Legal services are not being deployed in the way they were a few years (or a hundred years) back. Which means we need lawyers trained with new skills using new methodologies. And unfortunately, law schools are not equipped at this time to provide the training.
The Institute for the Future of Law Practice (IFLP), a nonprofit collaboration between law schools and industry, is helping to fill this void. Through its volunteer board, it seeks to create training and internship programs that serve law students (through high quality employment) and legal employers (through a rich pool of applicants with an expanded set of skills and knowledge).
This summer, IFLP tested its intermediary approach by hosting three-week training bootcamps in Chicago (at Northwestern Law) and Boulder (at Colorado Law). The bootcamps prepared forty law students selected from four law schools in subjects including data, process, tech, and business operations, for sophisticated legal and business work settings. After the bootcamps, students were placed in either a 10-week paid internship or a 7-month paid field placement.
Some of the founding sponsors of this class include Chapman and Cutler, Elevate, and Cisco, as well as ADM, Auto-Owners Insurance, Bryan Cave, Honigman, Neota Logic, Orrick, Relativity, Seyfarth Shaw, and Thompson Hine.
IFLP needs partners. If you are with a firm or legal company that might be interested in sharing this audacious but entirely doable plan to shape curriculum and access a pool of specially trained candidates, please consider hiring an IFLP intern. If you are an individual or an organization looking for a high impact way to improve legal education and the legal profession, please consider supporting the Institute.
David Silverman, JPMorgan Chase & Co.
You can register here. Seldom do you get a chance to be involved on the ground floor of something that is so potentially rewarding for those in the legal profession and, more importantly, those whom we (could) serve.