Between the efforts of Reynolds and Rose, Wake Forest continues to champion the development of the Innovation Hub Project, or the “I-Hub,” an experiential, multidisciplinary learning platform that allows students, faculty, and working professionals to utilize human-centered designthinking principles for the development of various projects. This platform will also help develop policy structures that enhance innovation, technology, and entrepreneurship in projects that span disciplines, all with Wake Forest Law marked as a distinguished leader. Reynolds also hired the law school’s first professor of practice in technology in 2017. Professor Raina Haque, a former artificial intelligence and fintech software engineer who is one of the first patent lawyers in the blockchain and distributed ledger technology space, helped add more STEM-related courses to the curriculum. “The law school is located in the right place at the right time,” says Haque. “We can partner with developed law, innovation, and technology programs and centers and use their models as blueprints to build a program of study that is unique to Wake Forest and its values. We have tested the waters, and the opportunity and demand is here.”
Professor Haque brought Technology in the Modern Law Practice as well as Coded Governance: Blockchains, Smart Contracts, and Cryptoventures to the curriculum, allowing all students to connect the law with emerging and nuanced areas of technology. “I designed our blockchain course to make it the most robust in the country,” says Haque, “especially in terms of covering the nuances of the technology, business-use cases, and developing regulation.” Brent Plummer (JD ’19) shared the value of this new course: “Our blockchain course was challenging, intriguing, organized, thorough, logical, and more,” says Plummer. “The technical portion of the course challenged me by forcing me into unknown and unchartered territory, but doing so greatly improved my understanding of coding, blockchain, and distributed ledger technology.” These additions created a domino effect. The Master of Laws (LLM) program added a variety of degree specializations, including Technology Law and Intellectual Property Law. For the first time in school history, students were studying the law while experiencing the basics of programming and coding languages. Another first occurred in 2018, when students participated in a competition that combined artificial intelligence software with a real-life fact pattern. Wake Forest joined Duke Law and the University of North Carolina School of Law at the 2018 Seal Software Legal AI Showdown, where students built custom analytics with Seal Software to research topics related to data breaches, limitations of liability, and cyber protection.
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