This chapter distills and coalesces the data presented in the preceding chapters of this book. It draws conclusions about the future of online journalism and discursive democracy and makes recommendations for future research based on the ruminative and perspectival synthesis of the data in previous chapters.

The emergence, popularity, and progressively soaring impact of the Nigerian diasporic citizen media examined in the previous chapters were actuated and propelled by six underlying factors. The first was the death or dearth of a critical press tradition in Nigeria—especially the adversarial guerrilla press tradition that reigned in the 1990s—in the face of the profound moral putrescence that the restoration of democratic rule has paradoxically inculcated since 1999. At a time when billions of dollars were brazenly stolen and salted away in foreign bank accounts by political officeholders and when bald-faced cronyism and avarice had overtaken the public sphere, the national media, for the most part, either looked the other way or were actively complicit. This state of affairs was inconsistent with the progressive, agitational, and inquiring disposition that had defined the character, disposition, and performance of much of the Nigerian press since its founding in the mid-1800s. As was shown in chapter 2, the Nigerian press has historically been vigorously critical of the powers that be. It almost single-handedly dislodged colonialism and helped fight against military dictatorship. The guerrilla press of the 1990s especially had a powerful impact on the media practice and politics of Nigeria. One of its enduring legacies is that it has predisposed Nigerians to expect their press to be robustly fearless, critical, and uncompromisingly adversarial. Nevertheless, after winning the fight against military dictatorship, much of the national press lost its critical bite; the press appeared to have been anesthetized into a false sense of triumphalism at a time when corruption by the emergent political elite it helped to bring to the forefront took newer, more insidious forms. In many cases, the traditional Nigerian press was co-opted into the mindless looting of the national treasury that has attended the restoration of democracy, as the case studies in chapters 4 and 5 illustrate.

Most agree that lawyers of the future will need a greater understanding of how technology can be used to design and deliver legal services. The issue for those involved in setting content for any route to qualification is defining the extent to which this must be regulated, as much as identifying the right level of technological capability. The issue is not merely one of content, but the acquisition of competences. Any accreditation must look beyond simply ensuring capability in relation to discrete tools, looking instead to ensure that future solicitors have the ability to adapt to new technologies. Separately, consideration has to be given to the emerging profession of legal technologists. Whilst some technologists may be legally qualified, those that are not must understand the ethical boundaries and regulatory requirements that lawyers work within. The organisation of the legal profession and the regulatory boundaries shared between various stakeholders require us to consider whether accreditation is the right way forward, where responsibility for accreditation should lie and who should take initiative in this space. This chapter explores these issues by contrasting the approach adopted by the Solicitors Regulation Authority in England and Wales with that of the Law Society of Scotland.

Today, technology is driving disruptive change in the legal profession and the public is demanding lawyers offer more value and choice in how legal services are delivered. Given these pressures, tomorrow’s legal profession will be fundamentally different from the profession we know today. Against this backdrop, this chapter argues the next generation of lawyers need at least five categories of multidimensional knowledge and skills: collaboration; design; project management; problem-solving; and lifelong learning. The prevailing, traditional legal education model was not designed to teach these multidimensional skills. This chapter describes some of traditional legal education’s deficiencies, introduces the pedagogy of problem-based learning, and advocates a particular form of this pedagogy: project-based learning that involves real clients or community partners. Through project-based learning – a student-centred, active, and experiential learning model – students learn the fundamentals of law and legal practice while gaining the multidimensional knowledge and skills needed to navigate disruptive change. Project-based learning can prepare law students to actively shape the future of the profession – as opposed to merely reacting to change – by harnessing technology and interdisciplinary insights to improve legal systems and create better legal service models for the public.

The field of dispute resolution has long been at the forefront of modernising legal education. Continuing this tradition, this chapter presents findings from an evaluation of an exercise introduced into the core law school curriculum at Monash University in Australia. In our compulsory litigation and dispute resolution units, we built an experiential exercise in which students resolved a dispute using both an online dispute resolution (ODR) platform and more traditional face-to-face mediation role-play. Students completed a short survey about their experience of the portal (n=64, response rate 30 per cent) and provided their reflective journals about the exercise for analysis (n=55). Drawing on the findings, we consider the benefits and limitations of this approach for facilitating students’ exposure to ODR. We explore themes including student understanding of ODR’s impacts on dispute processes and outcomes; appropriate conduct in dispute resolution settings; and the challenges of computer-mediated communication. We also identify means by which experiential activities can draw students’ attention to power disparities and access to justice challenges in ODR to develop their critical thinking about the rapid developments in this field.

qLegal is a leading commercial clinical legal education programme at Queen Mary University of London in which postgraduate law students provide supervised pro bono legal advice to technology start-ups and entrepreneurs. Within qLegal, clients often present with complex data protection issues, which relate to their business or the technology that they are developing. Law students who participate in qLegal have to learn and develop skills to respond to the needs of technology entrepreneurs. This requires students to demonstrate practical client management skills, as well as familiarity with an area of law (data protection) that is in a constant state of evolution as new technologies arise. This chapter explores the relationship between the law, law students’ skills development and technology entrepreneurs. In particular it focuses on the development of qLegal, its purpose and role as a clinical legal education programme. It explores the way in which qLegal offers an opportunity for knowledge transfer between entrepreneurs and aspiring lawyers. Further it examines how qLegal offers a means by which to test, expand and challenge students’ understanding of the application of law in unfamiliar fact scenarios, where limited, as well as newly emerging case law pushes students out of their comfort zone.

The CAVE experience is an immersive virtual reality (IVR) environment employing high-resolution, 3D video and audio technology. Using the CAVE, researchers at University College London designed an IVR scenario intended to echo the logical structure of a traditional ‘trolley scenario’ problem, and deployed this activity within an undergraduate Law and Ethics Course. In this chapter we explore how the use of virtual reality can offer students an unparalleled opportunity to reflect on the dissonance between the behaviour they adopt when faced with an ethical dilemma, and the theoretical stance they propose during class discussion. We explore how this personalisation gives rise to sustained student engagement borne out of a desire to understand the discrepancy between principle and practice. Our chapter considers the potential of IVR technology when teaching ethics to future and current professionals. We conclude by considering how such technology can offer more dynamic opportunities for student reflection and how IVR might be sensibly integrated into a broader legal ethics curriculum.

In this chapter we describe a discourse framework for understanding the historical development of modern reports into legal education in England and Wales by analysing the textual features of genre markers. We then apply this framework to a specific subset of topoi within such reports, namely the coverage given to digital technologies within legal education. We make three related claims. First, the discourse and rhetorics of reports on legal education has scarcely been analysed in the research literature, and we begin that process here. Second, the culture and context within which digital innovation is reported, analysed and recommended upon in regulatory reports is relatively shallow and ‘theory-lite’. We need to draw sophisticated insights into our understanding of digital in a variety of disciplines and discourses (e.g. media, education and discourse analysis generally), and apply those to legal education. Third, the genre-form of reports on innovation inhibit or constrain our ability to develop imaginative, theory-rich and persuasive accounts of digital cultures for legal education. Our case study has implications not just for law schools, but also and more significantly, for regulators and accreditors.

What will lead to meaningful change in legal education? And what should be the direction(s) of change? In the United States, as elsewhere, law schools are caught between critics who want them to be more responsive to the changing legal market and the needs of private employers, and critics who want them to do more to resist and shape the private market and promote the public good. These critiques are not wholly incompatible as a blueprint for curricular reform. Increasing students’ exposure to new skills and technologies, experiential training and projects, and collaboration with other professions, provides ‘opportunities for critical analysis and reflection’ as well as making students more employable.

Hitherto, hypothetical legal cases in legal education, otherwise known as ‘problem questions’, have been predominantly presented in written form. Lecturers provide students with a set of written facts and, through the exercise of skills such as research and argumentation, require students to advise a fictitious client. Whilst problem questions are easily accessible and provide useful training in issue identification and legal research, they can be enhanced through the use of novel methods. This chapter explores one such enhancement, brought about by rendering the very same facts within a computer game. It is argued that this environment is important practically and pedagogically as it imports an authenticity that adds to the careful analysis of facts, and expands the environment of traditional problem questions and opportunities for questioning and deduction. This chapter demonstrates the benefits of rendering traditional, written problem-based scenarios into computer game environments (including those using virtual reality) by drawing on work conducted at the University of Westminster.

An experience gap has opened up in the development of legal professionals. The workplace-based experiences (traineeships and articles of clerkship) that were once pivotal to the progress of law graduates from student to practitioner are either no longer available or are much diminished in scope and scale. Graduates are expected to have accessed such experiences through other avenues. This is a particular challenge for those law graduates who lack the family and social connections to help them start their engagement with the profession. In response to these changing circumstances Monash University has instituted a Clinical Guarantee assuring every law student a place in its Clinical Legal Education (CLE) programme if they so choose. In this chapter, we describe the Clinical Guarantee initiative, our progress to date, the way in which we have used technology to support provision and the challenges we have faced during implementation. We conclude by emphasising the value of CLE as preparation for modern legal practice, and outlining our intention to measure that value through future evaluation work. This chapter tells an Australian story, but one which resonates with experiences in other jurisdictions.

Once characterised as a relatively stable profession, unfettered by the influence of modernity and strongly resistant to external forces, the legal services sector has in recent years exhibited marked change. Efforts to preserve profit margins increasingly eroded by the introduction of new fee models, the demand for increased billing transparency, rising client expectations, the adoption of technology and heightened market competition from high volume legal process outsourcers, have all contributed to the sector’s evolution. In what has been viewed as a clear shift towards corporatisation and commercialisation, the legal profession in a number of jurisdictions has moved away from the broader social mission on which it was founded and in which it existed as ‘a branch of the administration of justice and not a mere money-getting trade’. Free market ideologies have undermined ‘justice and rights in the discourse of law’, and in its place, the generation of profit has become the primary indicator of success.

This chapter documents how the Legal Design Lab at Stanford University has integrated design thinking into law school technology curriculum. In this chapter we profile the objectives of the lab and explore the work the lab has undertaken to introduce new opportunities for skill acquisition through design thinking courses, innovation sprints, and workshops. We explore the purpose, process, and outcomes of these new experiments in legal education, and overview the interdisciplinary methods we have developed, brought from design schools and human-computer interaction programmes. We detail examples of the specific types of classes, sprints, and workshops run, how we define learning outcomes, and how we evaluate student performance. Further, we explore the way in which we leverage technology to provide students with opportunities to acquire user research, mapping, rapid prototyping, and improved communication skills. Drawing on lessons observed over the life of the Design Lab, we conclude by reflecting on our experience of integrating design thinking into a law school programme and argue for the importance of design thinking as an aspect of technology training within and outside of law.

Over the last decade Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the form of data-driven tools designed to support legal task completion, have occupied a growing position within the delivery of private legal services and the exercise of administrative functions by the public sector. As a result, whilst technological literacy was once understood as the capacity to use particular forms of word processing software, navigate the Internet or send electronic correspondence, modern forms of literacy demand a user exhibits a broader range of skills, including the ability to understand, apply, visualise and infer patterns from data. This chapter considers the range of current initiatives developed to address the technology skills and awareness gap amongst law students, and identifies the subject areas that ought to take priority in future curriculum development. It argues that exposure to data analysis and data-driven technologies represents a necessary component of students’ preparation for entry into the professions on the basis that this knowledge: (i) enhances student employability in an increasingly competitive graduate job market; and (ii) equips graduates to meet their wider civic responsibilities to uphold the rule of law and promote access to justice.

In the field of educational technology there are classic oppositions that shape what we do in our use of technology in higher education (HE) – behaviourism versus constructivism, open versus for-profit, conventional versus innovative curriculum design, technocracy versus democracy. Both sides of the binaries are critical components of what we might determine as the ‘social’ in HE, and the extent to which their oppositions govern our approach to curriculum design also determines the type of learning that our students undertake in their programmes. In this chapter we explore the effect of the antinomies on the development of simulation software designed and built last decade and still in use at Strathclyde Law School, and adapted elsewhere. The chapter will analyse the assumptions and the history – legal educational, technological and social – that are part of the software build and outline future use and expectations for the software as it develops beyond what might, to date, be characterised as its early beta or incunabula stages of development in HE. Above all we shall begin to trace what we hope is one resolution of the classic opposition of technocracy and democracy, a theme that will be developed in future publications.