WHAT WE TEACH
It is a fatal assumption that “an individual who understands the technical work of a business can successfully run a business that does technical work.” The E-Myth Revisited, a book by Michael Gerber.
What Bilingual means in this clinic
Lawyers speak one language. Data scientists, computer scientists, and engineers speak another. In Legal Data & Design Clinic, you will learn to speak both.
In LDDC you will learn to:
- Develop technological solutions that make legal practice more efficient.
- Use smart search tools, build custom databases, write data scraping algorithms, and perform statistical analysis.
- Engage in creative, introspective design work that is tangential to the legal field.
- Identify legal problems that are ripe for technical solutions and articulate those problems in a language that anyone can understand.
- Become familiar with the kinds of information a technical expert needs to solve data problems.
- Understand the capabilities and limits of various technological solutions.
- Become a communication bridge between technical experts and attorneys.
- Learn coding techniques that make analyzing data easier, effective, and quicker
LDDC is unique in that its clients are all attorneys. Specifically, students must understand legal context well enough to provide clients with technical solutions that make the practice of law more efficient and user-friendly. Instead of learning to explain the law simply and clearly to a non-lawyer client, LDDC student attorneys must explain technical solutions concisely to sophisticated lawyer clients. Students are challenged to become project managers, technical experts, and lawyers in one.
Check out one of our textbooks here.
This clinic is applicable to students looking to pursue any discipline of law. The focus of LDDC’s work is often on criminal law, because criminal law presents the greatest data bottleneck challenge. However, the skills learned here apply to any area of law that possesses big data or system inefficiencies that might be attacked with technical solutions.
Through LDDC, student attorneys evolve beyond mere technicians of legal work into entrepreneurial innovators of the entire practice of law.