Law Students Are Already Using Legal Technology To Live In The Future

Earlier this month, I went to the Association of American Law Schools annual meeting. It’s a good conference full of law professors and deans thinking deeply about the state of the law and the critical issues of educating young lawyers.

But there were also a lot of legal technology providers and thinkers floating around the conference. Normally, people focus on legal technology from the perspective of actual practitioners. It’s weird to not focus on getting law students to adopt technology given that students are early adopters of tech. If you can train them on your system, then they’ll demand those systems when they enter the workplace. Don’t believe me? Try asking a lawyer under 50 to research cases in a “library.” They’ll act like you’ve told them to build a house without a hammer.

During the conference, I had the opportunity to talk with Vikram Savkar, the Vice President & General Manager, International and Higher Education Markets, of Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S. Here’s a condensed and edited readout of our conversation:

Elie: Okay, first things first, we’re here at AALS, the big law professor, law dean conference. They always throw it up right after the new year for… reasons. Why is Wolters Kluwer here? What’s the play for this particular group of generally musty old men?

Vikram: We are the leading publisher of educational materials for law schools in America. We publish a lot of casebooks that are in use in more than 200 law schools. We also are the leading provider of digital solutions now for the new digital native generation, and that means that the people we have to care about most on a daily basis are law professors and law students. The more we understand what they value and what they are looking for, the better job we can do as a creator of solutions. There is no other place where you can talk to 2,500 law professors over two days.

Elie: We still deal with lawyers who are just like, “Why can’t it work like my typewriter?” What do you see when we’re talking about law professors? Because, on the one hand, they still have that same self-selection against innovation, but on the other hand, they work at a school. There’s a sense that they are a little bit more forward-looking and embracing of the future. What do you find in terms of their uptake and ability to adjust to new technological solutions?

Vikram: Most law students today are digital natives. They grew up with Google and Facebook, and more importantly they grew up in their classrooms with things like MyLabs and technology solutions. To them, being in a classroom is very closely tied to having really cool and powerful technologies to help them succeed, and they are very vocal about that with their professors.

So, whoever the professor is, whatever his or her personal taste for technology is, he or she is very clear that their students are really eager for these technologies. Law professors are scholars, but they’re also passionate teachers, which means they care to give their students what their students want. So, what we find is, if we’re able to give them solutions that students can be excited by, they will use them.

Elie: Let’s get into some of the specific solutions that you offer. I took a demo of Casebook Connect downstairs and the first thing that jumped out to me was that… so, I’m old. When I was in law school we were still fundamentally using books, like physical books. I had to carry my books in my backpack, uphill both ways, to get to property class, right? When I saw CasebookConnect.com, it kind of jumped off the screen, of like, “Well, of course casebooks are digitized or should be.” You were talking about the adoption rate, I kind of feel sorry for the kids who are still lugging the books. It’s just so obvious now that you should be digitizing your casebooks and reading them online.

Vikram: I think you’ve got it. It is on some level obvious and that’s why once we launched, it became very popular very quickly and has continued to grow. Let’s go back to the genesis. Five or six years ago, it wasn’t as obvious, right? Everybody was using print books in the classroom, and they were happy with them. Nobody was saying, “Hey, this situation isn’t working,” and professors felt like, “This is fine, I run my classroom well.” We did a lot of research over the course of a year with hundreds of students, scores of faculty, focus groups, and contextual design.

We actually did some exercises where we watched students studying over their shoulder in a non-intrusive way to the best of our ability and tried to learn how they study. What we learned is there are a few things that students care about that print books weren’t making happen. One, they wanted a huge amount of feedback. It’s a generational issue. This generation of students has grown up getting a lot of feedback in everything they do, and they want that in the law school classroom.

The second thing they wanted was a lot of exercises. They hear these theoretical ideas and they wanted a chance to put it into action.

The third thing was portability. So exactly to your point, lugging books, “uphill, both ways,” is a very real issue. Law school books are huge and carrying five of them was difficult. It meant they couldn’t take them when they went on vacation, or when they’re on the subway. So there were places where they could study and places where they couldn’t study. We designed Casebook Connect to solve all of those problems, and I think to a large extent, it has.

Elie: It looks particularly powerful when the professor is involved.

Vikram: You’re absolutely right, 100 percent right. CasebookConnect.com is useful for students on their own and it helps them learn, but it was designed as a tool for classrooms, not as replacement for classrooms. It was designed as something to facilitate professors. Professors can go in, annotate in the margins, add links to scholarship, put their own notes and highlights to share with students . . . students can actually do that as well to share with each other. It’s very much an interactive tool. You said earlier that CasebookConnect.com digitizes books, and our mission was to make sure that we did more than that. We did more than take the books and put them online. We wanted the reading experience — the consumption experience online — to be much more powerful than a print book, and I am very confident that it is. Not only do we have all these interactive elements to the online book, we’ve got a study center with thousands of questions and exercises that are tightly integrated with the material in the book, so the student reads the book and can understand further what is going on. We’ve got news feeds and features that allow them to share briefs and notes with each other.

Elie: Let’s get to Leading Edge, because this is a conference that you guys run that’s really helping professors share the best innovative practices among themselves.

Vikram: Yes. Leading Edge is one of our favorite things to do. It’s a conference we host every July, the week after the 4th of July, in a cabin in the woods of Illinois. We invite about 30 of the leading movers and shakers, thinkers, and innovators across the entire law school world in America and to some extent around the world. It’s an unconference. What that means is — and it’s a little scary, but it works — what it means is we don’t give them an agenda in advance. We don’t say at 9 o’clock we’ll be talking about this, and at 10 o’clock we’ll be talking about this. We just get together the brightest people we can find in a room, we give them an empty agenda, and for the first hour of the conference we say, “Create your agenda.” They get together and they talk, steam comes out of their heads, and they figure out what they have mutual passions in, and then they build a three-day agenda within an hour. They’ve sketched out 18–20 sessions that they want to cover, and then they run that conference. So it’s a conference that we host and watch, but that they run.

Then what happens is ideas, brainstorming, and collaborations. It’s not only that super interesting things are talked about and that people come up with answers to problems that they’ve been wrestling with for years, but also, they meet people that they are going to collaborate with in the future after they leave the conference.

Elie: What kind of issues have they been facing?

Vikram: There are many things that are talked about in the conference, but I really think that it all boils down to student success, which is the same thing that drives us at Wolters Kluwer. What gets us out of bed in the morning is figuring out: “How can we help more law students succeed?” I think they worry about the same thing. You’ve seen the bar passage rates. You know the number of students who take out loans, go to law school, and then are unable to get jobs. I think the law professors and the deans of these law schools care about this. It’s not a happy situation for them. They’re happy for the students who succeed, but they really want to figure out ways to get all of their students to graduate, pass the bar, and get a job, and we’re a long way from that.

So I think they think a lot about how can we change the curriculum, maybe in profound ways. What kinds of new tools can we use? How do we change our admittance practices? How do we create success tracks to help the struggling students succeed better? What are the predictors of bar passage success? How can we bring design thinking from architectural schools into law schools? How can we work with computer science departments at our school to teach students AI and big data so that they can be prepared to practice in those areas? I think there is a broad set of questions that all boil down to: “How can we make sure that 100 percent of our students succeed?”

Elie: That’s as good a place as any to end it. Thanks for your time.