Getting Campuses Ready for the Coronavirus — from insidehighered.com by Chuck Staben
What should leaders be doing to prepare their colleges if the situation worsens? Chuck Staben offers suggestions.

Colleges Prepare for Coronavirus Outbreaks on Campus — from wsj-com by Melissa Korn
Task forces map out prospects for quarantines, class cancellations as schools brace for virus spread

Teaching during a campus closure…— from linkedin.com by Bill Knapp
Here are some suggestions on preparing your on-campus students in the event of an unexpected campus closure (#COVID-19).

Coronavirus Forces Universities Online — from .insidehighered.com by Lindsay McKenzie
Compelled to close their campuses to limit the spread of coronavirus, U.S. universities with Chinese branches move at lightning speed to take teaching online.

NYU Response to Coronavirus Accelerates Digital Tool Adoption — from campustechnology.com by Dian Schaffhauser

Excerpt:

Instructors conducted some 700-plus sessions during the first week, using a multitude of tools to enable live feedback and interaction in both synchronous and asynchronous ways, including learning management system NYU Classes, media sharing service NYU Stream, web and audio conference tool NYU Zoom and commenting utility VoiceThread.

Keith Ross, dean of Engineering and Computer Science at NYU Shanghai, suggested that the health crisis has one silver lining: It’s bringing the faculty up to speed with online teaching tools in quick order. In a university article about the efforts, he mused that once the crisis has passed, faculty may choose to integrate the use of some of the tools into their traditional face-to-face courses.

NYU Stream and VoiceThread are letting students interact asynchronously. They can watch pre-recorded videos uploaded by instructors and then take quizzes, ask questions, make annotations and communicate with classmates using text, audio and video. Also available for use: NYU Web Publishing to publish and manage blogs; Slido and Piazza to conduct community voting and quizzes; Slack to support office hours; and Examity to proctor exams remotely.


How to Respond to Coronavirus: 6 Steps for Schools
— from edweek.org by Mark Lieberman

 

XRHealth launches first virtual reality telehealth clinic — from wearable-technologies.com by Sam Draper

Excerpt:

XRHealth (formerly VRHealth), a leading provider of extended reality and therapeutic applications, announced the first virtual reality (VR) telehealth clinic that will provide VR therapy to patients. VR telehealth clinicians providing care are currently certified in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Florida, Michigan, Washington D.C., Delaware, California, New York, and North Carolina and will be expanding their presence in additional states in the coming months. The XRHealth telehealth services are covered by Medicare and most major insurance providers.

 

ABA passes access to justice measure after opposition fades — from news.bloomberglaw.com by Sam Skolnik

  • New York State Bar Association president lauds “powerfully important moment”
  • Vote followed several days of sometimes tense negotiations

Excerpt:

The American Bar Association passed a resolution encouraging state bars to explore innovative approaches to access to justice by voice vote on Monday, after several days of behind-the-scenes negotiations during which its passage seemed unclear.

Proponents of Resolution 115 prevailed in the House of Delegates vote during the ABA midyear meeting in Austin, Texas, in part because they were willing to adjust the proposal’s language to make it more palatable to detractors who had been concerned about its possible impact on legal industry independence. The House of Delegates is the policy-making arm of the ABA, composed of nearly 600 members, two-thirds of whom represent state, local, and specialty-focused bar groups.

Also see:

 

Overcoming the challenges of large courses — from teachingprofessor.com by Maryellen Weimer

Excerpt:

The course redesign promotes students’ engagement with a student response system, peer instruction, and active learning strategies that get all students present involved in each day’s planned activity. The learning assistants tackle problems of anonymity. Each are assigned a group of students, and various means are used to connect students with their respective learning assistant. Learning assistants offer study sessions. Students also get email feedback on their exam scores, and those who are struggling are invited to meet with an instructor to develop improvement goals.

Large courses require special teaching skills; not every teacher has them. Those who do should be supported and rewarded for using them in this most challenging teaching situation. Students at the front end of a college experience deserve the best we can deliver, and often that’s not what they get.

 

Deloitte Legal to work with academic tech venture group — from artificiallawyer.com

Excerpt:

Deloitte Legal is to collaborate with Conception X, a nine-month programme designed to train PhD students in technology entrepreneurship and to support them in building ventures based on their original research during their degree.

Conception X accepts applications across several research areas including artificial intelligence, machine learning, genetic engineering, blockchain and quantum computing. The first two cohorts, prior to the link-up with Deloitte, have seen the start-ups incorporated by PhD teams collectively raising a total of £5m and generating revenues of £2m.

 

 

5 Things General Counsel Want from Law Firms They Are Not Getting — from linkedin.com by Julie Savarino and from “the excellent presentation at #LegalWeek2020 by ALM Media, LLC, Heather D. Nevitt, James Willer, Gina Passarella, Patrick Fuller & team”

(emphasis DSC)

  1. Direct, straightforward & practical legal advice & guidance they can take to their business leadership.
  2. A team of talented, diverse professionals (not just practicing #lawyers) that bring a wide range of solutions & options.
  3. Innovative technology options & support for legal tech & legal ops.
  4. Proactive communications & monitoring of their business, warnings of potential risks & legal issues & how the firm can support.
  5. Scanning the horizon for what’s coming/developing & future issues that the legal department needs to be aware of & ready to support.


From DSC:

#5 reminds me of the following graphic:

 

 

BIGLAW 2040: What will happen when Gen Z is in charge? — from law360.com by Natalie Rodriguez

Excerpts:

The opportunities that BigLaw has begun offering associates to spend months-long stints working out of international offices will evolve from rare resume brags to almost standard career milestones for those interested in leadership positions.

“If you don’t have global experience, you’re not becoming a CEO anymore, and that’s going to be true of becoming a managing partner. If you want to be a global business, you’re going to have to understand the world,” Wilkins said.

The legal leaders of 2040 will also have to expand their circle — think data technicians, cybersecurity professionals, chief knowledge officers, legal tech and artificial intelligence systems engineers, all of whom are going to play much larger roles in the BigLaw ecosystem in the next few decades.

Addendum on 2/11/20:

The Skills Every Future Lawyer Needs — from law360.com by Erin Coe

Excerpt:

To provide those outcomes and solutions, many lawyers of the future will be responsible for building the systems that replace the old ways of working.

They will become legal knowledge engineers, legal risk managers, legal systems analysts, legal design thinkers and legal technologists, and they will be the ones solving clients’ problems, not through one-on-one advice, but through technology-delivered solutions, according to Susskind.

The challenge for existing lawyers is whether they are prepared over the next 20 years to retrain themselves for these new roles.

 

 

Lawyers: Meet the CEO trying to make you obsolete — from abovethelaw.com by James Goodnow
Call it a drive for increased access to the legal system, call it a grab for cash, the legal and business worlds are getting more comfortable with nonlawyers handling issues traditionally reserved for attorneys.

Excerpt:

Mehta and Factor aim to take a bite out of the segment of the legal market that has previously been off-limits to anyone except Biglaw attorneys: challenging, sophisticated contract negotiations and compliance.

Factor’s secret sauce is combining attorneys, nonattorney legal professionals, and curated technology into an efficient package. Factor’s team of hundreds of in-house lawyers oversee nonattorneys specially trained in contract management, compliance issues, and leading-edge technology. The goal, of course, is to bring the cost of even highly complex transactions down to a minimum.

Make no mistake: a new front has opened up in the war between alternative legal service providers and traditional law firms. 


From DSC:

While I don’t think lawyers will become obsolete, the amount of technology being integrated into law firms and throughout the legal realm is definitely on the increase. I don’t see that trend slowing down, but rather picking up steam.

 

DC: Precursor to a next gen learning platform…? Another piece is falling into place.

 

‘Fundamental shift’ is transforming the delivery of legal services, new report concludes — from abajournal.com by Debra Cassens Weiss

Excerpt:

“Revolutionary changes are afoot” in the market for legal services, according to a new report.

Clients are actively managing their relationships with outside counsel, nonlaw competitors are gaining ground, and law firms are responding to market changes in innovative ways, the report says.

The 2020 Report on the State of the Legal Market was released Monday by Georgetown Law’s Center on Ethics and the Legal Profession and Thomson Reuters Legal Executive Institute. It is available for download here.

However, taking that view is seeing only one side of the story. Over this same period, there has been mounting evidence that the underlying model itself is changing, that clients, non-law firm competitors, and even many law firms are now operating with very different assumptions about the role law firm services should play in the legal ecosystem and how such services should be delivered. In the past year or so, this evidence has grown to the point that it seems apparent that a fundamental shift is now well underway.

Also see:

Lori Lorenzo, research and insights leader of chief legal officer program, Deloitte: “Catching-up and keeping-up with tech advancements for the legal function will remain a top goal for chief legal officers in 2020. Of course, addressing legal team tech skills gaps may drive inclusion of professionals with diverse skillsets, like data scientists, automation experts and the like, into the legal function.”

 

Coming down the pike: A next generation, global learning platform [Christian]

From DSC:
Though we aren’t quite there yet, the pieces continue to come together to build a next generation learning platform that will help people reinvent themselves quickly, efficiently, constantly, and cost-effectively.

Learning from the living class room

 

Learning from the living class room

 

Learning from the living class room

 

Delta Model Lawyer: Lawyer Competencies for the Computational Age — from law.mit.edu by Caitlin “Cat” Moon
Technology changes the ways that people interact with one another. As a result, the roles and competencies required for many professions are evolving. Law is no exception. Cat Moon offers the Delta Model as a tool for legal professionals to understand how adapt to these changes.

Excerpt:

The [law] schools must begin training the profession to cope with and understand computers. […] Minimizing the pain and problems which may be caused by computer-created unknowns is a responsibility of the profession.

 

The future of law and computational technologies: Two sides of the same coin — from law.mit.edu by Daniel Linna
Law and computation are often thought of as being two distinct fields. Increasingly, that is not the case. Dan Linna explores the ways a computational approach could help address some of the biggest challenges facing the legal industry.

Excerpt:

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (“AI”) introduces opportunities to improve legal processes and facilitate social progress. At the same time, AI presents an original set of inherent risks and potential harms. From a Law and Computational Technologies perspective, these circumstances can be broadly separated into two categories. First, we can consider the ethics, regulations, and laws that apply to technology. Second, we can consider the use of technology to improve the delivery of legal services, justice systems, and the law itself. Each category presents an unprecedented opportunity to use significant technological advancements to preserve and expand the rule of law.

For basic legal needs, access to legal services might come in the form of smartphones or other devices that are capable of providing users with an inventory of their legal rights and obligations, as well as providing insights and solutions to common legal problems. Better yet, AI and pattern matching technologies can help catalyze the development of proactive approaches to identify potential legal problems and prevent them from arising, or at least mitigate their risk.

We risk squandering abundant opportunities to improve society with computational technologies if we fail to proactively create frameworks to embed ethics, regulation, and law into our processes by design and default.

To move forward, technologists and lawyers must radically expand current notions of interdisciplinary collaboration. Lawyers must learn about technology, and technologists must learn about the law.

 

 

Preparing faculty for high-quality online programs — from campustechnology.com by Anne Frankel, Laurie Friedman, Jamie Mansell, Jennifer Ibrahim
Temple University’s College of Public Health is a diverse school experiencing significant growth online. Here’s how the institution is supporting the development and maintenance of high-quality online faculty.

Excerpt:

We recognized that faculty may be at different levels of preparedness and self-efficacy to start teaching in an online space — and we realized the challenges of organizing faculty in a single location at a given time. Therefore, we chose to deliver the training in a fully asynchronous environment, allowing faculty the time and space needed to digest the materials and practice with the content to build their confidence. Faculty are enrolled in the training during the semester prior to their assigned online class, and are asked to complete the training at least four weeks before the start of their online course to provide sufficient time for feedback to the faculty with lead time for changes to the course before launching, if needed.

We wanted the training to take the faculty member through the design of an entire online course, from syllabus creation, to choices in delivery style, to assessment techniques and more. Each of the nine modules included both pedagogical and technological pieces, encompassing everything from creating alignment (Module 3), to setting up your Canvas site (Module 4), to designing and delivering synchronous sessions (Module 8).

Within each module, there is an organized infrastructure to ensure a consistent experience for the faculty. The structure starts with a clear set of learning objectives, designed both to model best practices and to ensure alignment with activities and assessments. Following the objectives, there are diverse resources, including videos, instructional guides with screenshots, web links, journal articles and examples from our online classes. After the content, each module contains “assignments” for the faculty to complete. These assignments allow the faculty to demonstrate that they can incorporate both technological and pedagogical best practices within their own online course.

 

From DSC:
The two postings below show the need for more collaboration and the use of teams:


 

The future of law and computational technologies: Two sides of the same coin — from legaltechlever.com by Daniel Linna Jr.

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

An increasing number of lawyers today work with allied professionals to improve processes, better manage projects, embrace data-driven methods, and leverage technology to improve legal services and systems. Legal-services and lawyer regulations are evolving. And basic technologies and AI are slowly making their way into the legal industry, from legal aid organizations and courts to large law firms, corporate legal departments, and governments.

If we are to realize the potential to improve society with computational technologies, law, regulation, and ethical principles must be front and center at every stage, from problem definition, design, data collection, and data cleaning to training, deployment, and monitoring and maintenance of products and systems. To achieve this, technologists and lawyers must collaborate and share a common vocabulary. Lawyers must learn about technology, and technologists must learn about law. Multidisciplinary teams with a shared commitment to law, regulation, and ethics can proactively address today’s AI challenges, and advance our collaborative problem-solving capabilities to address tomorrow’s increasingly complex problems. Lawyers and technologists must work together to create a better future for everyone.

 

From DSC:
As with higher education in general, we need more team-based efforts in the legal realm as well as more TrimTab Groups.

 

 

Excerpts:

Why does this distinction matter? Because law—like so many industries—is undergoing a tectonic shift. It is morphing from a lawyer dominated, practice-centric, labor-intensive guild to a tech-enabled, process and data-driven, multi-disciplinary global industry. The career paths, skills, and expectations of lawyers are changing. So too are how, when, and on what financial terms they are engaged; with whom and from what delivery models they work; their performance metrics, and the resources—human and machine—they collaborate with.  Legal practice is shrinking and the business of delivering legal services is expanding rapidly.

Law is no longer the exclusive province of lawyers. Legal knowledge is not the sole element of legal delivery—business and technological competencies are equally important. It’s a new ballgame—one that most lawyers are unprepared for.

How did we get here and are legal careers  for most a dead end? Spoiler alert: there’s tremendous opportunity in the legal industry. The caveat: all lawyers must have basic business and technological competency whether they pursue practice careers or leverage their legal knowledge as a skill in legal delivery and/or allied professional careers.

Upskilling the legal profession is already a key issue, a requisite for career success. Lawyers must learn new skills like project management, data analytics, deployment of technology, and process design to leverage their legal knowledge. Simply knowing the law will not cut it anymore.

 

From DSC:
I really appreciate the work of the above two men whose articles I’m highlighting here. I continue to learn a lot from them and am grateful for their work.

That said, just like it’s a lot to expect a faculty member (in higher ed) who teaches online to not only be a subject matter expert, but also to be skilled in teaching, web design, graphic design, navigation design, information design, audio design, video editing, etc…it’s a lot to expect for a lawyer to be a skilled lawyer, business person, and technician. I realize that Mark was only saying a basic level of competency…but even that can be difficult to achieve at times. Why? Because people have different skillsets, passions, and interests. One might be a good lawyer, but not a solid technician…or vice versa. One might be a solid professor, but isn’t very good with graphic design. 

 
© 2024 | Daniel Christian