Professor Ben Barton on Fixing Law Schools

The past ten years have been what University of Tennessee Law Professor Ben Barton calls "the lost decade" for law schools. In his new book, Fixing Law Schools: From Collapse to the Trump Bump and Beyond, Professor Barton walks us through the issues he sees with the current structure of legal education in the United States, and ways to actually fix it. The book focuses on three areas that need correction:

The cost of legal education is simply too high, and cannot be maintained. Technology has to be leveraged within the educational curriculum to help future practicing attorneys to do more work, charge less, and make more money in the end. Regulations have to be focused on the outputs of legal education, and be given teeth so that students are more likely to succeed.

While the book title is about the lost decade of the 2010s, the root of the problem goes back well over a hundred years. Professor Barton talks with us about where we've been, where we are, and where we need to go so that we really are Fixing Law Schools.

Information Inspirations

We keep it short and sweet this week (mostly because neither of us has finished our holiday shopping.)

Wireframes are becoming less relevant — and that’s a good thing - In his Medium article, Sean Dexter argues that using wireframes is basically old school now, especially given the rise of Agile product development, and Lean UX processes. Today's visualizations require more on-the-fly modifications which standard wireframes just don't allow. Newer products like Think Sketch, Adobe XD, or Figma are the modern tools you might want to check out.

25+ Legal Tech and Business of Law Predictions for 2020 - Aderant released its third annual predictions and the common theme seems to be centered around the idea that we need less talk about innovation and more actual implementation of innovative ideas and products. Stop with the PR and BS, and get something done. Greg wanted to add one other idea to the 2020 prediction and declare that collaborative software products like Microsoft Teams or the legal industry-focused product Workstorm are going to become must-have products in the team environments in which most of us work.

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Contact us anytime by tweeting us at @gebauerm or @glambert. Or, you can call The Geek in Review hotline at 713-487-7270 and leave us a message. You can email us at geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com. As always, the great music you hear on the podcast is from Jerry David DeCicca.