Law Graduates Could be Better Prepared to Use Legal Tech, Experts Say

When Nicola Shaver asked Paul Hastings LLP’s new fall associates how many of them had studied law and technology or broad themes about the changing nature of legal practice in law school, just one person from the group of 25 in front of her raised their hand.

Shaver, Paul Hastings’ managing director of innovation and knowledge, said she wasn’t surprised by the response even though there is a growing recognition of the importance of tech knowledge in the legal industry.

“What this means is that we are getting an influx of new associates each year who still haven’t been exposed to these issues, yet they are something they will have to face during their careers,” she said.

Shaver is not alone in believing many law schools could do more to prepare aspiring attorneys to enter the profession possessing a basic familiarity with legal tech tools and a greater understanding of how the business-side of practice is evolving.

Bill Kammer, a partner at Solomon Ward Seidenwurm & Smith LLP in San Diego, said law students should be taught the principal concepts of electronic discovery. This exposure to e-discovery should not be limited to those who want to be litigators, he said.

“Working in a firm like I do, the first knowledge that someone might be engaged in a lawsuit or might come to expect a dispute might be in the hands of one of my transactional partners,” Kammer said. “They are the ones that should be early on discussing with the client the obligation to preserve and to institute a legal hold.”

Kammer, who leads his firm’s Electronic Discovery and ESI Services Team, co-founded the San Diego ESI Forum to help “give everyone here as good a head start as possible in learning these skills.” The forum holds free monthly educational events at the federal courthouse regarding a variety of e-discovery issues, with a recent session focused on the California Consumer Privacy Act.

Knowledge of e-discovery and other legal technology is particularly important, Kammer said, given the growing number of states such as California that have adopted an ethical duty of technology competence for lawyers.

He recommended law students also be required to learn about the basics of artificial intelligence, which has implications for contract review and e-discovery, among other tasks.

Shaver agreed, noting AI is increasingly being integrated into document management systems that lawyers utilize. She said familiarity with document automation and workflow automation would be useful for law students as well.

However, Shaver cautioned she wasn’t recommending all law students be trained to be coders, as some have advocated.

“I don’t think every lawyer has to learn to code,” said Shaver, who is based in New York. “What needs to happen is lawyers should be comfortable with technology and sufficiently exposed to it to understand adoption of technology will improve the way that they practice and improve their service delivery to clients.”

Thomas Suh, co-founder and COO of LegalMation, said the current crop of new lawyers is receptive to the use of innovative technologies as a result of the tech-savvy generation in which they have been raised. Early exposure to these tools in law school can help aspiring lawyers develop a comfort level with the technologies, he said.

But Suh, whose company provides a suite of artificial intelligence tools to help practicing attorneys and other legal professionals automate routine litigation tasks, said he sees a greater need for law students to be instructed on the business of law.

“It is great to have lawyers with not just great core skills but who understand how businesses work,” said Suh, former managing partner of LTL Attorneys LLP in Los Angeles. “I think they provide more value.”

Both Suh and Shaver named UC Irvine School of Law as one institution effectively working to ensure its graduates are prepared to enter the evolving legal profession.

Christopher A. Whytock, a vice dean and professor at the law school, said one of UC Irvine’s primary goals is for its students to be familiar with the legal technologies they will be expected to possess competence with when they graduate. These technologies include judicial analytics, AI-driven legal research, predictive coding and automated legal drafting tools.

“We do believe that there is demand in the legal job market for lawyers who are ready to hit the ground running in terms of their knowledge of those technologies,” Whytock said.

One way UC Irvine plans to bolster its efforts in this area is by incorporating into its required first-year courses more discussion about the legal, policy and practical implications of legal technologies.

For example, Whytock said the “Procedural Analysis” class he teaches focused on federal civil procedure will address the topic of judicial analytics when talking about forum selection.

“In the real world, I think these issues come up not as neatly packaged standalone issues, but they flow through all areas of law and stages of legal representation,” he said.

Recognizing not all law schools are preparing students in the way institutions such as UC Irvine are, some law firms are devising their own initiatives to fill the legal tech knowledge gap.

Shaver said Paul Hastings is working to introduce a program on legal technology for first-year junior associates and other associates at the firm who are interested in participating.

“A subsection of that we hope to develop for our summer associate program, so that at an even earlier stage students are being exposed to” legal technology, she said.