Legal Technology and Innovation Competency

I had some projects that I wanted to work on this summer after I turned in some writing commitments and I’m happy/proud/shocked to announce that I completed one.

Well, completed v1.0 of one.

As you may know, one of the things that I am obsessed with is Legal Technology and Innovation training and education. It feels like there’s no firm agreement on what technology and innovation mean in the legal world, what competency means, or how to assess it.

Both new and experienced legal professionals are left confused about what they need to know, how much of it they need to know, and where to gain these skills and knowledge.

So I made something.

(If you don’t want to read through the rest of this, the link is here.)

Depending on how you look at it, I’ve been working on this for either a few months or 15 years. I helped create my first “Learning 2.0” MooC for my University of Kentucky co-workers in 2008 or 2009. We did a more legal focused one a few years later at CALI. When I was at the ABA, I tried to get a legal tech training and education program together, but it fell through.

Since I left the ABA, I’ve been wanting to create a Legal Tech & Innovation MOOC like we used to do when Obama was in office. I decided to get serious about it this year. The <waves hands in the general direction of everything> makes one really want to not waste time anymore.

My initial plan was to create a resource that linked to available online learning programs, ideally ones that were free or relatively low cost. I knew I wanted to limit it to “legal technology and innovation”, I knew how I wanted to organize the skills and knowledge that I considered important, and I knew there were tons of accessible resources out there for people to use if they could just find them.

Then I got stuck.

Also, summer in Chicagoland is really nice.

Then I went to the AALL Annual meeting and heard a presentation by the librarians at GSU about their legal tech competency program. (Also, coincidentally, my former law school classmate Leigh Zeiser who now manages the IncuBaker program at BakerHostetler contributed to the session.) They reminded me of the existence of Bloom’s Taxonomy and suddenly everything snapped into place.

The problem was that I had forgotten the fundamentals of course design, such as creating learning objectives and assessment models.

Although I started off wanting to make a list of available online educational resources, I realized that I needed something to guide selection and to map content to. So my Legal Tech Course has ended up being a framework of competency in legal technology and education. My product roadmap is included, but in case you don’t get that far, I do plan on going in and adding educational materials. I also provided brief instructions for people that want to create their own program.

So, check it out: Legal Technology & Innovation Explorer

I did this in my free time, with no motivation other than to organize my thoughts and find links of educational materials to share. Then it all sort of snowballed.

Who is it for? It’s for lawyers, it’s for legal ops people, it’s for law students, it’s for paraprofessionals, it’s for people working in justice organizations. It wasn’t what I set out to do, but I ended up creating a modular framework that could be applied to learning needs regardless of where the learner worked, what type of work they do, where they lived, or what stage of their career they happened to be in.

In my not so humble opinion, most of the skills and knowledge covered by “legal technology and innovation” can’t be learned in a 3 hour CLE in a hotel meeting room but they also don’t require a several hour a week commitment for 13 weeks. And there’s no reason that only people able to pay several thousand dollars should be able to access this type of knowledge.

I hope it helps to move the conversation forward but I have no expectation of anything coming from it. I would say it was a labor of love but I don’t even like a lot of the people that could benefit from it.

It’s licensed CC-BY-NC, so as long as you want to do something non-commercial with it, knock yourself out. Reuse it, remix it, adapt it, whatever. If you want to do something commercial with it, get in touch.

As always, I’m happy to hear feedback. Shoot me an email (Sarah.Glassmeyer AT Gmail). I will be wandering around ILTAcon, so if you want to grab a coffee and geek out about legal tech education, let’s do it.