Technology Serves Law Students, Practitioners

by Edward J. Reisner

In the middle of the nineteenth century, as law schools were developing on college campuses, they often were seen as a supplement to the clerking experience their students were receiving working part time for local lawyers. Until the middle of the twentieth century, at least some lawyers still trained by "reading the law" in law offices. While legal education has been fairly stable for more than 50 years, over the 400 years of legal practice on this continent, law schools have changed in response to the expectations of the profession and students, as well as to the economy and the society it serves.

Lawyers already are fulfilling continuing legal education requirements by teleconference, programs delivered by satellite, and, now, by Web-based education. Technological improvements arrive almost daily. While the debt load of graduating law students and the overall cost of legal education increase, traditional law schools are being forced to look at innovative ways to hold down costs and meet the challenges of delivering an ever-increasing panoply of courses, some requiring instructors with very specialized knowledge or experience.

A new graduate from a law school in 1901 would find both legal education and the practice of law almost incomprehensible in 2001. With the increasing pace of change, it will not take another 100 years for us to feel "out of place" unless we adapt and change. While the concept of a law school with no classrooms may be at least surprising, if not alien, to us today, it may be a logical extension of a traditional law school 10 years from now.

The bar exam has been the key to the profession, a method of distinguishing between the qualified and the unqualified, among graduates from law schools of all types, sizes, and traditions. And, once admitted, the marketplace sorts the eminent from the merely competent.

If legal education did not adapt, we would still be teaching by lecture, there would be no legal clinics, and students would graduate with no knowledge about those fields of law that have developed in our own lifetimes. Let law schools continue to develop and incorporate the best of new techniques and technologies.

Edward J. Reisner, U.W. 1972, is an assistant dean at the U.W. Law School, Madison. His responsibilities have included career services, alumni relations, and other administrative matters.

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