Educating the Digital Lawyer

CHAPTER 5 EDUCATING SUPERIOR LEGAL PROFESSIONALS: SUCCESSFUL MODERN CURRICULA JOIN LAW AND TECHNOLOGY Jeanne Eicks Synopsis § 5.01 Introduction § 5.02 Technology Is Reshaping the Legal Field § 5.03 Technology Is the Subject Matter of Legal Process § 5.04 A Day In The Life of a Technically Sophisticated Lawyer § 5.05 Technology Changes Legal Professionals § 5.06 Educating the Digital Lawyer § 5.01 Introduction We have stepped into the second decade of the twenty-first century and technology has led to exciting, yet disruptive, changes in the way the world functions—socially, politically and legally. The impacts of technology have been felt in all the legal profession, from legal education to government to the practice of law. Within courts, federal agencies and other executive bodies, the government has made technology an essential part of creating efficiency, promoting access to justice and easing monitoring, reporting, communicating and processing requirements. Law firms have quickly learned the competitive advantage of adding technically based services to their practices and meeting the expectations of their technology savvy clients. § 5.02 Technology Is Reshaping the Legal Field Technology’s pervasiveness within government and the legal practice 5-1 § 5.02 EDUCATING THE DIGITAL LAWYER 5-2 means that technically skilled law school graduates are prized in a shrinking legal job market that places both law schools and new graduates at risk. Currently, however, most law schools do not offer students a legal education infused with information technology concepts. Students who arrive at law school with a computer science background or from a technical field experience a depth to their legal education beyond that experienced by average law students. While this level of technical background cannot be easily obtained while in law school, law students need technology education and exposure blended into their law school experience. Once convinced of the importance of adding technology to the legal curriculum, the task at hand for legal educators is twofold: law schools need to decide what portions of technology theory and skills to include in their curriculum and how to include it. Law schools struggle to bridge the gap between providing a traditional legal education and educating digital native1 law students who expect to learn in a technology-rich learning environment where they will be taught the technical skills necessary to become a successful modern legal professional. Digital natives now make up a large portion of the students enrolled in law schools2 and will become tomorrow’s digital lawyers. These students have lived lives enmeshed with technology—bombarded by consumer-based technology all day every day. They function with different, technically dependent, social and professional norms when contrasted with digital immigrants.3 While law professors have spent years focused on their area of expertise in a world of paper based texts, digital natives have spent those same years living and learning in a rapid fire, fragmented, consumer technology-driven environment that has altered the way they live, think and § 5.02 1 Marc Prensky coined the terms digital natives and digital immigrants in his 2001 work “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants,” On the Horizon, October 2001: 2. His article explains the concept that digital natives are those who have a natural or indigenous experience with computing technology due to interacting with it since birth. Id. 2 According to the Law School Admissions Council for the Fall of 2010, 78% of law students are digital natives (born in 1980 or later). (LSAC, Who is applying to law school?, May 22, 2011 http://www.lsac.org/JD/Think/who-is-applying.asp). 3 Digital immigrants are those who grew up in a pre-computer world. Definitions of this term has varied, but the general concept remains that “today’s students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors.” Prensky 2001, Id. Prensky goes on to state that “the single biggest problem facing education today is that our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language.” Id (emphasis in the original). 5-3 EDUCATING SUPERIOR LEGAL PROFESSIONALS § 5.02 act. In her book Alone Together,4 Sherry Turkle uses a story of roommates and how they inform each other of a guest to illustrate these stark differences. Both young women think that knocking on bedroom doors is an intrusive, rude way of being informed they have company. They prefer to be informed via a text message that they have guests even though their rooms are a mere 15 feet from the front door, a lifestyle foreign to most digital immigrants.5 The digital immigrant legal scholars who bear the responsibility for educating current law students have a generationally different set of life and technology experiences from the students they must engage. Legal educators have the challenge of educating law students who push the envelope of consumer technology adoption regarding how technology may professionally, safely and ethically contribute to the practice of law—as demonstrated by the sketch of a day-in-the-life of a modern lawyer in the section below. Generally incoming students have high level consumer technical skills and low level professional technical skills.6 Legal educators understand the technical transformation of the legal field. They move quickly to integrate technology throughout the curriculum so they may transform consumer tech-savvy students into professional tech-savvy lawyers. In the future, strong professional technical knowledge will be a salient characteristic of those who rise to the top in the legal profession. Exceptional lawyers will be lawyer-technologists who exploit technology to drive their capacity in the legal field beyond their peers. The average lawyer will understand technology and have professional technical sophistication. The sub-par lawyer will decide not to engage technology in any depth and will 4 Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011). 5 Id. at 2. 6 The Information Technology field draws a distinction between consumer technical knowledge and professional technical knowledge. Consumer technical knowledge consists of activities such as learning to play Wii or send a text message on a mobile phone. Learning how to use word processing software, a spreadsheet, digital shredding programs or case management software are examples of professional technical knowledge. Digital immigrants are assumed to be weaker in consumer technical skills than digital natives. For example, those who grew up texting on mobile devices tend to text much faster and with more accuracy than those who did not grow up texting. While digital natives may be poised to understand professional technology (items like encrypting email, building websites and using office software and practice management tools) more quickly due to their exposure to technology, both digital immigrants and digital natives need to learn about professional technology and how it intersects with the practice of law. From this point forward all reference to technical skills will refer to deeper and more professional technology skills unless directly referenced as consumer technical skills. § 5.03 EDUCATING THE DIGITAL LAWYER 5-4 fail to understand the critical impact of technology within the practice of law—as demonstrated below through a glimpse into the life of a successful ‘technophisticated’ lawyer.7 The synergistic evolution of law and technology will transform the legal profession within the next three to five years. What does the legal professional need to know about how technology functions to be competent in the practice of law? How will we educate the next generation of lawyers entering a legal field deeply altered by technology when the educators themselves often lack the necessary professional technical knowledge? How will law schools continue to recruit students and place graduates in a profession where entry level jobs are being sent to other countries with better technical legal training? To educate future lawyers we must discover learn how legal innovators currently leverage technology and make the technical abilities of those innovators the baseline for law school curriculum reform. § 5.03 Technology Is the Subject Matter of Legal Process Much of the information about our businesses, our government, our identities and our lives are now stored electronically. Accessing that information on behalf of clients relies on technology. Lawyers must engage with technically sophisticated clients whose expectations have reshaped the meaning of competent legal practice. As clients find information on the Internet and correspond via social media, email, IM and various other forms of internet-based communication, they expect the same of their lawyers. The pervasiveness of technology in our culture has raised the bar for lawyer’s technological competence. Economics and competition drive the need for technology-based efficiency improvements within the legal profession. This client expectation and practitioner need for an entrepreneurial approach to the practice of law has redefined the technical knowledge necessary for legal professionals. Outstanding law schools will absorb those curriculum changes and leap past the innovations of legal practitioners to drive a revolution in legal education with technology as the catalyst. For many businesses technology is what they produce, the service they offer or that on which they rely for business processes and processing. A strong advocate knows his client and how his client does business. Lawyers understand the necessity of educating themselves in a field in order to provide the requisite zeal in their advocacy and the knowledge to advise 7 The word technophisticated is a portmanteau word made by combining the words technology and sophisticated. Technophisticated people are tech savvy or technology innovators. 5-5 EDUCATING SUPERIOR LEGAL PROFESSIONALS § 5.04 their client. Unlike the need to know a type of business specific to a single client, technology knowledge cuts across all businesses and all possible clients. Successful businesses now depend on technical systems to provide document storage, workflow, logistics, financial planning, lead generation, communication, and a host of other efficiency producing uses. Individuals use technology for communication, storage of personal information, personal finance and entertainment. Carefully following the thread of a dispute, contract, or other legal matter may take an attorney through several technical systems which she must understand well to provide competent representation. Clients are sometimes uninformed about technology, sometimes technologists misunderstand that which a lawyer requests, and clients and technologists lie—all things which will cloud the issues and offer unknown challenges to the non-technical lawyer. Attorneys with strong technical knowledge will know how to ask the right questions and when to press for a different resolution regarding a technology issue. Whether the technologist working at the company of the opposing party explains that there are no pertinent files available or a client with a divorce case cannot understand that his hard drive may contain residual data even after a file has been placed in the trash, the strategic returns for the investment in focused specific technical training are high. When law schools integrate technology into the curriculum, future lawyers, and their clients, will reap significant rewards. § 5.04 A Day In The Life of a Technically Sophisticated Lawyer What technology does a sophisticated digital lawyer use? For a moment let us imagine how a near-future digital lawyer will function. This nearfuture digital lawyer uses digital document assembly to draft her most commonly created legal documents, whether contracts, wills or articles of incorporation. Her pro bono work consists of creating web-based A2J author forms8 for family court proceedings. Further examination of the future digital lawyer reveals that she actively and expertly uses basic office software (such as Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat), email, instant messages, social media, text messaging, mobile applications, blogs, wikis, project management software and internet-based practice management applications. Some of those skills she acquired in a basic technology literacy 8 The A2J author project originated with the funding and support of CALI (Computer Assisted Legal Instruction) as a tool to deliver greater access to justice for pro se litigants through the creation of consumer friendly web interfaces (or avatars) created by legal professionals. Chicago-Kent College of Law—Center for Access to Justice & Technology accessed May 20, 2011 http://www.kentlaw.edu/cajt/A2JAuthor.html. § 5.04 EDUCATING THE DIGITAL LAWYER 5-6 class in her undergraduate school and some through her diligent efforts to gain technology skills after law school at a local community college. Each time she uses those skills as an attorney, however, she must consider the ethical implications of her actions in an area where opinions and rules may conflict and leave uncertainty. Paper has an occasional use for this digital attorney, but almost everything—her notes, her briefs and all of her court filings—is electronic. She has negotiated and manages three contracts with cloud-based legal application vendors which enable her to run an effective and profitable solo practice. Knowledge of the guaranteed up-time of her Virtual Law Office and the vendor’s back-up plans, as stated in their service level agreement (SLA), can mean the life or death of her law practice. If her services go down at the wrong time, she may endanger her reputation or, because of an adverse impact to her client, her standing as a member of the bar. She realizes the ethical implications of using the web to market her firm and storing her client’s data in the cloud. She has contracted only with cloud vendors who exclusively serve the legal community to help ensure that her data is encrypted and stored behind secure firewalls. This next-generation attorney knows that her digital communications via mobile cellular devices are not secure unless encrypted, so she only uses them to communicate scheduling information or to conduct basic legal research using mobile applications. She would never use public wireless access (WiFi) to view files remotely or to e-file court documents unless she knew her transmissions would be encrypted through SSL9 or sent via a VPN.10 This new digital lawyer educates her clients about the threats to privilege that the ill-advised use of social media may pose while ensuring that her exposure via these social media services remains professional. She drafts discovery requests designed to elicit the same information she warned her clients not to put on Facebook or save in a Word document. She knows about data, where it is stored, how it is stored, how to request its retrieval, how to process it once received and how to instruct her clients to comply with data discovery requests. Her business clients require her advice to ensure that they are indemnified by their cloud-based vendors in case of an identity theft incident or data loss. Her litigation cases have aspects that touches upon 9 SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer. Most often observed through the HTTPS protocol on a web browser, an SSL connection means that the information passing over the web is encrypted. 10 A VPN is a Virtual Private Network. VPNs are frequently used to provide secure (encrypted) access to a private network from any geographic location using the internet. 5-7 EDUCATING SUPERIOR LEGAL PROFESSIONALS § 5.05 e-discovery. She does not share any documents with opposing counsel without stripping the meta-data from the drafts. When she disposes of her technical equipment she knows to digitally shred her documents and to take care with the disposal of her computer hardware. She pushes the envelope of standard legal practices and sells unbundled legal services11 to increase her revenue when business is slow. The unbundled services she provides require extraordinary project management efforts. She religiously practices project management techniques to ensure her organization and follow through for her clients when doing business. This future attorney distinguishes herself as more communicative, available and client-centric by using technology to make herself more competitive in the legal services marketplace. She has gained flexibility which allows her to do more—more for her clients, more professionally and more for her family and friends. This future lawyer has certain lifestyle expectations, more important to her than compensation expectations, that technology helps her meet. This new attorney will change the practice of law and raise the expectations clients have for legal practitioners while easing the lifestyle demands on practicing attorneys. § 5.05 Technology Changes Legal Professionals The above glimpse into the work life of a future lawyer is not years away. This future lawyer has skills required by a large portion of today’s graduating law students—skills largely not taught in law school. Recent law school graduates face a world enmeshed with technology and possess a legal education that only mentioned technology in passing. Lawyers who understand technology well will generate requests, motions, laws and rules that will be understood by the technologists who will interpret and execute them. Technology savvy attorneys will ask for enough information in their discovery requests without requesting that which may not be reasonably retrieved, know where to find the information requested and be capable of using appropriate technical vocabulary to make their request. These lawyers will receive the documents and information they intended from their requests and know when they have been lead astray. The details and 11 According to Stephanie Kimbro in her April 1, 2011 publication Serving the DIY Client: A Guide to Unbundling Legal Services for the Private Practitioner on page 9 “unbundling legal services, also termed limited scope services or discrete task representation, is a form of delivering legal services where the lawyer breaks down the tasks associated with a legal matter and only provides representation to the client pertaining to a portion of their legal needs. The client accepts the responsibility for doing the footwork for the remainder of their legal matter until it is completed.” § 5.06 EDUCATING THE DIGITAL LAWYER 5-8 complexities of technology often require a technically capable lawyer to generate appropriate legal documents—both legislatively and when practicing law. Lawyers who understand technology and have a modest technical vocabulary will make feasible technology related laws; the legislation they help create will be more likely to achieve the intended outcome. A difference exists between using technology and understanding technology well enough to leverage its use within the legal field, guide its governance and its application to legal affairs. The exceptional lawyer will have a deep understanding of technology, have the capacity to guide and assist in technology’s creation and use technology adroitly. Legal professionals and legal scholars cannot ignore the complex details of technical systems and still guide the governance of technology and the manner in which technology shapes the field of law. Unfortunately, those in leadership roles too often do not have technical knowledge or simply refuse to engage in the details and complexity that understanding technology requires. For example, “in an internet terror trial case, Judge Peter Openshow said, ‘The trouble is I don’t understand the language. I don’t really understand what a website is.’”12 This technical ignorance creates a troubling division within the legal field between those who understand technology and those who do not. This division places the likelihood of just and reasonable legal outcomes in question. The relevancy of digital milieu legal professionals depends on an acknowledgment of the cornerstone position of technology in our society and the insertion of technology learning imperatives within legal education. Through this insertion of technology into the framework of legal education a common ground for lawyers and technologist will arise. This common ground will enable the partnering of law and technology rather than the current incompatibility that causes frustration and confounded thinking for both the lawyer and the technologist. § 5.06 Educating the Digital Lawyer The partnering of law and technology necessary for professional success should begin within the law school curriculum. Clearly, lawyers do not require the same level of technical knowledge as a technology professional, though sharing information and resources with technologists and expanding engagement with technology has become necessary for most legal professionals. Offering law students an education that focuses on that level of 12 Rasika Dayarathna, “Towards Bridging the Knowledge Gap Between Lawyers and Technologists” 7 Int. J. Technology Transfer and Commercialisation 37 (2008). 5-9 EDUCATING SUPERIOR LEGAL PROFESSIONALS § 5.06 technical knowledge has become critical to guaranteeing the success of graduating students and longevity of law schools. We must integrate technology throughout the law school curriculum so that the technology revolution in the field of law may become a guided evolution informed by the core legal knowledge within the legal academy. Legal scholars will need to be convinced that technology topics have risen to the level where they must be addressed through broad integration into the curriculum. This integration will encourage legal scholars to have their experienced voices heard during this legal digital revolution, a positive outcome for both legal education and legal practice. Some law schools have begun the integration of technology within the law school curriculum by adding a few days of eDiscovery to Civil Procedure, offering courses in the law of technology such as Cyber Law or touching upon data and communications security during Legal Profession. An e-Discovery course that addresses all of the places an advocate should seek digital data would be immediately useful to a first year associate drafting discovery requests. While a good place to begin, this preparation will not fully address the technology education required to analyze cases, laws and rules infused with technology, to make informed choices about the use of technology in practice or to use complex technical systems that are more and more part of the daily practice of law. Rather than a superficial guest lecturer involving technology once in each term, students would better engage and learn the subject matter through an education that integrates technology into each lesson—where technology discussions enrich the material being delivered. Opportunities to blend technology into a class occur weekly in core law school curriculum as more and more cases have disputes over unsettled law on technical matters at their center, rely on technology for rapid adjudication or require technical knowledge to understand and properly practice that area of law. In a Constitutional Law course, a Fourth Amendment discussion would benefit from current examples of search and seizure that involve privacy expectations in the cloud,13 on computers and in digital transmissions. Full analysis of those issues requires knowledge and familiarity with 13 “Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.” Peter Mell and Tim Grance, “The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing,” Version 15, 10-7-09, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Information Technology Laboratory. http://www.nist.gov/itl/cloud/upload/cloud-def-v15.pdf (last accessed September 5, 2011). § 5.06 EDUCATING THE DIGITAL LAWYER 5-10 the way technology works without which the interpretive distinctions in the application of law cannot be accurately presented. An Evidence course should acknowledge that people who lead digital lives create digital evidence of their actions that are governed by the rules of evidence, recall the above future attorney advising her clients on the use of social media. How to present, preserve and manage digital evidence for both civil and criminal matters will be a large portion of any litigators’ experience and should be thoroughly addressed in any Evidence course. Legal educators teaching Contracts, Administrative Law, Mediation and Dispute Resolution cannot ignore the developments in their areas that rely on technology as a core tool to apply legal principles, to interact with the judiciary and the government, to parse through an accumulation of knowledge and to reshape legal processes and procedures. While opportunities exist in most courses to integrate technology theory into classes, legal educators should also consider the need for more skills based technical literacy labs in the law school curriculum. Students need exposure to technology beyond that which they receive theoretically through lecture or hands-on via consumer devices. A law school environment is not tailored to learning technology. With the exception of most legal research components, hands-on lab-based courses remain outside of the standard law school experience. Such courses could be a single credit skills lab attached to other required core course such as Legal Profession. The ABA Commission on Ethics14 suggests adding the underlined portion in Rule 1.1[6] regarding what constitutes a competent attorney: “To maintain the requisite knowledge and skill, a lawyer should keep abreast of changes in the law and its practice, including the benefits and risks associated with technology, engage in continuing study and education and comply with all continuing legal education requirements to which the lawyer is subject.”15 The addition of such language to the Model Rules of Professional Responsibility makes a Legal Profession lab a good fit for the addition of hands-on technology skills education within the law school environment. A Legal Profession lab could be taught in a computer lab to small groups of twenty to twenty-five students so they could directly engage in material such as how to encrypt an email and wireless communication, use a word processor without leaving meta-data behind, building a marketing website, securely manage and delete client data and other basic technical skills. A 14 ABA Commission on Ethics 20/20, Initial Draft Proposals—Technology and Confidentiality dated May 2, 2011. 15 Id emphasis added. 5-11 EDUCATING SUPERIOR LEGAL PROFESSIONALS § 5.06 graduate of law school should not have to go back and take a community college course on technology in order to practice law or lack the education necessary to have a discussion with her peers about the ethical implication of technology on the practice of law. Law students learning about privilege and confidentiality will better understand the implications of technology on those concepts through information they learned about securing data and electronic communications against eavesdropping. Hands-on lessons concerning topics such as how to digitally shred files, encrypt files and recognize privacy concerns on Facebook will make students better, more employable lawyers upon graduation. Law firms need lawyers who can implement technology innovation within their firms and understand and facilitate the appropriate vendor and technology choices for law firms. A Legal Profession technology lab would produce a solid foundation for emerging lawyers while cultivating deeper discussions in other courses. Technology labs would offer similar enrichment for Contracts, Evidence, Legal Clinics and General Practice programs. Teaching technology related skills will mean looking outside of legal education at cross disciplinary and technology pedagogy techniques. The occasional lab or technology assignment would benefit standard lecturebased law school courses and expose students to the technical aspects of the law in a supported environment. Evidence, Civil Procedure, Torts, Criminal Law, Contracts and Property all have new technology driven components that require technical knowledge and expertise. Rather than a passing reference to technology, exercises could be assigned to enhance the legal concepts conveyed and illuminate the impact of technology on the legal matters. Pedagogically this instruction could occur through labs, online or in the classroom with supplemental exercises for students to complete at home. A formal computer lab where students attempt to use technology skills in a controlled and properly configured environment would lend itself to lessons that require step-by-step instruction or lessons on complex topics. The knowledge transfer for students who have the opportunity to practice with a trained technology instructor/professor in attendance is better than for students who attempt to learn the technology outside of a classroom setting. Lab environments also offset the cost of individual software to students by placing the burden of software purchases on the educational institution which often receives free or very low cost trial software that may be unavailable to students. One cost conscious alternative to an institution provided lab environment would be for institutions to mandate the purchase of a single model student laptop upon admission to law school. Such a mandate would create opportunities for hands-on technical exercises and § 5.06 EDUCATING THE DIGITAL LAWYER 5-12 learning in any course. The scheduling and costs of maintaining labs would be greatly simplified if any classroom could become a lab environment. Online instruction that relies on students’ personal non-mandatory laptops for lessons has the most merit when teaching students how to use cloud-based services or web-based interfaces that require no additional software installation. Classroom demonstrations of technology tools can be supplemented and enhanced by take-home exercises. For all of the distinct pedagogies that may be brought to bear on the systemic integration of technology within the J.D. curriculum, each institution will develop an approach that echoes its capacity and aptitudes. In all cases the reputation of the institution and the students’ law school experience will be strengthened by addressing technology within the curriculum. A faculty champion and the assistance of a subject matter expert will be required for successful curriculum reform. Institutions with a faculty comprised of digital immigrants may struggle to find an internal champion for the revolutionary concept of infusing technology throughout the curriculum. An internal champion may fully embrace the requisite changes that accompany the radical infusion of technology into the J.D. curriculum while lacking the technical expertise to move such reform forward. When a subject matter expert cannot be found within an institution’s faculty, an institution may choose to create a new position16 or hire an outside consultant to assist with supplementing the curriculum and supporting internal faculty. The subject matter expert must be well versed in both technology and the law and able to collaborate well with legal scholars. The curriculum collaboration should focus on the inclusion of technology in a way that will enhance the strengths of the institution—recognizing that this will be unique for each institution. Some institutions may choose to create a faculty position to foster the growth of technology capacity. In the same way that Legal Writing may have both stand alone courses and play a strong role in each course taken, technology will grow to amplify the J.D. curriculum. Commentary from a 2000 bar journal article correctly predicted that law 16 One such proposed position would be a Director of Legal and Academic Technology. The Director of Legal and Academic Technology would be responsible for understanding technology trends within the legal profession, legal education and academia, including opportunities for distance learning and the integration of technology into the J.D. curriculum and legal scholarship. The position would responsible for promoting and teaching new technology to faculty members and helping faculty use technology to enhance their research and scholarship. Further, the Director of Academic Technology would be responsible for planning and managing technology literacy programs for faculty and students and teaching technology labs. 5-13 EDUCATING SUPERIOR LEGAL PROFESSIONALS § 5.06 schools would adopt technology to teach law, but would follow along behind practitioners in the adoption of technology to practice law. “Of course, technology will eventually transform the way law is taught and learned, inasmuch as access to information, classroom demonstrations utilizing PowerPoint and other technologies, and familiarity with the use of computers for trial work and office practice will all change the daily routine of law school professors. But leadership comes from practicing attorneys and from students who demand that new technologies support their efforts, not from legal educators. Technology will be important, but legal education will not be the engine driving these changes; it will be the caboose.”17 When legal colleagues gather to discuss technology and the law, someone inevitably comments that technology cannot be allowed to overwhelm law or to direct the law. These colleagues are the same cautious types who, Richard Susskind notes in his book The End of Lawyers,18 spend little time addressing technology beyond simply discouraging lawyers from entering the information age. Technology habitually moves forward with little regard to the processes (legal, business, etc.) already in place—moving forward at such a rapid rate that it creates new processes along the way and the old ways quickly become obsolete. The two professions—technology and law—are fundamentally opposite in their rate of evolution. The legal profession is built on common law and precedent, intended to create a stable predictable outcome that evolves slowly and weathers societal volatility. Technology, and more specifically information technology, changes rapidly. Adapting technology to the legal profession and legal education, which predates computers by thousands of years, requires a stable foundation of shared concepts and vocabulary as well as the adoption of technical literacy as a component of legal education. Should ignorance be a defense with regards to the legal profession’s use of technology? Ignorantia juris non excusat is a legal principle which holds that a person who is unaware of the law cannot use that fact to escape liability due to a lack of knowledge of the law. The rule of law would fail if ignorance of the law allowed the governed to avoid responsibility. What responsibility should attorneys have to learn technology basics and stay current with technology? What responsibility does the legal academy have to 17 VW. Frank Newton & James Eissenger, “Into the New Millennium: Something Old, Something Borrowed, Something New: Law Schools of the Future” 63 Tex. Bar J. 32,34 (2000). 18 Richard Susskind, The End of Lawyers, Oxford University Press (2008) p. xxxi. § 5.06 EDUCATING THE DIGITAL LAWYER 5-14 educate law students regarding technology? How should the legal academy proceed to provide technical education? Throughout the legal education process, law students should be given enough technical literacy and technology skills to maintain client data with reasonable security so they do not violate their clients’ privacy and trust. Law students and all legal professionals need to learn the basics so they can embrace and leverage eGovernment, digital drafting and other innovations in the profession. Technology will continue to advance, it is up to attorneys and those whose business or profession is tied to the legal system to be engaged and actively educate themselves about technology. The time has come for legal education to adopt technology as a necessary and vital part of the practice of law through the integration of technology theory in the core curriculum, the addition of hands-on technology skills labs and the creation of a transitional environment to support digital immigrant faculty who should be teaching technology theory within the classroom.