Digital Lawyering

In today’s rapidly changing legal landscape, becoming a digital lawyer is vital to success within the legal profession. This textbook provides an accessible and thorough introduction to digital lawyering, present and future, and a toolkit for gaining the key attributes and skills required to utilise technology within legal practice effectively. Digital technologies have already begun a radical transformation of the legal profession and the justice system. Digital Lawyering introduces students to all key topics, from the role of blockchain to the use of digital evidence in courtrooms, supported by contemporary case studies and integrated, interactive activities. The book considers specific forms of technology, such as Big Data, analytics and artificial intelligence, but also broader issues including regulation, privacy and ethics. It encourages students to explore the impact of digital lawyering upon professional identity, and to consider the emerging skills and competencies employers now require. Using this textbook will allow students to identify, discuss and reflect on emerging issues and trends within digital lawyering in a critical and informed manner, drawing on both its theoretical basis and accounts of its use in legal practice. Digital Lawyering is ideal for use as a main textbook on modules focused on technology and law, and as a supplementary textbook on modules covering lawyering and legal skills more generally.

With increasing digitalization and the evolution of artificial intelligence, the legal profession is on the verge of being transformed by technology (legal tech). This handbook examines these developments and the changing legal landscape by providing perspectives from multiple interested parties, including practitioners, academics, and legal tech companies from different legal systems. Scrutinizing the real implications posed by legal tech, the book advocates for an unbiased, cautious approach for the engagement of technology in legal practice. It also carefully addresses the core question of how to balance fears of industry takeover by technology with the potential for using legal tech to expand services and create value for clients. Together, the chapters develop a framework for analyzing the costs and benefits of new technologies before they are implemented in legal practice. This interdisciplinary collection features contributions from lawyers, social scientists, institutional officials, technologists, and current developers of e-law platforms and services.

The world of law is a world of information. Rules, judgments, decisions, interpretations, and agreements all involve using and communicating information. Today, we are experiencing a significant transition, from letters fixed on paper to information stored electronically. The digital era, where information is created, stored, and communicated electronically, is quickly approaching, if not already here. The future of law will no longer be found in impressive buildings and leather-bound books, but in small pieces of silicon, in streams of light, and in millions of miles of wires and cable. It will be a world of new relationships and greater possibilities for individual and group communication, an environment where the value of information increases as it is shared. In Law in a Digital world, M. Ethan Katsh explores how these new technologies will alter one of our most central institutions. He considers the different ways in which people will not only electronically read and write, but also interact with our vast storehouses of legal knowledge and information. He envisions how sounds and pictures will play into the largely imageless print world of law, and looks at the future importance of graphic and nontextual communication. He explores how the flexible, personalized organization of data will transform the way we gather information, and whether information can or cannot be contained, raising questions of copyright and privacy. What happens to the law when information is more plentiful and accessible? What happens to those people who suddenly have access to information never before available? Does the use of information in a new form change the institution, the user, and those who come in contact with the user? And, what role does the lawyer play in all of this? For citizens, for lawyers, for all those who will be part of the digital world rushing toward us, Katsh answers these questions while considering the implications of this new era.

Open Book: The Inside Track to Law School Success, 2E is a book that every JD and LLM law student needs to read, either before classes start or as they get going in their 1L year. Now in an expanded second edition, the book explains in a clear and easygoing, conversational manner what law professors expect from their students both in classes and exams. The authors, award-winning teachers with a wealth of classroom experience, give students an inside look at law school by explaining how, despite appearances to the contrary, classes connect to exams and exams connect to the practice of law. Open Book introduces them to the basic structure of our legal system and to the distinctive features of legal reasoning. To prepare students for exams, the book explains in clear and careful detail what exams are designed to test. It then devotes a single, clearly written chapter to each step of the process of answering exams. It also contains a wealth of material, both in the book and digitally, on preparing for exams. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Open Book comes with a free suite of 18 actual law school exams in Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law, Contracts, Criminal Law, Property and Torts, written and administered by law professors. These exams include not only questions, but: (1) annotations from the professors explaining what they were looking for; (2) model answers written by the professors themselves; and (3) actual student answers, with professor comments that explain why certain answers were stronger of weaker. As Open Book explains, there is no better way to prepare for exams than by practicing, and these unique materials will enable students to get the most out of their pre-exam practice.

Teaching Legal Education in the Digital Age explores how legal pedagogy and curriculum design should be modernised to ensure that law students have a realistic view of the future of the legal profession. Using future readiness and digital empowerment as central themes, chapters discuss the use of technology to enhance the design and delivery of the curriculum and argue the need for the curriculum to be developed to prepare students for the use of technology in the workplace. The volume draws together a range of contributions to consider the impact of digital pedagogies in legal education and propose how technology can be used in the law curriculum to enhance student learning in law schools and lead excellence in teaching. Throughout, the authors consider what it means to be future-ready and what we can do as law academics to facilitate the knowledge, skills and dispositions needed by future-ready graduates. Part of Routledge’s series on Legal Pedagogy, this book will be of great interest to academics, post-graduate students, teachers and researchers of law, as well as those with a wider interest in legal pedagogy or legal practice.

The purchase of this ebook edition does not entitle you to receive access to the Connected eBook with Study Center on CasebookConnect. You will need to purchase a new print book to get access to the full experience, including: lifetime access to the online ebook with highlight, annotation, and search capabilities; practice questions from your favorite study aids; an outline tool and other helpful resources. Many professional responsibility professors struggle to engage students in a required course, one that students wouldn’t otherwise have chosen to take, covering material that simultaneously appears both obvious and intricately technical. Ethical Lawyering: A Guide for the Well-Intentioned addresses those concerns with a fresh look at teaching and learning Professional Responsibility. Instead of containing impenetrable cases typical of most professional responsibility casebooks, which force students and teachers to sort out convoluted facts and incomplete or out-of-date analysis, this book “flips the classroom” by providing detailed explanations of the Model Rules, accompanied by problems for class discussion that require students to explore how the Rules apply in real-world situations—a structure which lends itself easily to both in-person and online courses. The book’s explanations are focused on building statutory interpretation skills, and then bringing these skills to common practice scenarios. Discussion covers all aspects of the law governing lawyers, from professional discipline to civil liability to court sanctions, as well as informal concerns, such as client relations and the business of law practice. Professors and students will benefit from: A “flipped classroom” structure in which the book provides detailed explanations of the Model Rules, interspersed with problems for class discussion, that are both drawn from practice and illustrate some of the challenges in applying the rules in real-world situations. MPRE-style multiple-choice review questions at the end of each chapter (or after substantial portions of a chapter) addressing the material. An informal, irreverent, down to earth, and conversational style, meant to be accessible, crafted to engage students without understating the seriousness of the subject matter, and to encourage them to put themselves into the “hot seats” that the problems describe. A statutory construction approach to the Model Rules, designed to build text-interpretation skills. A comprehensive treatment of the law regulating lawyers, considering all of the practical hazards that lawyers face, and illustrating the connections between the Model Rules as a basis for professional discipline and the law of torts (fiduciary duty and malpractice), contracts (scope of the attorney-client relationship and engagement agreements), agency (authority), and procedure (sanctions), as well as informal concerns such as client relations and reputational issues. A digital edition that includes links to all necessary statutory materials. Teaching materials Include: A detailed Teacher’s Manual, including: Suggested syllabi for two-hour and three-hour courses. Detailed analyses of all of the problems, including pedagogical suggestions, to stimulate class discussion. Explanatory answers to the MPRE-style multiple-choice review questions. Suggested PowerPoints for class use. Two online-only chapters (The Government Lawyer; Judicial Ethics).

This up-to-date book includes recent research and scholarship in all four skills: interviewing, counseling, negotiation, and fact analysis. Drawing on years of teaching experience, The author show students how to organize, analyze, and marshal facts into powerfully persuasive arguments. This Highly-Effective Text Offers: a unique emphasis on fact analysis that shows students how to recognize, organize, and utilize the persuasive value of facts, with new charts, illustrating factual patterns and organization expert instruction in essential legal skills from a highly experienced author team, covering the basics of problem solving, interviewing, counseling, and negotiating a streamlined, example-driven presentation minimizing theoretical digressions, and instead, drawing students into real case situations and problem-solving scenarios consistent attention to ethical concerns, alerting students to issues of moral and professional conduct wherever appropriate This New Edition Also Features: three new chapters: Communication Skills, Cross-Cultural Issues, and Fact Investigation focus on professionalism that includes working with clients, problem-solving with adversaries, and reflecting on core issues and more examples from criminal law, The area of the law most familiar to first-year students thorough coverage of the skills involved in both adversarial and problem-solving negotiation

"To compete effectively in digital business markets, you need to understand how the law affects your digital technology business. The contents include detailed plain English business and legal guidance on: Securing Intellectual Property for Digital Business; Digital Contract Fundamentals; Open Source Rules and Strategies, Development, Consulting and Outsourcing; Software as a Service; Business Software Licensing, Partnering and Distribution; Web and Internet Agreements; Privacy on the Internet; Digital Multimedia Content Clearance and Distribution; IT Standards; Web and Mobile Technology and Content Deals; Video Game Development Deals; International Distribution; User-Created Content, Mash-ups, MMOGs and Web Widgets; And Much More ."--Publisher's website.

This book has been revised substantially for 2021 and beyond. Each chapter in the book has been updated and this second edition includes a new chapter on employment issues. The book continues to be dedicated to the work of a full array of transactional clinics and serves as the basic introductory reading material for the seminar component of a law school transactional clinical course. The book includes chapters addressing: Skill issues as they relate specifically to transactional practice, including interviewing, counseling, negotiation and drafting; Ethical and professional role issues arising in that type of work; Issues specific to remote and virtual interactions with clients and others; Community group representation and economic development; and Substantive law topics that students typically encounter in transactional clinics. The book also has relevance to simulation-based courses focusing on transactional practice.