How can we better train law students and lawyers for the future? Indiana University Law Professor Bill Henderson has been working on this problem for a long time. In 2017, Bill joined forces with Bill Mooz, an experienced lawyer and former general counsel who in 2014 established and led the Tech Lawyer Accelerator (TLA) program at the University of Colorado Law School.
In November 2017 at a Forum on Legal Evolution event hosted by Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, Henderson and Mooz presented their vision for expanding the successful TLA program. Shortly after that meeting, they invited me to join them as a co-founder of a nonprofit, the Institute for the Future of Law Practice (IFLP).
Many videoconferences later–Henderson in Chicago, Mooz in Boulder, and me in Detroit–we’d assembled a board, held a board meeting, and launched IFLP. About the same time, I learned from a discussion with Lisa Colpoys, longtime Executive Director of Illinois Legal Aid Online, that she might be interested in joining our new endeavor. We promptly extended an offer to Lisa and were thrilled when she accepted and joined us as IFLP’s Program Director.
The plan, in essence, was to scale the TLA model, with Indiana, Northwestern, and Osgoode Hall in Toronto joining Colorado as founding law schools. Satisfying the student demand from these founding law schools, plus several Michigan State LegalRnD students, required recruiting additional employers for internships. For the training portion of the program, Colorado continued with their three-week foundational and two-week advanced track boot camp in May 2018. To that, we added a concurrent foundational track in Chicago at Northwestern.
Building and delivering the curriculum for the Chicago boot camp was one of my responsibilities during the sprint to May 2018. Fortunately, we had a proven program to start with, the TLA. I worked closely with Amy Bauer, a Colorado legal writing professor who led the Colorado boot camp. After making a few updates to the curriculum, we decided run each session in Chicago and Boulder concurrently, which provided opportunities to experiment with simulcasting and sharing speakers appearing via video conference.
The vast majority of our instructors and speakers appeared in person. Being at Northwestern in Chicago provided access to an enormous pool of talented practitioners and academics. We also attracted instructors from outside of Chicago, many of whom were in town for conferences or timed business trips to allow them to participate.
I’ve included the Chicago schedule below, including to provide future IFLP students, employers, and schools a better understanding of the curriculum and the instructors and speakers who delivered the training. I also wanted to publicly thank each of our instructors and speakers.
Throughout the boot camp, students completed electronic surveys for each session. We also conducted several Agile Scrum retrospectives, engaging the students to help us continuously improve everything IFLP does. We also continue to survey employers, now that students have completed their internships. IFLP’s initial foray has received high marks in all respects.
But we know that what was good yesterday is insufficient to propel us into the future. We must continuously improve and innovate, especially as the legal industry evolves ever more rapidly.
To advance IFLP’s progress, we aim to contribute to the development of a “body of knowledge” for the legal-services delivery innovation and technology disciplines at the heart of IFLP’s curriculum. This long-term goal will guide our IFLP curriculum committee, made up of stakeholders from legal education, law firms, legal departments, and legal aid, as we continue to refine and focus the learning objectives for the 2019 boot camps.
Last year, more than 40 IFLP students completed 10-week and 7-month internships in leading corporate legal departments, law firms, and legal-services providers. In 2019, we plan to increase that number to 75 to 90 students from about fifteen law schools.
Employers, we need your help for IFLP to succeed. Talk to your colleagues who hired from IFLP last year. We think they’ll report that, not only is this an opportunity to contribute to a cause, it’s also an opportunity to develop industry relationships and a talent pipeline that will directly benefit your organizations. If you worry that you do not have the capacity to manage an intern, Elevate Services or another of our partners can oversee an managed internship.
For more information about hiring an IFLP intern, please visit the employer’s page on our website and complete the contact form or reach out to me, Bill Henderson, Bill Mooz, or Lisa Colpoys.
Please also consider attending our Wave One Launch in Chicago at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, September 12, which features legal department leaders talking about the changing legal ecosystem and their talent challenges and needs:
Admission is free, but the Wave One Launch tickets are limited. We hope to see you there!
2018 Foundational Track Boot Camp – Chicago Schedule
| Date | Mountain Time | Subject | Chicago Speaker |
| Week 1 – May 14 – 18 | |||
| Monday, May 14 | |||
| 9:00 – 9:30 | Introduction to IFLP | Dan Linna and Dan Rodriguez, Northwestern | |
| 9:30 – 11:00 | Applied Excellence | Steve Harmon, Cisco (remote) | |
| 11:00 – 12:00 | Student Self-Introductions & Presentations of Employer Companies | Students | |
| LUNCH | Lunchtime Talk | Dennis Garcia, Microsoft (w/ Lisa Colpoys interviewing Dennis) | |
| 1:00 – 2:00 | Succeeding in a Law Department | Bill Mooz (simulcast from Boulder) | |
| 2:00 – 3:00 | Introduction to the Evolving Legal Landscape | Tim Mohan, Chapman Cutler | |
| Outside of class assignments: Completion required: (1) MS Word Legal Tech Trainer and Assessment and (2) MS Excel Legal Tech Trainer and Assessment. Completion optional: PDF Legal Tech Trainer and Assessment. | Access to software platform contributed by Casey Flaherty & Procertas | ||
| Tuesday, May 15 | |||
| 9:00 – 10:30 | Introduction to Process Improvement, Leadership, and Project Management; Introduction to the Toyota Way and the Improvement Kata, the scientific method for problem solving and knowledge creation | Dan Linna | |
| 10:30 – 12: 00 | Puzzle Exercise – Improvement Kata; Debrief | Dan Linna | |
| LUNCH | Lunchtime Talk | Casey Flaherty, Procertas | |
| 1:00 – 3:00 | Data Analytics | Casey Flaherty & Dan Linna | |
| Wednesday, May 16 | |||
| 9:00 – 10:00 | Intellectual Property | Megan Pavich, Allstate, Corporate Counsel | |
| 10:00 – 11:00 | Commercial Contracting | Richard Lee, General Counsel at Civis Analytics | |
| 11:00 – 12:00 | Mergers and Acquisitions | John Albright, Hub International, Chief Legal Officer | |
| 12:00 – 1:00 | Lunchtime Talk | Dan Rodriguez | |
| 1:00 – 2:00 | Managing Litigation | Pat Lamb & Nicole Auerbach, Valorem | |
| 2:00 – 3:00 | Group Work on Exercise (with Coaches) | ||
| Thursday, May 17 | |||
| 9:00 – 9:30 | Group Work/Presentation Prep | David Cambria, ADM; Ivy Grey, PerfectIt; Ravi Kiran, Abbott; Megan Pavich, Allstate; Matt Todd, Elevate Services | |
| 9:30 – 11:00 | Presentations to “shark tank” panel | David Cambria, ADM; Ivy Grey, PerfectIt; Ravi Kiran, Abbott; Megan Pavich, Allstate; Matt Todd, Elevate Services | |
| 11:00 – 12:00 | Debrief/Wrap Up | David Cambria, ADM; Ivy Grey, PerfectIt; Ravi Kiran, Abbott; Megan Pavich, Allstate; Matt Todd, Elevate Services | |
| LUNCH | Lunchtime Talk | David Cambria | |
| 1:00 – 3:00 | Computational Law and Rules-Driven Automation (Computational law concerns the mechanization of legal analysis. In this session, students will learn coding basics; learn to represent law, legal analysis, and agreements as explicit rules; and develop basic applications that automate the creation of documents and giving of advice upon the collection of variable inputs.) | Dan Linna & Jordan Galvin | |
| Friday, May 18 | |||
| 9:00 – 10:00 | Continued Process Improvement & Project Management | Dan Linna | |
| 10:00 – 11:00 | Introduction to Cybersecurity | Dan Rodriguez; Matthew Kugler, Northwestern | |
| 11:00 – 12:00 | Introduction to General Data Protection Regulation | Liisa M. Thomas, Sheppard Mullin | |
| LUNCH | Jeffrey Sharer, Actuate | ||
| 1:00-3:00 | Data Analytics 2 & Presenting Data | Dan Linna; David Silverman, JPMorgan Chase; & Jae Um, Six Parsecs | |
| Week 2 – May 21 – 25 | |||
| Monday, May 21 | |||
| 9:00 – 12:00 | Finance, Accounting, Budgeting for Legal Departments Exercise | Dan Coll, Elevate Services | |
| LUNCH | Lunchtime Talk | Dan Coll | |
| 1:00 – 3:00 | Work on Exercise with Coaches | ||
| Tuesday, May 22 | |||
| 9:00 – 12:00 | Finance, Accounting, Budgeting Exercise Presentation to “CEO” and “CFO” | Dan Coll; Jeff Carr, Univar | |
| LUNCH | Dan Coll debrief & student Q&A | Dan Coll | |
| 1:00 – 3:00 | Introduction to Machine Learning and legal prediction. | Kingsley Martin, Akorda | |
| Wednesday, May 23 | |||
| 9:00 – 12:00 | Lean Thinking Process Improvement/Project Management | Kim Craig, Amanda Grabarek, Kyle Hoover, Andrew Medeiros | |
| LUNCH | |||
| 1:00 – 2:00 | Lean Thinking Process Improvement/Project Management | Kim Craig, Bold Duck; Amanda Grabarek, Seyfarth; Kyle Hoover, Seyfarth; Andrew Medeiros, Katten | |
| 2:00 – 3:00 | Work on Process Re-Engineering Team Exercise | Kim Craig (Coach: Lisa Brzycki, Northwestern Mutual) | |
| Thursday, May 24 | |||
| 9:00 – 10:00 | Continued work on projects | Kim Craig (Coaches: John Duggan, Seyfarth, Heather Eskra, Seyfarth; Dawn Orel, Seyfarth; Lisa Brzycki) | |
| 10:00 – 12:00 | Presentations: Process Re-Engineering Team Exercise | Kim Craig (Coaches: John Duggan, Seyfarth, Heather Eskra, Seyfarth; Dawn Orel, Seyfarth; Lisa Brzycki) | |
| LUNCH | Steve Poor, Seyfarth | ||
| 1:00 – 3:00 | Overview of the IT Stack | Dave Hambourger, Chapman & Cutler; Michael Nogroski, Chapman & Cutler | |
| Friday, May 25 | |||
| 9:30 – 11:00 | Giving Voice to Values | Melanie Kay, Colorado (remote) | |
| 11:00 – 12:00 | Lawyer’s Role in Sales Transaction | Ravi Kiran | |
| LUNCH | Lunchtime Talk | Jayne Reardon, Illinois Supreme Ct Commission on Professionalism | |
| 1:00 – 2:00 | Routes to Market – Channels | Paul Shoning, Code42 (simulcast) | |
| 2:00 – 3:00 | |||
| Week 3 – May 28 – June 1 | |||
| Monday, May 28 | MEMORIAL DAY | ||
| Tuesday, May 29 | |||
| 9:00 – 3:00 | Transactional Drafting | Amy Bauer, Colorado (simulcast) | |
| Wednesday, May 30 | |||
| 9:00 – 12:00 | Adding Value to the Deal – Redlining Contracts; Introduce Project | Amy Bauer (simulcast) | |
| LUNCH | Lunchtime Talk: Connecting Innovation & A2J | Lisa Colpoys | |
| 1:00 – 3:00 | Common Contracts – NDAs, SaaS, SLAs | Ben Olsner, KO (simulcast) | |
| Thursday, May 31 | |||
| 9:00 – 10:00 | Review Redline Assignment | Amy Bauer (simulcast) | |
| 10:00 – 12:00 | The Structure of a Contract | Lauren Wallace, T-Mobile (simulcast) | |
| LUNCH | |||
| 1:00 – 3:00 | Leadership, Teamwork, Change Management | Bill Henderson (remote) | |
| Friday, June 1 | |||
| 9:30 – 10:30 | Perspectives from the C-Suite | Steve Beard, SVP and General Counsel, Adtalem Global Education | |
| 10:30 – 1:00 | Capstone Presentations | ||