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Harvard Law’s Berkman Center and LexisNexis Partner to Study Law School Curriculum
Are Law Schools Giving Young Lawyers Tools to Succeed?
Harvard and LexisNexis See Room for Improvement
CHICAGO, IL, September 20, 2006 - LexisNexis and Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society are partnering to ensure that the next generation of law school graduates is equipped with new technology and electronic litigation tools, skills that are rarely included in law school curricula, according to Andrew Prozes, CEO of LexisNexis Group, and John Palfrey, Executive Director of the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School.
Young lawyers are highly motivated to embrace emerging technologies such as e-discovery and early case assessment, but these and other software-based skills are infrequently taught in law school, forcing law firms to close the education gap and bear significant training costs when graduates enter the workforce, the two executives said. They announced their partnership at the annual conference of the International Bar Association here today.
"Are law schools responsible for lawyers’ being prepared for today’s technology world? – it’s a fundamental question, and one we’re not sanguine about," said Andrew Prozes, CEO of LexisNexis Group and Reed Elsevier board member. "New technology is revolutionizing the legal profession from the ground up, but critical thinking and the history of law continue to dominate law school curricula, producing lawyers with a superb grounding in the critical and important past and little in terms of today’s technology world."
Prozes said that a majority of LexisNexis’ law firm clients invest in technology training for new graduates, and that LexisNexis itself hires hundreds of new lawyers a year and finds significant additional training to be necessary, leading to greater below-the-line expense and decreased productivity.
"It’s exasperating for us when we meet with young lawyers and find they have little awareness of the electronic and filing tools that increasingly define our profession," Prozes said.
The Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center and LexisNexis partnership will begin by defining the parameters of discussion: How to quantify technology’s impact on the practice of law, what technology skills are an essential part of the legal profession, and how education can better prepare students for success in the marketplace. The eventual goal is creating recommendations on how next-generation law school curricula can preserve the fundamentals of critical thinking and legal history, while at the same time equipping graduates with technology training and skills.
"It’s not just the legal environment that has changed," said John Palfrey, Clinical Professor of Law and Executive Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. "Today’s students are ‘digital natives’ – they’ve grown up with social software, IM, e-mail, blogs, and online search engines. There’s a critical need for dialogue on how law schools can maintain the fundamentals of a legal education while also adapting to the technology and information age.
"We are grateful for the opportunity to partner with LexisNexis, an established leader in the innovation and development of legal technology. This research has potential implications for every institution that engages in the study, teaching, and practice of law, from courtrooms to our own classrooms at Harvard," said Palfrey.
The Berkman Center, one of the premier research centers in the world focusing on the intersection of law and technology, includes among its ranks such notable faculty as Charles Nesson, Charles Ogletree, John Palfrey, Jonathan Zittrain, William Fisher, and Lawrence Lessig. This project is unrelated to work and opinions on copyright and in no way represent an endorsement by LexisNexis of those views. This partnership is an example that business and academe can work together for the benefit of legal education while agreeing to disagree on other issues of import.
With this project, LexisNexis joins an elite list of companies that partner with the Berkman Center. The Berkman Center’s other current corporate partners include Google, IBM, Microsoft, eBay, Reuters, and others. A white paper created by the Berkman Center under the supervision of John Palfrey will be released at the end of the year.
About Lexis Nexis
LexisNexis® (www.lexisnexis.com) is a leading provider of information and services solutions, including its flagship Web-based Lexis® and Nexis® research services, to a wide range of professionals in the legal, risk management, corporate, government, law enforcement, accounting and academic markets. A member of Reed Elsevier Group plc [NYSE: ENL; NYSE: RUK] (www.reedelsevier.com), LexisNexis serves customers in 100 countries with 13,000 employees worldwide.
In the United States, LexisNexis® (www.lexisnexis.com) offers its customers total practice solutions comprised of an extensive range of online and print legal, regulatory, news and business information products, tools, customized Web applications and critical filing services that help legal professionals achieve excellence in the business and practice of law. One such solution, LexisNexis® Total Litigator, helps legal professionals gain a competitive edge by combining critical products, services and content through an intuitively organized platform.
About Berkman Center for Internet & Society
The Berkman Center is a research program based at Harvard Law School and founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development. It represents a network of faculty, students, fellows, entrepreneurs, lawyers, and virtual architects working to identify and engage with the challenges and opportunities of cyberspace.
The Berkman Center investigates the real and possible boundaries in cyberspace between open and closed systems of code, of commerce, of governance, and of education, and the relationship of law to each. This is done through active rather than passive research, believing that the best way to understand cyberspace is to actually build out into it. Faculty, fellows, students, and affiliates engage with a wide spectrum of Net issues, including governance, privacy, intellectual property, antitrust, content control and electronic commerce.
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