The financial crises and recession of recent years left no part of the global economy unscathed, and that includes the rarified legal field, which has seen revenues drop 10% at U.S. firms since 2008. Yet perhaps no industry has been as slow to adapt to the international and technological challenges of this new austere era. And that reluctance to keep pace with the changing times seems especially evident at law schools, where “legal education hasn’t really changed in the past 30 or 40 years,” says Richard Susskind, the author of The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services.
Susskind was recently a guest lecturer for an innovative project that is aiming to change all that. Dubbed “LawWithoutWalls”, the new University of Miami School of Law program, which debuted in January, hopes to give the theoretical milieu of law school a dose of the new realities of law practice. “Law school and law practice aren’t keeping pace with the 21st century,” says University of Miami law professor Michele DeStefano Beardslee, who developed the course model.
