Digital Directions

LILACnet - wiki and social networking site for LILAC 2010 Conference

A guest post from Ann Priestley, consultant for UKCLE, and general technical-whizz!

UKCLE has just launched LILACnet (http://lilac10.wetpaint.com/), a combined wiki and social network for LILAC10 (http://www.ukcle.ac.uk/newsevents/lilac/index.html), the forthcoming UKCLE conference at the end of January. We have added the 40 plus abstracts for the papers which will be presented at the conference and invited presenters to add their papers or any other materials as they wish. All the slides from the conference will be added to UKCLE's slidespace (http://www.slideshare.net/ukcleslidespace).

So far, much the same as for LILAC 2009. What is different this time is that LILACnet is geared towards comment and discussion. LILACnet members can create a profile page and communicate with other members, either one to one or by contributing to a discussion. They can look for members who perform the same role as themselves, who are involved in similar projects or who simply have common interests. Networking is frequently highlighted in feedback as one of the conference highlights, and we hope that law teachers will take to an online network with as much enthusiasm as they do to F2F networking at the
conference every January.

There is anecdotal evidence that law teachers are using the big social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn - or at least if I run my address book against these services a lot of names come up!, but how are they using them, and what role could UKCLE play? Niche services like Academia.edu perhaps offer more value to academics - see Michael's profile (http://gcal.academia.edu/MichaelBromby), but it seems to be more institution than discipline focused.

A recent post on the Nature Network (http://network.nature.com/people/franknorman/blog/2009/10/30/social-networks-are-they-useful-or-pointless) asked Social networks: are they useful or pointless? At the heart of the question is how they can become part of an academic's everyday routines - but the same questions were asked regarding email a few years ago, and who can do without emal now?

We hope that LILACnet will act as a small pilot and offer some more evidence on how law teachers could use social networks. LILACnet is geared to the conference life cycle, however anyone is welcome to join in, so please do sign up!

Ann Priestley

Free US caselaw... just google it!

Earlier this month I read a blog post at Out of the Jungle, an interesting US blog on legal education, about why Lexis and Westlaw should NOT be like Google.

"For the first time, I had a student write in my Advanced Legal Research class that they wished that Lexis and Westlaw could be more like Google. I had heard other librarians moan about this but had just not run across it til now. It really gave me pause to have it in hand. And it made me think, it challenged me. Why should this student not get her wish? If I sat down with this young woman and had a conversation, what would I say about why I disagreed? There must be more than just a knee-jerk revulsion against the transformation. What would be my reasoned argument to her?"

The blogger, Betsy McKenzie, suggested that Google 'flattens' information from the web and is not so good at discriminating sources (and reliability) of legal information and went on to discuss some of the critical thinking that students may not undertake if they rely too much upon Google search results.

This week, news from the BIALL blog tells me that Google have indeed launched themselves into the world of legal research with a range of US case law being made available.  My first thoughts were that we already have BAILII in the UK, and other Legal Information Institutes elsewhere with vast repositories of open-access documents - the Google Blog does acknowledge these pioneers in their launch statement.

There is already a lengthy list of other bloggers who have reported on this, I read some about the advanced search functions, and whether it will give Lexis a run for it's money (probably not, for now).

For those who are well able to use Lexis or Westlaw, this may come as no particular benefit but as Google seems to be increasingly the search engine of choice for students, there is merit in that the cases are available freely.  I have to agree with Betsy McKenzie in that Google have flatten that value of "cited by xxx" as there is no discimination in this (potentially) long list - but then is can encourage the critical thinking skills - and for this type of research, there's always the subscription services!

At the moment, it does mean that I can provide some quick and easy VLE links to US cases without the hassle of an additonal login.

Enhancing Legal Education in Scotland Event - part two

 Kevin Kerrigan from Northumbria University and myself ran an afternoon session at the UKCLE event in Edinburgh on Developing the Undergraduate Law Student Experience (see blog post: Enhancing Legal Education in Scotland Event for the morning session).  Kevin spoke about how Northumbria, Westminster and others have sought to combine their undergrad substantive law programmes with the one year vocational skills course and the two year practise-based traineeship.  Bringing aspects together from each of the previously separate entities there can be a more logical progression from, for example, criminal law to procedure to advocacy; or land law to conveyancing.  Students are still afforded the opportunity to exit with a traditional liberal-arts style LLB and must do so unless they secure the traineeship-syle placements necessary for the remainder of the 5 year programme at a particular stage.

This reminded me of the problem-based learning approach adopted by York University (see previous blog post: What McMaster did for medical training, can York do for legal education?) last year, and of course, the recent development of the clinical LLB at Strathclyde more recently discussed in the post below.

My own presentation looked at some of the less radical means of enhancing the undergraduate experience that may not require a complete refocus of the programme, or financial / time consuming clinics – both of which can be highly commended, but require enormous effort.

I illustrated my talk with three examples: work-related learning, which includes clinics, simulations, and problem-based learning.  Some of which may be time or resource intensive, but on occasion can be a short 2 day simulation package.  Secondly, the internationalisation of staff, students and the programme; and thirdly, examples of tools and technologies that universities should perhaps be adopting to equip our students with skills for the 21^st century.

The slides from this, and from other presenters on the day, will most likely appear on the UKCLE website’s Scotland Pages in due course, but for now - mine is below.

Developing the undergraduate student experience

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Pro Bono Week, Strathclyde's Law Clinic and Legal Education

Yesterday saw the launch of the extended law clinic at Strathclyde University.  Since its inception in 2003, the clinic has expanded to include not only the initial advice sessions in Glasgow, but also an outreach project in Greenock, to the West of Glasgow.  Earlier this year, their work as a law clinic was recognised by the LawWorks and Attorney General’s Student Pro Bono Awards 2009, shortlisted for three of the four awards and taking home the award for the Best Contribution by an Individual Law School – this being the first time that the awards have been open to students in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

A Prisons Project has also been designed and run by the Clinic’s student volunteers to offer guidance and information to prisoners on their employment rights, specifically in relation to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974.  This will be offered to five prisons in and around the Glasgow area.

Supported financially, by both university sources and externally by law firms, the Law Clinic relies more so on the dedicated time of students, supervising staff and both solicitors and counsel who provide their advice pro bono.  The evening was supported by the Lord Advocate, Elish Angiolini, head of the Crown Office which directs all public prosecutions in Scotland.  Not only a Strathclyde alumna, but also a strong proponent of pro bono work, the Lord Advocate had earlier this week promoted the National Pro Bono week in Scotland.  Lord Phillips, the LibDem peer, spoke highly of the Law Clinic and other law schools (estimated at approx 100 in England and Wales) who offer students the opportunity to work with clients, but also reminded the audience that whilst pro bono can and does work well, there is still an over burdened legal aid system that cannot cope with the increases in legislation.  Providing pro bono services can, said Lord Phillips, remind the profession of what they profess... making comparisons to the medical profession with the overarching Hippocratic Oath, there exists no counterpart for the legal profession.

One future development, highlighted by the Law Clinic’s director Prof Donald Nicolson, is the establishment of a clinical LLB at Strathclyde from 2010.  This will enable students to reflect on their clinical cases and gain credit for their performance in both training and live case management.

This example of change to the delivery of undergraduate legal education reminded me of the discussions at the UKCLE event in Edinburgh, of which the afternoon sessions are still un-blogged!  See the next post...!

Enhancing Legal Education in Scotland Event

This was the first UKCLE event in Scotland (that wasn’t attached to another event) for some time, and possibly the first event to involve representatives from all levels of legal education.  The event was held in Edinburgh and was well attended by over 50 delegates – mainly from academic institutions (representing both the LLB and postgraduate diploma stage) but the legal profession was also widely represented by the Law Society of Scotland, HR directors and managers, heads of training and partners from law firms.

The first keynote from Alastair Robertson (HEA, Academy Scotland) covered a range of issues including the changing nature of the student learning experience, new ways of relating to businesses and the profession and forthcoming challenges: in particular how the four nations of the UK will contribute to devolved policy and the likely divergence that may lead to tensions.  Relating to news earlier this week that England & Wales have a new framework for HE - will there be pressure to adopt similar or distinctly different policy in Scotland?  Alastair also spoke of graduate attributes and what it means to be a graduate of a particular HEI or in a particular discipline such as law.

Prof Margaret Ross (University of Aberdeen) spoke about the diversity of the legal education student body and the study of law for its own sake.  Pointing to Edinburgh University’s centenary of women in legal education, Margaret spoke of the first two women to gain a postgraduate LLB in 1909 who both had legal profession links in their family, but who did not, and could not, enter into the profession.  The law society, at the time, decided to wait until the end of the Great War to see if they would have enough male members returning from the battle fields before considering whether to admit women – rather much a response to market forces than the emancipation of female lawyers!

Nevertheless, Margaret also indicated how some things have not changed – William Twining’s book Blackstone’s Tower relates a story where law students were directed to bring in a broadsheet newspaper and identify the items that had legal issues until the entirety of the paper had been considered – modern law students may well use electronic publications rather than the paper-copy but the learning experience remains the same.  Less positive is the lack of change in terms of funding for legal education.  Margaret made comparisons with medical practitioners, honorary NHS contracts and the general view that law is a professional subject that can be taught on a lower budget due to the absence of scientific labs etc.

Still to come, guest blog post from the Law Society of Scotland, and a review of the afternoon sessions!

The value of social media

This month's Big Question from Tony Carrer's Learning Circuits Blog is an interesting one, not just for learning professionals who are trying to enage colleagues, but also for academics who are trying to engage their students!

"How do I communicate the value of social media as a learning tool to my organization?"

"My coworkers are Baby Boomers and Traditionals. When I mention blogs or any social networking they "poo-poo" me and say our workers should not use those tools because it will make them inefficient and not do their jobs. When I have presented the idea of how we can use discussion threads on our environment to discuss topics and make comments outside the classroom, many of my co-workers said it can't be done. They either haven't opened their mind to the idea or really care. In essence, if it is not classroom, they are really not interested in it.

My question is how do I get my coworkers to even consider the capabilities of these tools when it really does not interest them."

In relation to higher education, and legal education in particular, I think that the uptake of social media by the profession can also be used as a driver to encouage staff to (re)consider using such tools in the classroom setting.

It may well be that the profession is also experiencing this 'Big Question' and that senior partners are poo-pooing tools that may be considered as an inefficient use of time, but recently the use of social media by both large and small firms has really taken off.

Writing for the Binary Law blog, Nick Holmes picks up on other commentators in thrall of the BigLaw firms, in particular whether the legal press pays a disproportionate amount of attention to large law firms - with their panoply of marketing directors, PR advisors, website and social media mavens.  His response to Jordan Furlong, a Canadian blogger at slaw.ca, was:

"I do think you’re not seeing the wood for the trees here. Social media do already provide the means for solos and smaller firms to leave a bigger footprint and “amplify their voice and multiply their narratives within the profession as a whole”. As you well know, they are doing it through public blogging and the public SNEs; and the pooling and focussing is done via public group activity on group blogs and special interest groups on the SNEs.

That does not provide a complete solution and third party collaboration and aggregation channels are evolving, but I don’t really see that they need “their own media channel” – will it not be an agglomeration of media channels?

The first step for solos and small firms is to engage with social media and they have only themselves to blame if they don’t.

You suggest that their footprints need to be left “in the places where journalists search for ideas and leads”. Turn that around: how about journalists need to engage better with social media and source their stories from a wider range of media channels? Surely it’s a very lazy hack who relies on the mainstream legal media for their ideas; surely they need to be reading blogs, following Twitter et al? Now I know you do this, so the next question to ask (of an employed journalist) is – It’s all very well for me to source some of my ideas and stories from solos and small firms, but will that sell the rag/will it attract the advertising bucks, will it please my paymaster? I suspect the answer to those questions is No."

In a previous post, Holmes also points to a critique of Susskind's book, The End of Lawyers? reviewed by Gillian Bull, which further contributes to the notion of BigLaw:

“Susskind’s book in the main deals with life on Planet Mammon: life on Planet Rumpole (or even Planet Pooter) doesn’t figure much.” Thus, in her view, the book is not relevant to most lawyers and the public at large. Not only that, but City lawyers either won’t need to read it if they’re already on the game, or won’t want to read it if they’re not; and their ICT managers will “need more than the collection of anecdotes and predictions that this book comprises. To make their case for spending money they need lots of hard data, of which there are none here.”

But then, this book does focus on the large law firms and perhaps another book, or another author, could /should look further at small firms and the sole practitioner.

So, returning to the 'Big Question', then yes, both large and small firms are using social media and there may well be an expectation that future employees (our students) should be able to engage, contribute to, or even lead with this type of engagement.

The HEA in general, UKCLE in relation to legal education and individual HEIs all encouarge staff to undertake pilot projects and the sharing of examples which is probably our sector's solution to this Big Question, and has been for some time.  However, this does rely on the innovative lecturer to adopt or adapt the case studies for specific purposes on his or her course.

I was particularly drawn to an existing response to the Big Question that included the following presentation - a PR jobs-worth trying to ban the telephone in favour of social media!

New technology - the threat to our information

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