Making the case for a digital lawyering framework in legal education

Abstract

In 2015, in a practice report on lawyering in a digital age published in the International Journal of Clinical Legal Education, the author and colleague Michael Sales made a modest proposal that could make law graduates more capable of serving their clients in a modernised and efficient manner. It was proposed that, in addition to offering law clinics and other forms of experiential activities, law schools could adopt a digital lawyering skills framework as part of their curricula to teach students how to use technology to assist in the delivery of legal services. The author submits in this article that digital lawyering skills will assist law students in learning core competencies needed in an increasingly technological profession whilst increasing the availability and convenience of legal services. The author therefore proposes to law schools and legal education regulators that they consider a consultative digital lawyering framework that could be subject to further review in the future. The framework is currently being utilized in a second-year Lawyers’ Skills module taught by the author, and it has been revised intuitively and through feedback after each lesson. The proposed framework in this paper is in its final version.