Innovation
Students attending the ConPosium gathered in Miami in April.
LawWithoutWalls Kindling the Creative Spirit By Catharine Skipp
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icture a global NGO’s online network specifically designed to connect legal, political and community advocates around the world who fight against human trafficking. Or a low-cost website, using widely available web tools, that crunches data and produces valuable information to prospective law students who are unsure whether taking on the debt of attending a particular law school is a wise financial decision, considering the current job and salary prospects for the school’s recent graduates. Or a smartphone app for female lawyers that connects users with other female lawyers to form an online community, while also offering a variety of services, functions and resources. These days, many people earning a paycheck from the law are legal entrepreneurs — without a law degree, a shingle or a wood-paneled office that bills by the hour. They are mining a field that for years was the exclusive province of lawyers and their firms, often at such bewilderingly high cost that many of the potential clients most in need of legal help never received it. Such changes in the legal landscape motivated Miami Law’s Michele DeStefano and Michael Bossone to create LawWithoutWalls, a course that draws students from around the world to discover far-reaching innovations for the legal profession, give birth to new business ideas and address a crucial inquiry — how will law be taught and practiced in the future, and how will lawyers make a living? “The only way lawyers are going to survive is to innovate in order to meet the market’s evolving demands,” Professor DeStefano said. Bossone, special advisor to Miami Law Dean
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Patricia D. White, added that “developing lawyers for a new vision of legal practice requires a new model for today’s legal education, and LawWithoutWalls is one such new model.” Peter Lederer, another of LawWithoutWalls’ founders, said that no matter how much people may dislike it, change is inevitable. “Lawyers will continue to be needed and new lawyers will keep coming along, but they face a world in which getting a conventional job may be impossible,” said Lederer, a former managing partner at Chicago’s Baker & McKenzie, one of the largest law firms anywhere. Embarking on its third year, LawWithoutWalls continues to challenge the talents and vision of law and business students from around the world. Meeting in once-weekly virtual sessions featuring real-time video technology, students from 18 schools — across six continents and many time zones — immerse themselves in the intricacies of legal concepts that question conventional notions of how the law is taught and practiced. “These sessions are a time for open and collaborative exchange among people from different disciplines about hot topics facing the legal marketplace,” the LawWithoutWalls website says. Not every connection is virtual. The course’s opening and closing sessions are face-to-face affairs. For the launch of the 2013 session in January, students and their academic mentors — as well as the legal practitioners, business professionals and entrepreneurs known as “thought leaders” in LawWithoutWalls — will meet for an intensive two-day session at IE Business School’s medieval-meetsmodern campus in Segovia, Spain. “It is exhilarating and inspiring,” Dean White said after attending the kick-off of the 2012 session in St. Gallen, Switzerland. Dean White, whose leadership and support has been instrumental to LawWithoutWalls’ success, said the kick-off weekends provide “a strong foundation for the remarkable collaborative work these teams do.” One of the primary benefits of the kick-off sessions, according to past participants, is that they enable students to get to know each other personally before returning to their home countries, where they use technology such as Adobe Connect and Google+ to share their ideas and develop their projects. Students then regroup at the University of Miami for the semester-ending ConPosium, a tech playground where they use Prezis — cloud-based presentation software — to explain their projects to Skyped-in judges, while members of the audience live-chat each other in multiple languages. “LawWithoutWalls could not happen without really cool tech tools,” Bossone and Professor DeStefano wrote in an e-mail. “We spent hundreds of hours testing dozens of products to find the ones that would best meet our collective needs, tweaking and customizing them to create a culture of collaboration, and to kindle our innovative spirit.”