Paul L. Caron
Dean





Sunday, February 21, 2016

Harvard Prepares Students To Thrive In A Disrupted Legal Profession

Harvard Law School Logo (2014)Harvard Law Bulletin (Fall 2015), The Laws of Adaptation:

Change is coming to the legal profession—whether attorneys like it or not—and HLS is at the forefront of efforts to anticipate it, and prepare students.

The warning bells have been ringing for at least two decades: The legal profession as we’ve known it is doomed, and lawyers must adapt—or face extinction. For the most part, these dire predictions have been ignored, even as globalization and technology have revolutionized markets, affecting everything from airline travel to taxicabs. Yes, law firms have been outsourcing legal research to India, and electronic discovery is taking over some basic tasks. But lawyers have tended to see themselves as immune: a guild of highly educated advisers whose wisdom, savvy and deep understanding of a complex series of laws are irreplaceable.

Then a computer named Watson beat a human on “Jeopardy!” Now all bets are off.

Watson’s victory showed that artificial intelligence can master what was considered a uniquely human realm: using judgment to select best options after sorting through huge amounts of complex information communicated in real language. Cancer doctors from the nation’s top research institutions were among the first to recognize the broad implications. Today, they are working with the IBM Watson project to sort through massive amounts of data to try to find new ways to diagnose and cure the disease. If a computer can displace doctors—or at least, significant aspects of what doctors do—who’s next?

In fact, lawyers may be far more susceptible than physicians, says Harvard Law Professor David B. Wilkins ’80, vice dean for global initiatives on the legal profession. As a rules-based system, law is similar to chess, he notes, in which Watson’s predecessor, Deep Blue, prevailed 14 years earlier, beating the world chess champion.

“The Watson people say, ‘We won’t replace doctors or lawyers; we’ll just help them be more effective,’” Wilkins laughs, adding, “But of course, they will replace some doctors and lawyers.” The question, he says, is which kinds of lawyers, and how big a share of the legal market?

Because of technology, globalization and other major market pressures, “law is ripe for disruption,” says Wilkins, faculty director of the HLS Center on the Legal Profession, which is a leader in research and analysis in this area.

Disruptive innovation, a term coined by Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, occurs when existing patterns of work and organization are radically transformed in a relatively short period of time, when new competitors arrive to offer low-cost alternatives at the bottom end of the market. The incumbents ignore these upstarts—until the disruptors become the norm and the old guard adapts or is replaced. Personal computers replacing mainframes, cellphones replacing landlines, retail medical clinics replacing traditional doctors’ offices, and Uber replacing taxis are important examples, Wilkins says. The legal market—which has maintained some of the highest profit margins for professional service businesses—faces the same challenge. Legal information is being digitized, and low-level tasks are being outsourced. Now the inspiration aspect of legal work—the solving of complex problems—could soon be facing competition from sophisticated computers. Meanwhile, consumers are turning eagerly to low-priced alternatives to traditional lawyering, such as online divorces and wills, and new online matchmaking services through which lawyers can compete for clients—like Uber, but for law. ...

Indeed, since the financial crisis of 2008, all clients—especially general counsel at major companies—have had more market power than ever, “and they aren’t likely to give it back,” says Scott Westfahl ’88, HLS professor of practice and faculty director of Executive Education. ...

These changes also mean a shift in the way law is taught. “We need to teach students how to unbundle legal problems and collaborate across organizational boundaries with other providers, which is the biggest challenge,” Wilkins says. “We have to work across divides, including with the disruptors themselves.” ...

Wilkins expects disruption at all levels of the legal world. But unlike some others, “I don’t think we’ll see the death of Big Law because there will always be a space for sophisticated legal services,” he says. However, “the question is how big that space will be and how many will be in it. For high-priced, high-profit-margin work, how much of that could be done by other providers?” ...

In the new economy, Westfahl believes, collaboration is among the most important skills. Last spring he launched a new team-based course at HLS, Innovation in Legal Education and Practice.

Drawing from other disciplines, including neuroscience and psychology, Westfahl modeled the course on the work of Michele DeStefano ’02, a professor at the University of Miami School of Law, who is a visiting professor at HLS this academic year. The course teaches students how to design and maintain effective teams, requiring them to work to identify challenges in the legal world and come up with solutions. Among team proposals were a better mentoring program for new HLS students, and a means to encourage mindfulness meditation training at law firms in order to lower stress and increase error-free productivity. Class participants say the collaborative approach has been a liberating experience.

“Students in law school are taught to be apex predators, alone and armed to the teeth against everyone else. But these days, that is [neither] a feasible way to build a practice nor how the law works,” says Caitlin Hewes ’15, who was part of a team that designed ways to make the 3L year more efficient and useful. ...

Law schools could make real strides by adding a business-case-type problem into torts, civil procedure, and other classes, he says, “so we could build skills without sacrificing traditional educational and critical legal thinking, which we do well and shouldn’t give up.” He and Wilkins are two of the seven instructors for the HLS Problem Solving Workshop, which uses such methods and is required of all J.D. students. ...

In the fall of 2010, frustrated by how slowly the legal world was responding to the fast-paced changes swirling around it, Michele DeStefano ’02 launched an innovation space for law students and lawyers.

“I felt that the world was changing but the law market, legal educators and lawyers were not changing to meet the 21st-century marketplace,” she says.

Her creation, LawWithoutWalls, a kind of “American Idol” meets “Shark Tank,” has grown from 23 students each year to 100, from an initial group of six law schools (HLS among them) to 30 law and business schools. It now comprises 750 “change agents”—academics, lawyers, multinational business professionals, venture capitalists and others—in a global “collaboratory” dedicated to innovating the future of legal education and practice, DeStefano says.

“There’s nothing else like it, and that’s what makes LawWithoutWalls so rewarding—that I can be a catalyst for change,” she says. “I help students find their passion that was either buried or that they didn’t think they could apply to law.” Students who apply are selected because they can add value to the collaboratory and can benefit from it—their law school grades aren’t even considered, she emphasizes.

Combination hackathon, conference, webinar, and professional network, LawWithoutWalls convenes students from around the world and places them in teams with a broad base of mentors: lawyers, academics, businesspeople. It charges them with identifying a problem in legal education or practice and gives them four months to create a business plan for a startup that would solve that problem. It kicks off with interactive exercises to foster idea generation and teamwork; then, using the latest technologies, teams e-meet every week. Finally, they present their proposals before a panel of multidisciplinary judges including venture capitalists.

LawWithoutWalls teaches skills not emphasized in traditional law classes or executive education courses, including cultural competency, teamwork, presentation skills, communication, project management and leadership, says DeStefano, who worked for eight years in the business world before attending HLS and helped the school launch its executive education program. It has also become a global multidisciplinary network that breaks down barriers between lawyers and clients, law and business, and professors and students. Its supporters and participants include major international law firms such as London-based Eversheds, as well as American Express and the Ethics Resource Center.

(Hat Tip: Glenn Reynolds.)

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2016/02/harvard-law-school-prepares-students-to-thrive-in-a-disrupted-legal-profession.html

Legal Education | Permalink

Comments

Novus,

The Union endured after the Civil War. The South began to "industrialize," got air conditioning and continued its culture wars though the ballot box and courtrooms. The framework was there to extricate the entire nation from a civil conflict. We will always be engaged in a cold form of a Civil War. And that's ok. There are 900 million different opinions on any issue given our population of 350 million.

Posted by: Captain Hruska Carswell, Continuance King | Feb 22, 2016 2:31:29 PM

Should read "has not been stable for over two centuries. Sorry, I was destabilized.

Posted by: Publius Novus | Feb 22, 2016 7:32:57 AM

Mr. Malloy: Our Republic has been stable for over two centuries. We had a major cataclysm from 1861-1865 called the "Civil War." It was, by most accounts I have read, somewhat destabilizing. We appear headed in that direction again.

Posted by: Publius Novus | Feb 22, 2016 7:32:13 AM

So the future of law depends on taking a client centric approach, versus supporting a game where everybody loses except the lawyers? Imagine that.

Posted by: Dale Spradling | Feb 22, 2016 5:36:40 AM

@ King: I'm not sure I agree with your assessment of our Republic as stable. . . it has been for over two centuries, but some pretty toxic stuff is brewing.

Posted by: terry malloy | Feb 22, 2016 5:07:40 AM

"What does Harvard Law School know about changes in the legal profession? Don't they know that the legal profession is not and cannot ever change because I said so?"

- Anon TaxProf commenters

Posted by: Unemployed Northeastern | Feb 21, 2016 8:13:41 PM

I do not believe the issue is with legal curriculums nor the profession itself. Our Republic has been well served for nearly 240 years by both. We are the only game in town that provides political and legal stability. When China and Mexico collapse, all of multi-nationals will be running back here for safe harbor. How many F-150s will be sold today in Syria? The problem is the grotesque over saturation of attorneys from schools like Cooley High Phoenix Jefferson Marshall Law School. There are no standards.

Posted by: Captain Hruska Carswell, Continuance King | Feb 21, 2016 3:41:25 PM

Funny - this story says the bells of change have been ringing for decades and yet, nothing really has changed. Maybe the change theorists should change their theory?

Posted by: anon | Feb 21, 2016 12:02:29 PM