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Reimagining Innovation In Legal Education

Ari Kaplan speaks with Gabe Teninbaum, a professor at Suffolk University Law School and the director of the Institute on Legal Innovation and Technology

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Ari Kaplan speaks with Gabe Teninbaum, a professor at Suffolk University Law School and the director of the Institute on Legal Innovation and Technology.

Ari Kaplan: Tell us about your background and your work at Suffolk University Law School.

Gabe Teninbaum: I’ve been at the law school for just over 10 years and for the last few years I’ve been running the legal innovation and technology program. Prior to that, I was a legal writing professor and spent a lot of time with students thinking about how they should solve legal problems most effectively and efficiently, which was informed by my work as a practicing lawyer.

Ari Kaplan: I had the chance to visit the Legal Innovation and Technology lab. How do students take advantage of the opportunity to work there?

Gabe Teninbaum: The LIT lab is a research and development project within the law school. It runs like a clinic, where students are assigned to real projects for real clients. They could be legal aid recipients, courts, or even for-profit law firms.

Ari Kaplan: Why are law schools incorporating initiatives like the LIT lab into their programming?

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Gabe Teninbaum: I would like to think that part of the reason is because being capable with technology is now a core responsibility for all practicing lawyers. We have an obligation to be competent in relevant tools and to do that, we need to do more than point people to news articles or provide general awareness. Our belief here is that you have to get people working on things hands-on, which is what the LIT lab does. Our students are performing real-life data science tasks, building apps and websites for clients, and engaging in projects to meaningfully change the way people interact with the legal system. The hope is that we are helping students gain responsibility and preparing them to be terrific practitioners, who have access to new jobs. I think that might be why other schools are starting to do it too.

Ari Kaplan: Can you share some examples of projects on which your students have worked?

Gabe Teninbaum: In one really exciting project we did with Stanford Law School, which the Pew Foundation funded, we built a tool to help create a taxonomy of legal problems. Similar to a Google search, it leads you to the results that are most relevant based on a machine learning algorithm. Nothing like that really exists for legal aid so if you visit your legal aid organization’s website and search for bankruptcy, it doesn’t typically have any sort of smart mechanism that directs you to the right resources or the correct individuals. Since you need to have people who are experts in machine learning and a large corpus of information, we partnered with Reddit, which has about 75,000 random requests for legal advice. We created a game to help organize this information and an algorithm that categorizes it for legal aid organizations. Last year, we also had a team of students that built an automated tool for people in Minnesota, who were having bed bug problems, to assert their rights with their landlords, cure the situation, and secure any compensation to which they were entitled. And, a student, who is now an ABA Center for Innovation fellow, built a tool to give juvenile court judges access to information about minors that appear before them, such as their age, home town, and special needs, e.g., anger management, drug treatment, or job training. The judges can then identify the closest facilities with open beds, rather than send the individual to jail. There are also dozens of projects that students perform within the classrooms themselves. The LIT lab is just one piece of the hands-on training to which our law students have access.

Ari Kaplan: What skills do today’s students need to have that prior generations did not worry about?

Gabe Teninbaum: Students need to understand what technologies are relevant and how to identify the tools that might help them in any given situation. Not every student needs to learn how to code, build an expert system, or automate documents, but every one of them should be able to recognize where those technologies will be useful, as well as find someone that can do the work. We are also deep believers in adapting engineering principles like Lean and Six Sigma to law so that students can immediately apply process improvements to complex transactions and litigation. We also want them to understand new business models for delivering legal services.

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Ari Kaplan: You run an educational technology company called Spaced Repetition Systems. How does your entrepreneurial background inform your teaching style and philosophy?

Gabe Teninbaum: The website itself is relevant to what we do here because it uses an algorithm to identify the right moment that students should study flash cards based on 100-year-old psychology research. It very closely relates to the mindset that I try to teach, which is to acknowledge that there are problems in the legal market that could be solved by new products. As a result, we spend a lot of time thinking about solutions to problems, new markets, and entrepreneurial opportunities.

Ari Kaplan: How do you see law school changing in the next few years?

Gabe Teninbaum: There will be more emphasis on practical skills like process improvement that new lawyers can perform effectively and efficiently on behalf of clients. Law students also have to be savvy about delivering good service experiences, which requires soft skills and an ability to work in teams. At Suffolk, we have a clinical program and about 200 electives that focus on some of these in-demand skills. They get people jobs and, frankly, they make for a fun experience for students. Students like to do things that are a little bit different and we’re giving them those opportunities.

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. 

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