(thanks to sobaka.ru)
In this photograph I'm comparing glasses with another delegate at the St Petersburg International Legal Forum. Actually we were at Legal Street, an event held by the Forum and the Russian Ministry of Justice and were being shot by a fashion magazine--Sobaka.ru, as you do.
The last few months have been active, especially in the area of law and technology and new directions for the legal profession. Three events in particular stand out. First is the Law Without Walls ConPosium in Miami; second is the JDHorizons symposium in London; and finishing up with the VII St Petersburg International Legal Forum in Russia. All quite different but with themes in common running through them.
I've written extensively about LWOW in this blog as I have been involved since its inception in 2011. What I will add to my previous comments is the dramatic growth in the students' skills and talents in formulating their projects. In the early days projects would often involve an innovative web portal that enabled people of different kinds to interact. In a couple of projects this year we had students creating chatbots to interact with their audiences. We have students using ideas based on games to coach people in new areas. Their creativity is dazzling. LWOW has now developed an incubator to help develop the winning projects.
LWOW is one of the growing number of programmes that show legal education can't remain trapped in the 19th and 20th centuries, merely based around doctrinal law. New courses such as Iron Tech Law at Georgetown and Law Apps at Melbourne use the Neota Logic platform to develop legal apps targeted at specific problems. Michigan State Law School has LegalRnD for legal services innovation. There is still enormous resistance from conventional law faculty to these types of courses, but among students, when offered them, the clamour for them is strong.
JDHorizons is part of a series of annual events held by Janders Dean, a law firm consultancy. What is unusual about Janders Dean is the way it combines the worlds of practice and academia. Each gets an opportunity to speak to the other, which, as an academic, is so enriching. We had socio-legal scholars, psychologists, lawyers, among others. It means one can be cross-disciplinary as well as cross-professional. Janders Dean is also involved in LWOW.
The VII St Petersburg International Legal Forum is different from the other two. The forum had 4,000 delegates from 70+ different countries. It is as much a forum for networking as it is for exchanging ideas. I was originally invited for one session but ended doing three. The forum is organised by the Russian Ministry of Justice each year on a distinct theme, which for 2017 was law and technology.
I was originally invited to participate in the Plenary session with the Russian Prime Minister, Dimitry Medvedev. Our panel was unusual in that besides myself we had the head of the Swiss Parliament, the CTO of Aliexpress, the head of the UCL Blockchain centre, a co-leader of IBM Watson. The central theme was the disruption of law and legal practice by technology. In particular we discussed how artificial intelligence and blockchain were radically altering our approach to business, life and the professions. (We had a two-hour lunch afterwards with the Prime Minister and the Justice Minister where we carried on these discussion. I have never had such extensive and intensive conversations with politicians before who clearly knew what they were talking about.)
The following two days I talked about law as algorithm as well as the future of legal education.
Normally I don't go to conferences like this. But I am glad I did attend. I had the opportunity to meet with and talk with a range of people, lawyers, academics I might miss. I gained an enormous amount of knowledge and contacts in St Petersburg. (Plus, it is one of the most beautiful cities I've visited.)
In these days of interdisciplinarity academics need to step out of their normal worlds and experience new things, ideas, and forums. It's the necessity to be experimental and innovative. It can be challenging, when over many years one has built expertise and knowledge in specialised areas, to come to grips with new spheres of knowledge where one isn't the expert. We also need to transmit this through our educational systems.
I will admit too as a legal sociologist something like the St Petersburg International Legal Forum is a great opportunity to observe other worlds and try and understand their folkways and rituals.
Comments
Normally I don't go to conferences like this. But I am glad I did attend.