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How Does A Law School Innovate? Mulling That Question At BYU Law

BYU Law is putting significant effort into thinking about innovation to better prepare its students for an increasingly complex and unpredictable world.

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“I want BYU to be known as, if not the most innovative law school in the country, then one of the most innovative law schools in the country.”

With that bold statement, D. Gordon Smith, dean of the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University, kicked off a day of presentations and conversations Friday around where the school is in its journey towards that goal and what more lies ahead.

Present were the members of a professionally diverse advisory board that Smith convened to help the school think through answers to one overarching question: How will BYU prepare students for an increasingly complex and unpredictable world?

Among those attending were Margaret Hagan, director of the Legal Design Lab at Stanford University; Daniel W. Linna Jr., director of the Center for Legal Services Innovation at Michigan State University and creator of the Law School Innovation Index; a judge on the Tenth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals; two Utah Supreme Court justices; Utah Attorney General Sean D. Reyes; law firm partners; corporate CEOs; the president of an international human rights foundation; a TV news anchor; and several BYU Law faculty and students.

In law, the word “innovation” is often used as shorthand for leading-edge technologies and next-generation practice models. But during Friday’s meeting, the term encompassed a broader meaning, of how to equip law students with the skills and experience — beyond legal knowledge — that will enable them to succeed in their careers.

Through a series of presentations, faculty and students described initiatives already underway at the law school. I have previously written here and on my blog about one of these, the LawX Lab, a practicum in which students identify an access-to-justice problem and then design and create a solution. Smith said he was inspired to create the lab after attending a presentation by one of Friday’s attendees, Margaret Hagan, who is often recognized as the guru of design thinking in law.

Teaching Leadership

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Other initiatives are intended to teach skills not traditionally covered in law school curricula. One such skill is leadership. BYU Law should be a school, Smith said, that “inspires leadership in ideas and action.” To that end, the school last year created a course, “Foundations in Law and Leadership,” co-taught by Smith and James L. Ferrell, a lawyer and the founder of The Arbinger Institute, which has published three books on leadership.

The traditional, highly competitive law school environment is anathema to the core of leadership, Ferrell told the members of the advisory board. “What great leaders do is help other people succeed. We wanted to create a course that incentivized that, that got students into the idea, ‘How do we become people who are really good at helping other people succeed.’’’

Nothing in the course is about law, per se. Rather, students read, write and talk about leadership and how it plays out in their own lives.

“We told them the first day, ‘Nothing in this course will help you pass the bar, but more than any other course here, it will help you in every other aspect of your life and career,’” Ferrell said.

Teaching Other Skills

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The leadership course has proven so popular that the school is considering making it part of the first-year core curriculum. Meanwhile, the school is — or is planning to — teach other unique skills.

Storytelling. Believing that storytelling is a core skill of effective lawyering, the school has launched three initiatives, all under the guidance of K. Marie Kulbeth, assistant dean of communications, and Rebecca Clark, publications director. One is a speaker series featuring lawyers and professional storytellers presenting on various aspects of the craft of storytelling.

Another is the Law Stories initiative, a competition in which students write brief stories that must be both true and related to the law. Finalists will present their stories orally in a judged story slam. The third, Law Reads, engages students in reading and discussing stories related to law. For next year, the school will expand the speaker series and may hire a storytelling coach.

Business ethics. Because many of its students go on to careers working for or within corporations, BYU Law has two initiatives to teach business ethics — as distinct from legal ethics.

One is a class in compliance and ethics, taught by professor Craig D. Galli. The other is a joint initiative of the law school and BYU’s Marriott School of Business to develop a master’s degree in ethics and compliance, spearheaded by professor Bradley R. Agle, author of The Business Ethics Field Guide.

“Ethics is a skill set,” Agle said. “If you want to be a great and ethical leader, time and effort are required to learn the skills.”

Science and technology. Under development to launch within the next two years is a class in science and technology. Stephanie Bair, the law professor and former neuroscientist who is developing the course, said the goal is to prepare students to tackle technological and scientific innovation as they encounter it in their future careers.

The course will address how advances in technology and science may change the letter of the law, as well as how they may impact the practice of law.

Clinical Experience

Clinical training, as a concept, is hardly innovative. Law schools have offered it for decades. But BYU Law has three clinical programs that each, in its own way, puts an innovative spin on clinical training.

Negotiation and Conflict Resolution Clinic. BYU was only the second law school to offer a negotiation clinic, after Harvard, and is still among only a few that have followed suit. The goal, said director Benjamin J. Cook, is to teach students to help organizational clients not simply address disputes, but step back and examine the sources of disputes and how best to address them through dispute system design.

“The clinic is a path to advancing peace,” Cook said, adding that, in the future, clients will not be asking lawyers to draft arbitration clauses, since they’ll find those online. Instead, they’ll be turning to lawyers for larger solutions to issues that give rise to conflict.

Students in the course have worked with organizations as diverse as the Urban Indian Center of Salt Lake, the government of Costa Rica, and the Utah Refugee Services Office.

Community Law Clinic. This clinic, run by professor Carl Hernandez III, sounds more like a traditional law school clinic. Run out of Deseret Industries, a thrift store that offers employment training, it handles a range of legal problems.

But when the school was preparing to launch the clinic, it discovered that Utah had one of the most restrictive student-practice rules in the country. So students drafted a more liberal rule and successfully lobbied for its adoption. As a result, students in the clinic can now represent clients from start to finish of a matter, supervised by Hernandez but operating with significant discretion.

Law and Entrepreneurship Clinic. This clinic, explained third-year student Ryan Lewis, provides legal services to entrepreneurs seeking to launch their companies. Students take full responsibility for the clients assigned to them, he said, not only counseling them on the law, but also helping them think through other aspects of their business.

“We learned the skills involved in managing clients,” Lewis said. “Once a client is given to you, it’s your client.” By managing clients himself, he quipped, “I learned what it means to overpromise, and I learned what it means to underdeliver.”

Technology Innovation

None of the above should be taken to mean that BYU Law is ignoring technological innovation. In addition to the LawX Lab mentioned above, it recently served as a host site for the Global Legal Hackathon, where several BYU student teams developed projects, and it also hosted a conference on blockchain in law.

In addition, BYU Law has developed a one-of-its-kind product devoted to law and corpus linguistics. The product analyzes collections of textual materials to help scholars and researchers get at the meaning of words as they naturally occur in speech and text. The goal is to help lawyers and judges ascertain the ordinary meaning of words through their usage.

One of the participants in Friday’s meeting, Thomas R. Lee, associate chief justice of the Utah Supreme Court, has used BYU’s corpus linguistics in published opinions and recently published an article in the Yale Law Journal, Judging Ordinary Meaning, in which he and co-author Stephen Mouritsen argue for using corpus-based analysis to interpret the original meaning of legal words and phrases. Next year, he will teach a class at Harvard Law School on corpus linguistics.

Professionalism, Integrity, and Faith

As the day neared its end, the conversation turned to weightier philosophical discussions of how to teach law students about professionalism, integrity and faith.

“Being a good lawyer isn’t just about skill sets,” said professor Elizabeth Clarke. “It is also about wisdom, judgment and being able to use legal skills in a broader moral context.”

And because BYU Law is affiliated with the Mormon church, that means that students should also be taught about how to integrate their faith into their professional lives.

“For people of faith, integrity isn’t integrity if you have to check your religious beliefs at the door,” Clarke said. “Having a religiously affiliated law school presents an opportunity to embrace this intersection between faith and intellect.”

The participants at Friday’s meeting agreed that these concepts of professionalism and faith can be embodied in one word — integrity — and that teaching that to students is paramount.

But how does a law school teach integrity? By example, all seemed to agree.

“The commitment to integrity has to be pervasive throughout the curriculum,” Clarke said. “We can provide personal and professional models of what this kind of integrated life can look like. Integrity at the institutional level involves faculty and staff who provide a model.”

Pursuing Innovation

So what does it mean for a law school to innovate? BYU is just one example of how a law school can conceptualize and implement innovative teaching methods. Other schools may be more innovative. Many others are certainly less innovative.

But what impresses me is that BYU Law is putting significant effort into thinking about innovation, not just for innovation’s sake, but to better prepare its students for, as Dean Smith said, an increasingly complex and unpredictable world.

Will he achieve his goal of making BYU the most innovative law school in the country? After just two years as dean, he is off to a good start.

Robert Ambrogi Bob AmbrogiRobert Ambrogi is a Massachusetts lawyer and journalist who has been covering legal technology and the web for more than 20 years, primarily through his blog LawSites.com. Former editor-in-chief of several legal newspapers, he is a fellow of the College of Law Practice Management and an inaugural Fastcase 50 honoree. He can be reached by email at [email protected], and you can follow him on Twitter (@BobAmbrogi).

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