Preparing Students For Factory Work and Choice Jobs

Speaker(s):

There are proven techniques for delivering consistently high quality legal services. Yet law students often have no exposure to them. Many move into solo and small firm practice without a clue of what running a modern service business requires.
Choice making is a pervasive aspect of legal work. It’s central to case strategy, client counseling, advocacy, negotiation, document drafting, and adjudication. Yet law school courses rarely thematize it. Modern technology make possible many intelligent tools for supporting choice, yet they are rarely leveraged in law practice or legal service delivery, let alone considered in the academy.
This session includes two related parts. (1) Richard Granat will describe the work of the Center for Law Practice Technology at Florida Coastal School of Law, which teaches students about legal technology, project management, process redesign, and other methods for delivering high quality services. These disciplines have particular applicability to ‘manufacturing’ practices that handle high volumes of work affordably, cost-effectively and consistently. The processes that the Four Seasons hotel chain and Starbucks employ to insure quality and effective delivery are relevant to legal service delivery of any high volume law practice, but involve skills that lawyers generally do not have. (2) Marc Lauritsen will preview a course he’s offering at Suffolk Law School this fall on ‘decision making and choice management.’ While covering aspects of probabilistic reasoning and decision trees, the course will focus largely on choices that depend on resolving tradeoffs among competing considerations. It will emphasize experiential learning, in the spirit of the Apps-4-Justice movement, with students building useful models and applications that can help legal professionals and laypeople make law-related decisions.

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