Teaching Law Students 21st Century Practice Skills Through Coding with A2J Author

Will robots steal jobs from lawyers in the 21st century?  Not if lawyers learn to program the robots!

In this session, I will talk about the work CALI is doing to create a new version of A2J Author and make it available to all law schools and how it can be used to teach law students 21st century practice skills.   A2J Author is a free authoring tool that let's lawyers create "Guided Interviews" for their clients or for people representing themselves (i.e self represented litigants or pro ses).  A2J Author has been used by legal aid organizations around the country to create over a half a million forms for pro ses and it doesn't require a programmer to use and learn.  

CALI is in the process of recoding A2J Author from scratch to replace the Adobe Flash based system with a HTML5/Jquery web-based system that will run on smartphones, tablets (e.g. Ipads) and will work on almost any browser and on any operating system.  

With a grant from the Legal Services Corporation, CALI is working with Professor Ronald W. Staudt of Chicago-Kent College of Law to publish his "Practicum in Justice" course materials as a starter kit for law school clinic teachers across the country.  CALI will publish a collection of materials as an ebook under the eLangdell Press imprint and provide a comprehensive website where instructors can copy and remix materials for their own course needs.  

This session will have information of interest for law faculty, law librarians AND law school technologists.  

Slides: 

2012A2J_For_LawStudents.pptx