Apps 4 Justice
The legal profession is endangered. Law schools are in trouble. New lawyers are unprepared for economic and technological reality. There’s vast unmet need for legal services.
Apps for Justice attacks these four related problems.
The basic idea is to greatly expand programs in which students create software as part of their education. Courses that engage students in creating ‘apps for justice’ – software applications that do useful legal work – can take on many forms.
They can focus on tools practitioners can use to ‘work smarter’ and assist others; they can focus on empowering self-helpers to address their own problems and opportunities. Students can build document templates, guided interviews, dynamic checklists, calculators, interactive advisers, instructional modules, games, and decision support systems.
This session will outline a proposal using CALI's own A2J-Author software (www.a2jauthor.org) that seeks to recreate the CLEPR/Law Clinic successes of thirty years ago by establishing a permanent teaching cadre in US law schools that can offer course credit for practical instruction in system building, aimed at real client problems. It is self consciously focused on institutionalizing an organic engine for growth of new resources to support education in new skills that are now critical for lawyer competency while, at the same time, supporting legal services to the poor.
See the proposal that won top prize at the NYLS Future of Legal Education Contest here... http://dotank.nyls.edu/futureed/2011proposals/11llcs.pdf
Press on the Future of Legal Ed Contest here ... http://www.kentlaw.edu/news/releases/apps-for-justice-wins-future-ed-con...
Watch Marc Lauritsen's talk about Apps 4 Justice at the 2011 ABA TechShow Ignite ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQ2SMKWTi7c
