Reimagining legal education for a profession in perpetual evolution
There is a tendency, particularly since the arrival of AI, to speak of the legal profession as being on the verge of fundamental transformation. But lawyers have heard versions of this story before. The technology may be new; the underlying question — how law should respond when society changes around it — certainly is not.
Law has always had to balance stability and change. Contracts, property, institutions and everyday decisions depend on some confidence about what the rules are. At the same time, a legal system that cannot respond to changes in the society around it will quickly become obsolete. Holmes’s famous observation that “the life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience” was, among other things, a recognition of this fact.
Think of how much the ordinary work of lawyers has already changed. Cross-border movement of people, goods, capital and services has significantly increased the importance of transnational law. More recently, lawyers have had to work out how old concepts apply to the internet, blockchain-based transactions, and even private commercial activity in outer space.
So, change is not new, but what is striking today is the pace of change and its multi-layered character. Consider the regulation of an online platform. It may simultaneously involve contract, competition, privacy and constitutional law. Consequently, a lawyer may need to understand the underlying technology, incentive structures on the platform, and why and how users behave the way they do.
A good lawyer should certainly be able to answer the question: what happens if this dispute reaches court? But increasingly, the more useful question may be: how can we structure this relationship so that the dispute does not arise in the first place?
This, in turn, has implications for legal education. The goal should not be to turn law students into amateur economists, data scientists or climate scientists. But they should know enough to understand what those experts are telling them, recognise the legal consequences of a design choice, and know which questions to ask. They will still have to decide whether the cases retrieved by an AI are actually relevant, understand what an argument is really doing, read between the lines, identify the interests at stake, and judge what advice makes sense for a client in their particular context.
Training students in these skills requires some room for experimentation. Law schools should be able to offer genuinely interdisciplinary and dynamic clinical courses, and develop assessments that test judgment and problem-solving rather than only the reproduction of legal knowledge. Internships should focus on gaining exposure beyond courts and law firms, including in technology, finance, policy and civil society.
The task, ultimately, is not to prepare students for every technological or professional change that might come their way. It is to educate lawyers who can recognise change, understand enough of the world around law to make sense of it, and exercise sound judgement when the familiar boundaries of their profession begin to shift.
The writer is a professor at BITS Law School; Views presented are personal.
