IBA Showcase: reinventing global legal education

Tuesday 15 December 2020

This session addressed the key trends, opportunities and challenges facing legal educators. Former IBA President Fernando Pelaez-Pier and Soledad Atienza, current Co-Chairs of the IBA Commission on the Future of Legal Services, posed questions and offered recommendations raised by their report, Developing a Blueprint for Legal Education.

IBA President Horacio Bernardes Neto, São Paulo: We lawyers must be very realistic in understanding that law has been taught and practiced the same way for the last thousand years. We are very conservative, we like gowns, wigs and difficult words that nobody else understands. And I think that this is now coming to an end. We are, by far, the profession which is least developed in terms of technology.

I think that this is something that we have to talk about, we have to talk [about] how the profession is going to change and the study of law has to change. The profession is changing. We have competitors who are not lawyers, who are not bound to our principles or our ethic commitments. We were, for many years, the owners of the law, and we are not anymore.

We can’t forget to include in our conversations, in the education we are proposing, the rule of law, access to justice and human rights. It is very important that the young technological lawyers of the future understand the importance of the promotion and protection of the rule of law and access to justice. That everybody understands and respects human rights and public freedoms.

Fernando Pelaez-Pier, former IBA President and Co-Chair of the IBA Commission on the Future of Legal Services, Caracas: This report has been a joint venture between the IBA and the Law Schools Global League. We have worked with ten different universities, members of the League from around the world and a group of researchers that we divided into eight regions within the world.

The report identifies four challenges for legal education: globalisation, technology, skills and regulation. These were all important before we woke up to a pandemic, but Covid-19 has accelerated many of these trends and is having an important impact on legal education.

Soledad Atienza, Dean of IE Law School and Co-Chair of the IBA Commission on the Future of Legal Services, Madrid: Developing a Blueprint for Legal Education comprehends qualitative and quantitative analysis that brings together a deep literature review and desk research, where we have analysed over 400 law schools from around the world and conducted surveys and a large number of interviews.

Our main conclusion is that globalisation and internationalisation is the number one trend in legal education. The reality is that only a very small number of law schools have reached what we call a high level of international legal education. High-level law schools offer programmes to students which allow them to qualify in different jurisdictions.

Concerning technology, we have found that while the pandemic has caused most law schools to use technology as a tool to teach, top-level law schools use technology as part of their content. They teach courses in programming and the use of technology to improve legal services.

The third topic is skills. There is a large number of schools that teach skills related to employability, but not many teach management skills.

Regulation and access of legal education is also a key challenge. Regulation has been considered a large limitation for innovation, internationalisation and globalisation of law schools. It has also been considered a limitation to an improvement of the use of technology for education. But, due to Covid-19, some regulators have had to adapt and to be more flexible in order to allow for law schools to teach online.

And the last emerging trend is the impact that the pandemic has had on the mental and physical health of students and faculty, and the equality to access legal education.

FP: To develop this further, Michelle, I would like to ask you to share your thoughts on technology and legal education, but, before you start, what do you wish for the future of legal education?

Michele DeStefano, founder of LawWithoutWalls, Miami, Florida: I wish it [to be] increasingly global, increasingly diverse and, most importantly, increasingly inclusive. If we do those things, we will be more tech-enabled and more open to teaching in different styles. You can't be inclusive, diverse and multi-disciplinary, and continue to teach legal education the way we teach it.

I think the future when it comes to technology is a blended one, blending the in-person and the virtual. When you teach in a blended format you become a better teacher as it forces you to learn two different ways to teach. We should set expectations about technology and discussing how to use Slack, Teams and shared clouds. Not taking the time to talk through those details is a mistake, it creates frustration and people get resentful.

FP: Sarah, please can you share your thoughts on globalisation?

Sarah Hutchinson, IBA SPPI Chair, London: Globalisation was the number one issue identified in 70 per cent of the research in the report. It's also the number one issue in every single region. Which, for me, puts it right at the heart of what's got to change about legal education, but there have been very limited responses from law schools so far.

The report also shows how economically important international legal education is. Thirty-six per cent of law schools want more international students, yet they're not actually addressing the content of what they're teaching. So, for me, there's a commercial benefit for law schools to address this.

My third observation is this real dichotomy within law schools that everybody says they want to do more internationalisation, that there’s a resource issue, and yet, nobody's joining the dots together. More internationalisation means a better cohort of international students, which means more resource. You can deliver a much broader syllabus to a much wider group of people by integrating technology. Technology, internationalisation, diversity, accessibility and inclusion – they're not separate issues, they actually all come together.

FP: Amnon, please give us your remarks on the regulation of legal education.

Amnon Lehavi, Co-President of Law Schools Global League, Herzliya: Regulation plays an important role when [done] in a transparent and thoughtful manner, setting clear and attainable goals. So, what are these goals? What role should regulation play for law schools, now, during the pandemic and for years to come?

Law schools should see to it that law students come from all walks of life, all socio-economic strata and encompassing all human activities. Law schools should have a social consciousness, a broad commitment to society and ensure that all major legal fields are taught. We must never neglect those fields of law in which future legal experts will be able to assist those in need – from federal law, to criminal law and public law.

Law schools should see students as future defenders of democracy, human rights and the rule of law. Democracy can be fragile and human rights can be too easily pre-empted in favour of other interests. Law schools have a responsibility – we should be open-minded, politically inclusive and tolerant. Regulation supports us to play a role that goes beyond the professional craftsmanship of mastering jurisprudence and how to draft a contract. Lawyers should always be educated with a broader mission in mind, although they should certainly have the freedom to decide whether to actually accomplish it.

Finally, law schools should see students as the future agents of globalisation. The important process of globalisation and the increasing need for global legal thought cannot be undermined on the basis of national jurisdiction.

SA: Sarah, in your opinion, how is diversity reflected and how should diversity be an element and part of legal education?

SH: There is an enormous disparity in the accessibility of legal education to those who are most committed and most talented on a global scale. In many jurisdictions, law is essentially the privilege of the rich. And, unfortunately, until we can fix that by using technology and open-source information and education, I think we have got a global issue in terms of inclusion for our profession. When you look at the gender diversity inside the faculty, how can we expect our female students of the future to aspire to leadership when 80 per cent of the faculty is female, and very, very few of the higher echelons are women?

This is an abridged version of the showcase session. Virtually Together delegates can watch the session by first logging in to MyIBA then visiting this page on the Virtually Together site