LEGAL INNOVATIONS SUMMER SCHOOL 2019
“We will never catch up with progress, simply doing faster what we always did. We need huge system transformations and many small experiments in order to cut the corner”.
Andrii Kostenko
Legal Engineer
Preamble
Today in Ukraine you can easily register a public organization, submit a claim, or sign legal documents by tapping your finger on a smartphone.
Did this happen because the lecturer taught lawyers living critical thinking and the ability to think with algorithms instead of singing in the dead Gaudeamus language?
Jurisprudence never had time to keep up with technology, and this was normal, but only until the 80s of the XX century, until an exponentially accelerating technological growth came to the hot phase.
Ukrainian legal education continues to exist in the familiar format “theory above all”.
The key recipe for student success in the exam is a good memory, from which he needs to have time to extract the norms of existing laws. In rare happy cases, the solving of practical cases, the argumentation of the position, and the preparation of legal documents are required.
But even with the most practical items in the curriculum, there is no room for the latest practices and innovations in law.
We cannot catch up with progress simply by doing what we always did, only faster. Huge system transformations and many small experiments are needed to cut the corner.
Why don’t we start by finding a place in the curriculum for a semester(or even a year-long) course around legal Innovation? At least on the introductory level and find people to present this course, even as an introductory study?
THE MISSION OF “LISS” 2019
On July 22–26, the first Legal Innovations Summer School (LISS) was held in a small town (Yaremche) next to the Ukrainian part of the Carpathian mountains.
The School brought together — university teachers from all over Ukraine, representatives of Ukrainian student chapters of the Legal Hackers movement, the best speakers and mentors from disrupting legal projects.
During the LISS week-long event, 12 teachers and 4 students (organizers of student “Legal Hackers” university chapters), that were selected on a competitive basis from 73 applicants (19 Universities), deepened their specialized knowledge and gained skills in introducing legal innovations and modern technologies in law.
LISS was organized by KYIV Legal Hackers, Ministry of Justice of Ukraine, USAID New Justice Program and OSCE Project Coordinator in Ukraine.
In addition to the fact that the participants were able to admire the nature of the Carpathians, share their experience and discuss the problems of modern legal education, they had an important mission — to create a model course on legal innovations.
For 5 days, participants attended lectures, training, and workshops. Every day, working in teams (3 Ph.D.`s + 1 Student), they were creating their own courses for on order to launch them in their law schools next semester.
“It`s hard to find a law teacher who can professionally teach absolutely all the topics that should be contained in the course of Legal Innovations. It’s too complicated. And we don't have to. If we create a platform for the exchange of expertise, materials, and ideas, help to organize guest- and open- lectures and Universities give us support with this— everybody wins. Collaboration and teamwork will become the key to success”, said Denis Ivanov, one of the LISS organizers, the executive director of “Kyiv Legal Hackers”.
Denis also shared his own experience in teaching the course “Legal Innovations and Technologies in Law” over the past few years. He talked about the logic of building topics and questions, and teaching methods of this rather specific discipline. He drew attention to project-based learning, which was used as part of the course presentation and examples of useful and socially significant legal services that his students developed during the course during 2017-2019.
Program and Mentors
This year LISS program included such topics as legal innovations, global and local innovative online platforms, automated systems for providing legal services with virtual consultants.
Also, it was discussed issues around the improvement of legal business processes using digital technologies, artificial intelligence and the use of algorithms in law, online contracting, provision of notarial services through a blockchain, the monetization of legal tech services and fundraising in such projects.
These topics were highlighted by:
⁃ Founder of Brooklyn Law Incubator & Policy Clinic, Professor Jonathan Askin
⁃ Executive Director “Kyiv Legal Hackers”, Ph.D. in Law, Denis Ivanov
⁃ Executive Director “Bot & Partners”, Mykyta Pidgainiy
⁃ Legal Engineer “Axon Partners” Andrii Kostenko
⁃ Co-founder “Legal Nodes”, Nestor Dubnevich
⁃ HiiL representative and Kyiv Legal Hackers co-founder, Dmitry Foremnyi
⁃ Creative Director “Doozhe Agency”, Vlad Posad
⁃ Experts on Legal Design/Design Thinking, Pavlo Rusev, and Daria Kushnir
One of the founders of Legal Hackers community, Professor Jonathan Askin, spoke about how and why the idea of creating such a community arose, how legal innovations are studied in Universities in the US, how to take into account the peculiarities of the global context while teaching the course of legal innovation in Ukraine.
Denis Ivanov — shared the main trends of the legal profession for the upcoming years and highlighted the structure and current results of the “legal innovations ecosystem” that were built in Ukraine over the past years.
Mykyta Pidgainy talked about how and why lawyers create chatbots, and how these tools can help a practicing lawyer, as well as what ethical problems arise by communicating with a robot lawyer. Under the mentorship of Mykyta, the participants practiced their skills in legal engineering and created 16 chatbots within an hour.
Andriy Kostenko explained the basics of digitalization of law and the specifics of computational law. He spoke about how legal neural networks work and how law data are digitized. His other topic was devoted to artificial intelligence and algorithms in law.
Nestor Dubnevich continued with a blockchain in law and taught attendees during the workshop on how to create and use cryptocurrency wallets. Then he focused on smart contracts, decentralized registries, and blockchain notaries.
Dmytro Foremnyi presented the basics of business model innovation, monetization, and fundraising projects. He paid special attention to the rules of interaction between the founder of a legal startup and an investor. Participants learned where to find “business angels” and which business model to choose depending on the type of legal project.
Pavlo Rusev and Daria Kushnir focused on the design thinking of lawyers, putting the needs of the consumer at the center of any legal project, otherwise, it is unlikely that such a service can be considered successful. In support of their theses, they held a workshop on design thinking to train to identify the needs of hypothetical consumers of legal services.
Vlad Posad spoke about the design rules and guidelines for legal documents, and how to achieve that they will be most effectively perceived. He explained the rules for formatting texts and the main mistakes that interfere with easy reading and working with documents.
The full PDF version of LISS program available here.
Results
Participants had a lot of follow up discussions on the topics of workshops. It can be heard over meals, walks, and hikes, and even deep at night in the lobby of the hotel.
This brought unexpectedly good results: on the final day of LISS, four teams of teachers presented 4 versions of the innovative course syllabuses.
Based on these syllabuses, the special working group, supposed to review and approve a “Model course on legal innovation and technology in law” in September 2019. It should be subsequently recommended for study for a bachelor’s degree in legal specialties by the Ministry of Education and Science, and the Ministry of Justice.
In addition to that, one of the teams created a chatbot (which showed their readiness to use this tool in the educational process). Another one presented course on a landing page they just crafted. The third team launched a survey of 1000+ students of “National Law University Yaroslav the Wise” (83% of students supported the innovation course even before it starts).
“This Summer School was just the first step towards introducing a course in law schools that should teach future lawyers what employers and society have been expecting for a long time”, noted Ivan Shemelynets, General Director of the “Directorate for Human Rights, Access to Justice and Legal Awareness” of the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine.
Each of the courses drafts presented on the final day deserves to be recommended for teaching in law schools.
The summaries of LISS 2019 were already published by:
- MEETONE Blockchain platform (2 million readers)
- Ministry of Justice of Ukraine
- USAID New Justice Program
- OSCE
- Local legal blog, media, and even on Instagram Highlight.
Hot requests to share the “Model course” have already arrived from our colleagues from Brazil, Sweden, Turkey, Moldova, Belarus, and some other countries and Legal Hackers Chapters.
Outcomes
AxDraft, a Ukrainian legal technology company (which has passed acceleration at YC and received $1 million in investment), has not been able to find a legal engineer for several weeks now. And we need to change this situation.
Legal engineers need to be raised somewhere, and such an innovative course will be the starting point.
But if lawyers will not want to move away from traditional practices and methods, they can’t hide their head in the sand and wait until technological storm will cool down. It will not. It is already changing everything around us. And more is still to come.
So, see you next summer at LISS 2020.
When it becomes truly international…
