Law Schools

Law School Offers Program Teaching Corporate Executives To 'Not Be Criminals'

The LLX program moves legal education into a new market.

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In fairness, the new program will provide enrolled executives general legal literacy, but one hopes that a side effect will be some useful “how not to be a criminal” lessons.

Loyola Law School in LA is kicking off an executive education program called LLX, which is presumably a takeoff on the LL.M. degree, but one that no executive will possibly understand making it a curious marketing move. But Xs are cool looking, so they’ve got that going for them.

While LLX’s mission is ostensibly to make legal knowledge accessible to people without law degrees, the law school still wants to make money. Admissions will be selective, and the six-week courses will cost around $1,000. In addition to online courses, LLX will also provide on-campus courses and is open to teaching bespoke curricula on-site at company locations.

“What we’re looking to do is deliver our core product to a different universe of people that could use it and have the ability to pay for it,” said [Dean Michael] Waterstone.

Honestly, this is a fantastic idea that more law schools should consider. While the greater legal education landscape keeps jacking up tuition and sending more students out into the legal market unable to make ends meet, Loyola is over here expanding its base and using its faculty talent in new ways.

The project is headed by Hamilton Chan, who put the whole thing together with a startup mentality, developing an online education platform that could serve as an inspiration for future law school courses if the legal world ever decides it’s ready for online education:

The online platform was designed to offer students an interactive learning experience, said Chan. In addition to watching preproduced instruction videos, students will work through “choose your own adventure”-style exercises in addition to polls, quizzes and fill-in-the blank questions. LLX will also employ “cold calls” to ask students questions under time pressure — a popular technique at business schools.

It’s a popular technique at law schools too, folks.

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The courses certainly sound enticing to an executive. While the first course to launch will be Negotiating for Success — a topic many business instructors teach as well — the second course will be Intro to Contracts, followed by What to Expect When You’re Expecting a Lawsuit, How to Actually Practice Corporate Law, Protecting Your Intellectual Property, and Marijuana Law. For executives it probably should have been Cocaine Law, but we get the point. Learning how to deal with a lawsuit from a client’s perspective could well populate the world with much, much better clients and that would be a boon to lawyers everywhere.

We’ll see how this LLX program works out, but it’s safe to say there are other schools waiting to pounce on this market if Loyola finds success.

A Law School Ventures Into Executive Ed [Inside Higher Ed]

HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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