A loud and hearty round of applause rose in the Telus Centre auditorium and then a hush fell, such was the excitement and anticipation as the second day of 'The Future of Law School' Conference (26-28 Sept 2013) kicked off with renowned keynote speaker Professor Richard Susskind OBE., addressing the crowd via video link on the subject of "Tomorrow's Lawyers". There followed an hour of insightful, interesting, thought-provoking, and often funny commentary, challenging the minds of the law practitioners, law professors, and law students in the audience to think about the tectonic shifts occurring in the legal services market. These shifts include thinking about the future of lawyers, and the suggestion that law firms need to start by implementing "vision based strategy" and "blank street thinking" whereby they plan for what they could be in the future and forget about legacy. Be visionary!
Prof. Richard Susskind OBE.Susskind's keynote address focused on three key drivers of change:
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The "More for less" challenge would define the next decade of legal services
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Liberalization in the regulation of the profession
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Disruptive role of information technology, increasing globalization, fragmentation, etc.
Professor Susskind outlined his view of the new legal landscape, its impact on legal processes, and the work that lawyers will do in the future. He questioned whether law schools are adequately preparing law students for tomorrow's legal marketplace. He called on law schools to provide law students with the options to study current and future trends in law, and teach students to be 21st century lawyers, flexible and team-based, who can transcend boundaries, with an eye on globalization, technological innovation, outsourcing and so forth. He urged law schools to keep the best of what they have today whilst at the same time embracing E-learning - not merely online webinars but transformative approaches such as simulated learning/simulated-based training, virtual education, virtual learning environments (VLE), m-learning, transactional learning, and so forth. The main point of Susskind's presentation is that the world is changing and law firms and law schools must adapt or risk being rendered obsolete by other business models for the provision of legal services and the shaping of tomorrow's lawyers.
"I thought Professor Susskind's talk was very provocative but that there was a lot of truth to what he is saying," said Andrew Strauss, Widener University School of Law, Wilmington, Delaware, USA. "I think we would be foolish to say that IT isn't a fundamentally disruptive technology not just for lawyers but also for higher education which is the last of the knowledge-based industries that hasn't been fundamentally altered by IT."
"My question in listening to Professor Susskind is 'what about the relationship?' A huge part of being a lawyer is the relationships, for example the relationship of the partner to the associate is not an easy thing to outsource, or being able to assess how risk adverse your client is. Often your reading of a person or a situation is based on intuition and this may not be anything that artificial intelligence can tell you. Despite my questions I found his talk to be very interesting and very provocative."
Panel: Foundations!
During the conference the attendees were treated to four different panel discussions dealing with questions relating to legal education and with each panel coming at it from slightly different perspectives. The first panel of the conference dealt with 'Foundations', and tackled the history of Canadian legal education, and what ideas and principles should inform its future.
(l-r) David Sandomierski, Prof. Rosalie Jukier, Ms. Kate Glover, Prof. John McLaren, & Prof. Thomas McMorrow'Foundation' panellists: Professor John McLaren (University of Victoria, Faculty of Law), Professor Rod Macdonald & Professor Thomas McMorrow (McGill University, Faculty of Law, and University of Ontario Institute of technology, Faculty of Social Science and Humanities), David Sandomierski (S.J.D. Candidate, University of Toronto, Faculty of Law), and Professor Rosalie Jukier & Ms. Kate Glover (McGill University, Faculty of Law)
The panel presented the following main points to the audience:
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Law schools need to ask bigger questions, think more broadly, both about legal education and about the world around them.
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Law schools and the legal profession could not exist without one another but seem to have remarkable little insight into each other.
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The future is a plurality of legal education and law practitioner jobs/roles as described by Professor Susskind in his talk.
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Graduate legal education should be at the centre of any discussion of innovation in legal education, and not sidelined.
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Introduction of specialized tracks (differentiating between academic tracks and legal practitioner tracks) for graduate students. Non-specialized tracks best for undergraduate law students.
Prof. Harry ArthursAfternoon keynote speaker Professor Harry Arthurs (Dean Emeritus, Osgoode Hall Law School) spoke on 'The Future of Legal Education: Three Visions and a Prediction" and presented three alternative views of what law schools might be and might do:
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Law schools ought to produce "practice-ready lawyers" for today's profession.
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Law schools ought to prepare "tomorrow's lawyer's" to have the ability to adapt to rapidly changing legal practice.
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Law schools ought to play a leading role in the creation and transformation of legal knowledge, role, practice and the legal system, preparing students for a variety of legal and non-legal careers.
Professor Arthurs predicated that 100 years from now, distinguished legal scholarship and long-term contributions to the public good will be mentioned more often as the legacy of law schools than skills training or any immediate influence on legal practice.
Panel: Circumstances!
The second panel dealt with 'Circumstances', and investigated the changing circumstances of legal education and the regulation of lawyers and how law schools should respond.
'Circumstances' panellists: Dean Kim Brookes (Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University), John Hunter Q.C. (Past President, Federation of Law Societies of Canada), Prof. Margaret Thornton (Australian National University, College of Law), and Dean Ian Holloway (University of Calgary, Faculty of Law).
 Dean Ian Holloway |
 John Hunter, Q.C. |
The panel presented the following main points to the audience:
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Do law schools want to produce better lawyers or better thinkers? Why can't the answer be yes to both? The law school of the future should be one in which preparing students to perform as professionals is viewed as complementary to academic education in the law and a core function of modern legal education
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Law schools should view themselves as belonging to the same community as lawyers and vice-versa.
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Need to be innovative and creative about how we address the future of law schools
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The challenge for Law Schools of sustaining a liberal education in a marketised climate, including addressing the problem of the continually increasing tuition fees and the effect that this is having on the corporatisation of our law schools.
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Law profession needs to invest in more skills based training programs and not rely solely on the law schools to do this
 Dean Kim Brooks |
 Prof. Margaret Thornton |
"I really enjoyed panellist Dean Kim Brookes talking about how we can be more innovative and creative about what kind of options are open to us for the future of law schools," said Dayna Nadine Scott, Osgoode Hall Law School, Toronto. "In particular I felt like she was doing this open-ended brain storming. She was talking about admissions and how we should totally blow open our system and do something different in terms of how can we address the problem of the continually increasing tuition fees, and as Professor Margaret Thornton said, 'the effect that this is having on the corporatisation of our law schools'. So I drew a lot of inspiration from their remarks in terms of just being more creative and innovative in how we are going to address the future."