Law schools as innovation hubs – the Global Legal Technology Lab

Today I had the pleasure of attending an exploratory meeting for a new initiative — the Global Legal Technology Lab. It’s a network of law schools, legal technology companies, and other organizations interested in pushing forward new innovations in the legal system — particularly around access to justice.

It grew out of meetings at University of Missouri – Kansas City Law School, that the Kauffman Foundation had supported to explore how innovation and technology could be brought to law. But it is not strictly a UMKC, MIT, or Kauffman project. It is meant to be a new network of law schools who build new technologies and launch projects that make the legal system more accessible, efficient, and empowering.

Today was about exchanging ideas about projects, and thinking through how the Global Legal Technology Laboratory could operate. One of the driving ideas is to link projects across different schools and silos, stop duplication of efforts, and drive a stronger agenda of what the future of legal education and innovation should look like.

The concept is that people at law schools can propose projects, draw upon the GLTL’s resources to get more guidance, man/womanpower, and perhaps also funding. These projects could come from hackathons, classes, research, or otherwise.  Instead of these projects stalling out after being identified and scoped, the GLTL should help keep their momentum and contribute to their implementation.

Here’s some more photos from the day’s discussions and project proposals.