Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) built in the blockchain are quietly revolutionizing ideas around digital assets despite their questionable status under current law. The smart contracts that control many NFTs are disrupting the way deals are done. At the same time, disputes regarding NFTs and smart contracts are inevitable and parties will need means for dealing with these highly technical issues. The chapter tackles this challenge and proposes that parties turn to online dispute resolution (ODR) to resolve NFT and smart contract disputes efficiently and fairly. Furthermore, the chapter acknowledges the benefits and challenges of current means for addressing blockchain issues and proposes ideas for how designers could address those challenges and incorporate ODR to provide efficient and fair resolutions.

America’s market for legal technology presents a puzzle. On the one hand, America’s market for legal services is among the most tightly regulated in the world, suggesting infertile ground for a legal technology revolution. On the other side of this puzzle is America’s advanced and free-wheeling market for legal tech, which is likely the most robust in the world. This chapter explains this seeming puzzle and then uses that explanation to make some predictions about where legal technology will continue to flourish in America and where legacy players—lawyers, law schools, and judges—will instead stymie its development. In order to predict the future we first must understand the present and the past, so the chapter presents a brief overview of lawyer regulation, the structure of the American market for lawyers and legal services, and the current state of legal tech. This more granular view of the innovation ecosystem can explain why some tech sectors are booming, while others remain stubbornly behind, and also where we’ll see continued and even accelerated legal tech growth and where we won’t.

The justice system is infamously slow in adopting technology.1 Although recent years saw an exponential increase in the role played by technology within the justice system,2 the legal industry has not kept pace with technical advancements to the same extent as other sectors. As put by former Australian High Court Justice, Michael Kirby, a Dickensian lawyer would still feel at home in the court halls of the 1990s courts, while a Dickensian doctor would not comprehend a contemporaneous hospital due to immense modernisation that had taken place at the same time.3 However, in the COVID-19 era, the courts and tribunals are forced to conduct remote hearings, which imposes a degree of technological awareness and proficiency on the justice system.

Most agree that lawyers of the future will need a greater understanding of how technology can be used to design and deliver legal services. The issue for those involved in setting content for any route to qualification is defining the extent to which this must be regulated, as much as identifying the right level of technological capability. The issue is not merely one of content, but the acquisition of competences. Any accreditation must look beyond simply ensuring capability in relation to discrete tools, looking instead to ensure that future solicitors have the ability to adapt to new technologies. Separately, consideration has to be given to the emerging profession of legal technologists. Whilst some technologists may be legally qualified, those that are not must understand the ethical boundaries and regulatory requirements that lawyers work within. The organisation of the legal profession and the regulatory boundaries shared between various stakeholders require us to consider whether accreditation is the right way forward, where responsibility for accreditation should lie and who should take initiative in this space. This chapter explores these issues by contrasting the approach adopted by the Solicitors Regulation Authority in England and Wales with that of the Law Society of Scotland.

Today, technology is driving disruptive change in the legal profession and the public is demanding lawyers offer more value and choice in how legal services are delivered. Given these pressures, tomorrow’s legal profession will be fundamentally different from the profession we know today. Against this backdrop, this chapter argues the next generation of lawyers need at least five categories of multidimensional knowledge and skills: collaboration; design; project management; problem-solving; and lifelong learning. The prevailing, traditional legal education model was not designed to teach these multidimensional skills. This chapter describes some of traditional legal education’s deficiencies, introduces the pedagogy of problem-based learning, and advocates a particular form of this pedagogy: project-based learning that involves real clients or community partners. Through project-based learning – a student-centred, active, and experiential learning model – students learn the fundamentals of law and legal practice while gaining the multidimensional knowledge and skills needed to navigate disruptive change. Project-based learning can prepare law students to actively shape the future of the profession – as opposed to merely reacting to change – by harnessing technology and interdisciplinary insights to improve legal systems and create better legal service models for the public.

The field of dispute resolution has long been at the forefront of modernising legal education. Continuing this tradition, this chapter presents findings from an evaluation of an exercise introduced into the core law school curriculum at Monash University in Australia. In our compulsory litigation and dispute resolution units, we built an experiential exercise in which students resolved a dispute using both an online dispute resolution (ODR) platform and more traditional face-to-face mediation role-play. Students completed a short survey about their experience of the portal (n=64, response rate 30 per cent) and provided their reflective journals about the exercise for analysis (n=55). Drawing on the findings, we consider the benefits and limitations of this approach for facilitating students’ exposure to ODR. We explore themes including student understanding of ODR’s impacts on dispute processes and outcomes; appropriate conduct in dispute resolution settings; and the challenges of computer-mediated communication. We also identify means by which experiential activities can draw students’ attention to power disparities and access to justice challenges in ODR to develop their critical thinking about the rapid developments in this field.

In this chapter we describe a discourse framework for understanding the historical development of modern reports into legal education in England and Wales by analysing the textual features of genre markers. We then apply this framework to a specific subset of topoi within such reports, namely the coverage given to digital technologies within legal education. We make three related claims. First, the discourse and rhetorics of reports on legal education has scarcely been analysed in the research literature, and we begin that process here. Second, the culture and context within which digital innovation is reported, analysed and recommended upon in regulatory reports is relatively shallow and ‘theory-lite’. We need to draw sophisticated insights into our understanding of digital in a variety of disciplines and discourses (e.g. media, education and discourse analysis generally), and apply those to legal education. Third, the genre-form of reports on innovation inhibit or constrain our ability to develop imaginative, theory-rich and persuasive accounts of digital cultures for legal education. Our case study has implications not just for law schools, but also and more significantly, for regulators and accreditors.

What will lead to meaningful change in legal education? And what should be the direction(s) of change? In the United States, as elsewhere, law schools are caught between critics who want them to be more responsive to the changing legal market and the needs of private employers, and critics who want them to do more to resist and shape the private market and promote the public good. These critiques are not wholly incompatible as a blueprint for curricular reform. Increasing students’ exposure to new skills and technologies, experiential training and projects, and collaboration with other professions, provides ‘opportunities for critical analysis and reflection’ as well as making students more employable.

Once characterised as a relatively stable profession, unfettered by the influence of modernity and strongly resistant to external forces, the legal services sector has in recent years exhibited marked change. Efforts to preserve profit margins increasingly eroded by the introduction of new fee models, the demand for increased billing transparency, rising client expectations, the adoption of technology and heightened market competition from high volume legal process outsourcers, have all contributed to the sector’s evolution. In what has been viewed as a clear shift towards corporatisation and commercialisation, the legal profession in a number of jurisdictions has moved away from the broader social mission on which it was founded and in which it existed as ‘a branch of the administration of justice and not a mere money-getting trade’. Free market ideologies have undermined ‘justice and rights in the discourse of law’, and in its place, the generation of profit has become the primary indicator of success.

This chapter documents how the Legal Design Lab at Stanford University has integrated design thinking into law school technology curriculum. In this chapter we profile the objectives of the lab and explore the work the lab has undertaken to introduce new opportunities for skill acquisition through design thinking courses, innovation sprints, and workshops. We explore the purpose, process, and outcomes of these new experiments in legal education, and overview the interdisciplinary methods we have developed, brought from design schools and human-computer interaction programmes. We detail examples of the specific types of classes, sprints, and workshops run, how we define learning outcomes, and how we evaluate student performance. Further, we explore the way in which we leverage technology to provide students with opportunities to acquire user research, mapping, rapid prototyping, and improved communication skills. Drawing on lessons observed over the life of the Design Lab, we conclude by reflecting on our experience of integrating design thinking into a law school programme and argue for the importance of design thinking as an aspect of technology training within and outside of law.

Over the last decade Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the form of data-driven tools designed to support legal task completion, have occupied a growing position within the delivery of private legal services and the exercise of administrative functions by the public sector. As a result, whilst technological literacy was once understood as the capacity to use particular forms of word processing software, navigate the Internet or send electronic correspondence, modern forms of literacy demand a user exhibits a broader range of skills, including the ability to understand, apply, visualise and infer patterns from data. This chapter considers the range of current initiatives developed to address the technology skills and awareness gap amongst law students, and identifies the subject areas that ought to take priority in future curriculum development. It argues that exposure to data analysis and data-driven technologies represents a necessary component of students’ preparation for entry into the professions on the basis that this knowledge: (i) enhances student employability in an increasingly competitive graduate job market; and (ii) equips graduates to meet their wider civic responsibilities to uphold the rule of law and promote access to justice.

The lawyer of the future will exist as a ‘polytechnic’ or ‘many-skilled’ professional, applying their legal expertise to a client’s changing world in an increasingly agile way and within a range of organisational settings. For legal educators, there is a need to consider how education can best prepare future lawyers for this reality. The long view suggests that we should be looking to build core skills in legal, design and logic principles rather than learning specific technologies that may be rapidly superseded. But how can we develop these skills, and how we can balance the need to understand core academic principles of law against the need for applied, workplace experience? This chapter looks at the balancing process, focusing on the impact of changing roles in law firms and the demands of the in-house legal and law-advisory-organisation dynamic. It examines how legal education can instil within lawyers, both an understanding of the principles of law alongside an appreciation of the application of those principles in the workplace. It presents a vision of the roles and specialisations that are likely to emerge within the profession, and considers how the future work of lawyers will sit alongside alternative paths into the legal industry.

Automated decision-making and profiling are becoming more prolific and changing in nature. What began with police photography and Habitual Criminal Registers has reached a new crescendo with computer vision and data science. Law has struggled to adequately regulate these technologies and practices. Where it has been successful, law constrains profiling by protecting ‘identity’. However, in the contemporary technological environment, the notions of identity that animate the legal thinking and the notions of identity that animate the data science and profiling are markedly different. This chapter introduces the argument that these contradictory ways of thinking about people is why the law has struggled to introduce meaningful regulation in this field. It introduces the metaphor of the ‘world state’, the process by which the world and the people within it are translated into the computational world, and asks what law needs to do as the world state becomes more prominent.