challenge and are evaluated for their performance. This is already being done by some law firms (Allen & Overy and Fenwick & West have some scenario training around international deals). The proposal here is to draft real-life cases into multi-day simulations that can both be courses and evaluation mechanisms for young lawyers to get practical skills and exposure.

3. Business certification track in law. Create a business certification track in the Law School, to meet the needs of business and law schools by creating lawyers who are better able to work in interdisciplinary business teams. This would involve more teamwork, more quantitative and business modeling skills-building, and more exposure to working with non-lawyers — so that lawyers can begin to think like their business colleagues, and adapt their problem-solving and working styles to better integrate with them.

4. Law-Harmony matchmaking. As an alternative to the OCI model of recruitment and job placement, have a more intentional matchmaking + job-prep process that puts emphasis on matching the skills of law students with employers.

5. Legal Navigator community training. More law schools should offer community members, social service and other analogous service-providers, and self-represented litigants education in the law. This is driven from the access to justice crisis — and the need for more non-lawyer navigators to assist people with family, debt, housing, and work issues. The resources and structures of the law school could be adjusted and packaged for new kinds of training, not for JDs, but for Legal Navigators who could be employed by courts, legal aid groups, hospitals, and others focused on community lawyering.

Post-Workshop Ideas: Near-Term Innovation for Law Schools

After the workshop ended, a few other ideas emerged — -not from the design teams, but out of the conversations after the fact. These ideas were a filtering down of some of the grand designs, to more near-term ways that law schools can improve how they are training young lawyers.

6. Pop-up Classes with Experimental Curriculum. Test run new courses with one or two day versions of the class. Law schools can invite faculty from other schools to come and run classes on specialized or advanced technology. Stanford Law tried this with a Prototyping Blockchain for Law class earlier in 2018, with guest speakers Jeff Ward from Duke and Aaron Wright from Cardozo Law bringing their excellent legal blockchain curriculum to Stanford for an abridged 2-day version.

7. Client Experience Tours. As part of orientation to law school or a new legal job, and also woven throughout classes, there can be a practice of Client Experience Tours. For any given topic matter, whether in doctrinal classes or more advanced ones — or even clinics — there can be an obligation for students to shadow a client throughout their visit to a clinic, a court, or other legal setting. They might also go to the client’s home or work to see the context from which they’re coming. One model for this is the LawX class at BYU, which included home visits to people who were dealing with debt and credit card lawsuits, so that the students could get the backstory of a person for whom they were creating a new service.

8. Failure Training. With the insight that many young lawyers get stuff wrong, but most don’t admit it — and often suffer professional or personal consequences from keeping their failures to themselves — this proposal aims to help lawyers and law students better acknowledge how they got things wrong. It could be a short-class in a law school, a regular evening casual event (like the professionals-oriented F-up Nights), or an internal set of videos or resources inside a legal org — the main thing is to have lawyers talk to their peers about actual stories of how they did something wrong, what the consequences were, and what they might have done differently. The goal is to get young lawyers to be ready for the many failures that await them, and to lower the stigma of talking about it — so that lawyers are more likely to tell their peers and bosses when they did something wrong.

Some Bonus (Non-Law School) Innovation Ideas

Not all groups stayed within the law school-redesign ambit — and took on wider ambitions about how to build better lawyers and improve services to people in need of legal help.

An emergent lawyer referral system. Have State Bars help organize a more robust network of lawyers for a referral system that truly serves people with legal needs — finding them a great fit, and also helping lawyers to develop their practice and client relationships.

Relocated Community Courts. One group advocated a new approach to court services — where dispute resolution and legal/clerical services would be out of government buildings, and more centrally located in public transport, gym, coffee shops, libraries, and other community locations.

The Process + Insights Behind the Ideas

Where did these ideas emerge from? We spent the morning of the workshop mapping out anecdotes, data points, trends, and hypotheses around 4 main themes: (1) Community and Market Needs; (2) Reflections on Law School; (3) The Ideal Lawyer; and (4) Innovations in Law Schools. We had stations around the room in which participants could discuss these 4 themes, leave comments, and make proposals around them.

From there, we pulled out some of the major themes that emerged:

1. Law graduates and innovation-oriented organizations need better ways to find and influence each other, with more ‘disintermediated’ career services. It should be easier for like-minded law grads and companies to find each other and work with each other.
2. Law students should have more varied and numerous client-oriented experiences in law schools..
3. Law schools need to provide more strategic training.
4. Failure and resilience must be taught and prepared for earlier in lawyers careers.
5. There needs to be more explicit education around Collaborative Lawyering.
6. The State Bar can be a rich partner for a more data-driven agenda on needs and futures of lawyers, as well as access to justice initiatives.
7. We need more lightweight legal education of social workers, public servants, and community members, so there can be a broader network of professionals certified in legal support.
8. Lawyers should explore ways to retrofit existing community spaces with legal resources and resolution centers, to get more legal help in places people will find and trust them.

What’s going well in law schools + other lawyer training

Some of the current positives that the participants highlighted are

1. Recognition that change is needed. Law schools recognize that new skills are needed for the alternative roles that younger lawyers are taking after law school. Because of this, Law Schools are starting to teach different ways of thinking and the rise of innovation labs is a proof of this.
2. Rise of the practice lawyer. Law Schools have been increasing their focus on clinics and real world application of the Law. Students are eager to learn by doing (not only from books) prior to work in a law firm or in other legal career path.
3. Law firms are beginning to recognize the need to change. The rise of emerging technology tools, and the broad spectrum of employers and practices have incentivized law firms to invest in teaching. Younger lawyers are eager to continue studying while practicing at a Law firm.

What could be better in the legal ecosystem

Many ideas of what could be better in the legal ecosystem emerged:

1. Law school’s administration. Law Schools could be seen as labs where new ideas could be prototyped and implemented. Some of these ideas could include a shared student governance for the school, rewrite the rules of admission, or lowering the debt pressure.
2. Rethink the practical training. The career paths and prospects for lawyers have changed during the last decade. Most of the practical training is thought for the classic legal paths. The law schools should begin to train young lawyers for these new career paths.
3. Twenty-first century lawyers. Lawyers should be better positioned for the client’s needs. The T-shaped lawyer is an example to tackle this because it requires the lawyer to communicate and collaborate across disciplines, with a knowledge and skills in different subjects. Law Schools could consider lawyers as entrepreneurs and teach them all the skills they would need. The pace of technology in other verticals will validate and drive innovation in the legal career. Law Schools could consider dual programs in which they integrate emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence.
4. Data-driven law firms. Legal departments can set pressure on metrics from the law firms. This could result in a better feedback from the companies.

Who can lead Better Lawyer efforts?

One other set of insights emerged from the groups — they identified the main stakeholders who should be at the heart of law school innovation. The groups all laid out the key people in the law school, legal department, state Bar, and law firm circles who could be key people to tap into, to build better lawyers.

From the different teams’ work, there was noticeable convergence around a short list of stakeholders that future legal innovation initiatives should target. There were also some unique stakeholders that single teams proposed. The proposed focus points included, from most prominent to least:

1. Law Students, and recently graduated young lawyers
2. Partners, associates, managing partners, and hiring associates in law firms
3. Law Schools’ deans, career services, and academic deans
4. General Counsel of legal departments
5. Bar leaders and delegates
6. Small Business Owners, Self-Represented Litigants, and other Clients
7. Law-Adjacent professionals, like social workers

Conclusion

1. Innovation and change of the legal profession is a task that should be tackled by the whole legal ecosystem: law schools, law firms, the State Bars, legal departments, and beyond — including litigants in the mix as well.
2. New soft skills should be taught to law students in order to prepare lawyers with a different mindset. These soft skills should teach law students to think in a more collaborative way (not just to battle), increase problem-solving capabilities, and resilience.
3. Law Schools should encourage a flexible curriculum with different type of courses and practice training. These could include pop-up courses, shadow learning training, and purpose driven classes with clients.
4. The State Bar can (and should) play a key role in the future of the Legal Profession through a data-driven agenda of the new ways to practice law.

Building a Better Lawyer was originally published in Legal Design and Innovation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.