I remember vividly when Gary (must follow! @legalacademia) first told me he hoped for people to set out their vision for legal education, and to get a group of people together to discuss a possible way-forward. This Thursday Gary’s hard work and idea came to fruition, though I must say the panel discussion described in this blogpost must have involved a huge amount of co-ordination and planning!
Nottingham Law School (Nottingham Conference Centre) was delighted to celebrate the launch of the Centre for Legal Education, with a full day dedicated to legal education on Thursday May 3rd, 2012. This coincided with a a discussion of legal education by people with a very active and practical interest in legal education, and marks a significant event in the work of Rebecca Huxley-Binns (@bexhuxbinns, please follow on Twitter), Reader in Legal Education, Nottingham Law School. Rebecca herself has been Law Teacher of the Year 2010, and is currently Secretary of the Association of Law Teachers. I feel personally that Rebecca deserves to be given a Chair at Nottingham for her contribution to legal education, and, equally important, for explaining innovative paradigms in legal education and for participating in a synthesis in higher-order cognition, affect and emotion in legal learning. The purpose of this blogpost is not to ‘create’ the timeline of this meeting organised by Gary and Rebecca, but instead for me to discuss the issue of innovative behaviour in legal education and the rather nebulous notion of ‘commercial awareness’. For a faithful timetable of the discussion itself, please do trace the #NSLED tweets on Twitter, or go to the excellent relevant blogposts on Paul Maharg’s blog.
In the morning, there was a ‘Question Time’ panel, chaired by Baroness Ruth Deech, Chair of the Bar Standards Board (@barstandards) to discuss various Visions of Legal Education. The panelists include David Urpeth, Partner at Irwin Mitchell; Gary Lee Walters of Stretlaw; Becky Huxley-Binns, Reader in Legal Education at Nottingham Law School; Nazmin Akthar, young barrister and legal blogger; and Baishali Majumdar, trainee solicitor and alumna of Nottingham Law School. Paul Hutchinson, Public Relations and Press Officer, also answered questions focussing on the Chartered Institute of Legal Executives.
The event lead sponsor was LexisNexis. The event was also kindly supported by Oxford University Press, Routledge Publishing and Hodder Education.
Gary Lee Walters is an innovative law teacher, whose website ‘Stretlaw‘ has gradually been receiving the very good recognition it deserves, for being an eLearning resource focused on law tuition, research, and commentary. It serves to facilitate group learning via interactive tutorials or one-to-one tuition. It facilitates eLearning by allowing students to take education wherever they wish.
Gary explained why he became interested in a fusion of technology and law, in legal education:
“In year two, I chose Law and Technology, simulation/essay based. I thrived and the combination of studying hard, my natural interest and curiosity with technology meant I gained a first in this module. Point here is that with interaction, as opposed to reading a traditional text book, one can gain valuable insight into how law works in practice, and by embracing law, enjoy it more so.”
This, I feel, is noteworthy for two reasons. Firstly, it reflects what is true innovation. I personally came top in the innovation MBA class at BPP Business School (2011-2). Innovation for me is building a distributed network where contributors freely participate in a network, but its fundamental success depends on its adoption by users and successful interaction between the innovator and the recipient of that innovation. It is a critical way, if used properly, for business entities to build competitive advantage. I feel far too often, in a way like disability, “diversity” and corporate social responsibility, it is used by law firms as a cheap advertising or marketing gimmick, without being understood properly. Secondly, Gary would like to see more ‘simulations’ in the curriculum. This I feel is interesting for two reasons. Simulations introduce a component called ‘face validity‘ (much studied in neuropsychology, the subject of my own PhD at Cambridge), in other words what you are learning (and assessing) is comparable to a real-life experience; which must surely be vital for legal education? Also, I think simulations is genuinely an example of innovative behaviour, which fits in very nicely with the work of Dr. Paul Maharg, Professor of Legal Education at Northumbria University. As Paul and Martin Owen, from the University of Warwick UK Centre for Legal Education, describe,
“Simulation is one of the major applications of the web in entertainment and training, but has so far received little attention from HE and FE. It is becoming increasingly clear that simulations can be used for educational purposes, but how can they be used most effectively with students? How do they affect other areas of the legal curriculum? Can all professions use them equally effectively, and if so under which conditions? These and other questions are at centre of a two-year funded project, Transactional Learning Environment (TLE) 2.0, which sets out to create an environment, use it within variety of disciplines and sub-areas within law, and evaluate the results.”
The other most eye-catching part of the event for me was the discussion of commercial awareness. Elsewhere on the IT superhighway, this was tweeted by Prof Richard Moorhead, about to assume a Chair at UCL, but currently a Chair in Cardiff:
What then is “commercial awareness”? I am continuously surprised about how little ‘commercial awareness’ there is amongst my other LPC students. At the most basic level, I agree with the many who say that such individuals lack any compass of business acumen. This is bound to be problematic, even in advising a client when a case might be in their own best interest (a mandatory outcome of the SRA’s Code of Conduct), or thinking whether your law firm can or should allocate sufficient resources in a traditional law firm or ABS environment. Simply put, I don’t think many other students have a clue about what is happening in the outside world around them in business or finance, let alone the major transactions of the City which corporate lawyers deal with (literally) on a daily basis.
David Urpeth tackled this issue head on:
“The chance to explore and apply legal rules and concepts with real clients is an invaluable experience. It reinforces the discussion in academic texts for the need of such opportunities within an undergraduate law degree (Richard Grimes, „The (book) case of learning by doing? (2002) 152 NLJ 1516) . These modules are only the start of what is to come. As the competition for training contracts becomes even fiercer than it currently is, the need for students to gain commercial awareness and a business-like manner, I feel, will be more important than ever. “
My concern is, obviously, is that students learn about ‘commercial awareness’ simply because it looks good to get a training contract. Indeed, my own Society at BPP (the BPP Legal Awareness Society) has students attending who, above all, want to be seen to be developing some commercial awareness so that they can put it down on a training contract application.
Having completed my MBA earlier this year (I am due to graduate officially in November 2012), and having graduated from the College of Law in International Commercial Law in December 2011, I can say ‘commercial awareness’ is simply having a feel for what businesses do. Good businesses will maximise shareholder profit through maximising ‘competitive advantage’, but really good businesses will do so having a regard for corporate social responsibility and maximising shared social value within and beyond their business entity. I do not apologise for this being in business speak, as that is what business means to business professionals. Lawyers should not pretend to be business professionals (it is always annoying for professionals to find their territory being invaded by other professionals), but they should have some idea of the world outside their microcosm. As for Baroness Deech’s question as to why lawyers in 2012 should be interested in this stuff, whereas it was not a burning problem for people studying jurisprudence some years ago, you’ll imagine that I have a number of valid views on that. However, I agree with Baroness Deech in having an education system fit-for-purpose; as a Cambridge graduate (different from the place where Baroness Deech trained originally), we have to ensure that legal education is ready for the modern age, while having some nostalgia and respect for how things have been done, I humbly submit.
I’ll leave you with some pictures that my friend, Jon, kindly took on my behalf. I am extremely grateful to Jon for having done this. Please follow Jon on Twitter #ff (@colmmu) – really nice guy, and extremely fluent in the language of new media, technology, legal education and innovation.
In summary, this event captured successfully the flavour of some of the more pressing debates in legal education, without suffering from an ‘ivory tower syndrome’, and in particular addressed two issues of interest to me as a current legal student and MBA graduate, the advancement of innovative techniques in modern English legal education, and issue of ‘commercial awareness’, so critical for all law firms (some more than others, perhaps), all law students and all law education providers.
References
Paul Maharg et al. (2008) ‘An informal discussion of simulation in legal education: SIMPLE in the US?’, Transforming Legal Education – CALI Conference for Law School Computing – University of Maryland, Baltimore, USA, United Kingdom, 19/06/08 – 21/06/08, .
Affect and Legal Education Emotion in Learning and Teaching the Law [published by Ashgate: November 2011], edited by Paul Maharg,
Northumbria University, UK and Caroline Maughan, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK. A description is provided here.
