An Interview With Anthony W. Crowell
Ari Kaplan spoke with Anthony W. Crowell, the Dean and President of New York Law School
Ari Kaplan spoke with Anthony W. Crowell, the Dean and President of New York Law School, which just launched a Business of Law Institute and released a market research report called – The Business of Law: A Market Research Study to Explore Opportunities for New York Law School Students, which helped to support the new initiative.
Ari Kaplan: Tell us about your background and the genesis of the Business of Law Institute.
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Anthony Crowell: I’m entering my seventh year at New York Law School and came here after 15 years in government practice. I was working in City Hall with Mayor Bloomberg, serving as his counsel for 11 years of my tenure, where I engaged in a lot of business process re-engineering initiatives across the government focusing largely on legal operations and the regulatory work of the city. It was clear that technology was beginning to play a larger role in law offices and businesses on everything from data privacy to information security. As a result, lawyers were not only influencing the general legal functions of these offices, but also offering ideas for how technologists could develop applications in a corporate environment. When I came to New York Law School, one of my key priorities was to study the intersection of law and technology to understand emerging opportunities for our students, not just in e-discovery, but also in governance, risk, and compliance, GDPR, and other areas. We developed a working group to understand how a law school in the 21st century could really step forward and have a meaningful impact for its students while meeting market needs and not shooting from the hip in developing programs.
Ari Kaplan: Why did the law school and the leadership team feel it was necessary to begin the process with market research?
Anthony Crowell: Often in legal education, programs are developed in a way that isn’t necessarily focused on what the market wants, but what educators, scholars, and practitioners believe new lawyers should know. I think that when you’re evaluating the application of technology to deliver legal services faster, cheaper, and in a scalable way, you need to identify market-driven law school training opportunities. It’s fair to say that while we have a very broad and extremely experienced array of faculty, we didn’t have any in-depth experience in terms of how emerging technologies are being used in legal practice. This market study cut across different sectors using technology and helped us understand the range of considerations, opportunities, and viewpoints, including how different employers perceived lawyers with certain skills and their training preferences. It was important for us to hear directly from the market on how we could deliver to them well-informed and well-trained new lawyers.
Ari Kaplan: Why was it so important to combine qualitative interviews, quantitative analytics, and student focus groups?
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Anthony Crowell: The interviews were really critical to understand the perspectives of leaders in the industry, such as those who hire law students and develop technology applications. Many of the survey participants are pioneers in their industries, and we tapped into that perspective because not all training can be done on the job and not all learning can be done in the office setting. We wanted to identify how a law school can give students graduating in the 21st century an advantage by understanding the “business of law” and those skills that will help them come out with a level of fluency and comfort to hit the ground running.
Ari Kaplan: What key findings are helping to drive this initiative?
Anthony Crowell: One of the things that I questioned when we undertook this study was whether there was an opportunity to offer a specialized degree beyond the J.D. The findings seemed to show that there wasn’t much of an appetite for that. We did, however, see an interest in understanding the academic programs and hands-on experiential learning a law school could provide for its students that would carry the most weight in addition to a rich core legal education. The other thing I was interested in knowing was whether there was a market for businesses to send staff members who may not be lawyers for additional legal education, and it seemed that there is an interest in getting them some level of training. There may be certificates, master classes, and CLEs that can be fashioned for legal professionals who are not lawyers. Ultimately, I was glad to know that the market was really focused on giving students hands-on experiential training before they graduate and creating pipelines from law school into a variety of work settings where students could get this training.
Ari Kaplan: Some of the commentary focused on finding ways to align the school’s alumni relationships with the ability to give students more practical experience, and it seems as if you have managed to associate those two perspectives. Was there anything about the research that surprised you?
Anthony Crowell: The research affirmed some of the notions that we had. I think it’s helpful for us to be able to leverage our alumni who are working in these spaces to speak to our students and help them gain an appreciation for their career possibilities. We benefit from the fact that so many of our alumni are in a diverse array of legal careers, with a number on the cutting edge in this space right now. Being in New York, we are also among the schools with the largest representation of alumni in financial services, compliance, and fintech.
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Ari Kaplan: How is the research guiding the development of the Business of Law Institute?
Anthony Crowell: The Business of Law Institute is going to start with a series of programs that tap into our alumni and other experts, who will teach master classes that give an in-depth review of different areas, including data privacy, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and other pressing issues. We are also going to be providing learning labs for students to use the technological resources the instructors discuss. They will actually be able to put their hands on them and start to gain experience assisting alumni and others, who will supervise them in a structured work setting. Law students need to know the substantive issues and the legal framework, but also how to actually engage with technology in a way that allows them to produce a quality product by understanding the theory, as well as the practical impact. It’s something that we are very excited about. To that end, we’re engaging with a variety of software vendors who will help our students use their products in school and at work, whether at banks, consulting firms, law firms, or government agencies. It will be nice for them to have that arc of information, knowledge development, and training, both at school, but also in a practical setting where they’re producing a real work product.
Ari Kaplan: How does this new initiative reflect the trajectory of legal education and the profession?
Anthony Crowell: More than ever, legal education has to embrace what’s going on in the wider world by looking at legal services because the way lawyers do their job, and the way companies undertake their corporate responsibilities, compliance efforts, risk management, information governance, and privacy protocols in changing. We have to understand what the new regulatory overlay means and why it’s in place. We have an obligation to teach our students those things, but we also have an obligation to help our students understand the practical implications and how to actually navigate those regulatory complexities. It cannot be just high theory. It has to be about understanding how to take that knowledge and put it to work for the everyday task at hand.
Ari Kaplan regularly interviews leaders in the legal industry and in the broader professional services community to share perspective, highlight transformative change, and introduce new technology.