Last week I was privileged to attend a Conference on the Future of Education, sponsored by New York Law School and Harvard Law School. This conference was the third in a series on this subject. The purpose of this conference is to initiate a conversation among and between law schools on how to make legal education better, cheaper, and faster, as Dean of New York Law School, Richard Matasar frames the issue. Personally, I think that Matasar’s presentation on the problems and prospects for legal education was the best that I have ever heard.
The format for the conference was a series of presentations of very inventive proposals presented by teams of legal educators and other legal specialists, mostly academics, 12 teams in all.
As participants, we each had $1,000,000 to spend as if we were venture capitalist’s listening to start-up pitches.
The team that I was part of actually won the competition, by receiving the most "venture capital" dollars. Credit goes to Ron Staudt from Chicago-Kent Law School and Marc Lauritsen from Capstone Practice who did the heavy lifting on developing the proposal. The proposed project called for law students in clinical programs to be engaged in the development of "Apps for Justice" that could be used by legal service programs to provide tools for access to justice. The title of the project is "Learning Law by Creating Software" Click here for a copy of the proposal.
Marc and Ron receiving their $10,700,000 check.
David Johnson from New York Law School won second place for a proposal to create "legal apps" that are games that would be used to teach and learn. The "State of Play" Academy.
Click here for a link to many of the other proposals.
