According to Zachary Zarnow, the legal system isn’t working for everyday people. When nonlawyers encounter a law-related issue, such as fighting eviction or pursuing an employer for wage theft, they find the court system unnavigable, he says.
Can you objectively and accurately describe a sandwich?
Students attending Keith Porcaro’s Readings in Algorithms and the Law at Duke University School of Law learn to think about how algorithms work by first building their own. In addition to creating an algorithm to describe a sandwich, students are tasked with other hands-on challenges, such as translating an expungement statute into a simple logical expression.
Most lawyers dislike two things: the bar exam and change. Those two things are about to collide as the Uniform Bar Exam sunsets in 2028 and the NextGen UBE begins its rollout in July.
Before June 2022, law clerks had few opportunities to judge their judges. Enter the Legal Accountability Project, which Aliza Shatzman launched to increase transparency and accountability in judicial clerkships and the judiciary. A hallmark of the nonprofit organization is a centralized clerkships database that Shatzman describes as “basically Glassdoor for judges,” referencing the popular company review site.
Tanguy Chau, an engineer with a master’s degree, PhD and MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was an entrepreneur and venture capitalist early in his career. In looking for interesting investment opportunities, Chau zeroed in on legal technology.
Rebecca Sandefur traces her interest in access to justice back to the University of Chicago, where she wrote her dissertation on the social organization of legal careers.
Generative artificial intelligence has changed the practice and business of law in a short amount of time, and that’s especially been the case for in-house counsel.
Surely, lawyers have been in this situation before. Imagine being in a room with a client or a prospective client you really want to land for your law firm. They ask you a question about something that you’re just not ready for, and you start stumbling around or filibustering, hoping to sound like you know what you’re talking about. Or you admit you that don’t know and will get back to them, striking fear into your heart that they might decide they’re going to find a different lawyer—one who will know the answer immediately and not have to go look it up.
For decades, the Uniform Bar Examination has been old school, with bar candidates using paper-and-pencil exam books. But starting with the first administration of the NextGen UBE next year, the test will be entirely conducted on the examinees’ personal computers.
What is agentic artificial intelligence? According to IBM, it refers to “AI systems that are designed to autonomously make decisions and act, with the ability to pursue complex goals with limited supervision.” That definitely sounds like it could be really exciting. Or really scary. Or maybe both.
When Arizona changed its ethics rules in 2020 opening the door for alternative business structures and nonlawyer ownership for law firms, it sent shock waves throughout the legal industry.
Law firms acquire or merge with one another all the time. But when it comes to technology companies, firms usually keep it in-house or enter into a partnership with an outside vendor. They rarely go ahead and just buy a tech company.
"May you live in interesting times." For immigration lawyers, that old proverb is now a reality. Ever since the start of the second Trump administration, immigration lawyers have been busier than ever.
It’s a well-worn saying that the law always lags behind technology. It makes sense. We all remember the old song about how a bill becomes a law and how long the whole process can take. By the time you get to the verse about a president signing something into law, technology has either evolved into something even more cutting edge or become obsolete—replaced by a newer, shinier toy.
Rodrigo Camarena has been advocating for immigrants since he was a child. By the time he was 8, this son of an electrical engineer father and an attorney mother was the family's translator, navigating the bureaucracy when they immigrated to northern Virginia from Mexico City via a work visa.
When the Oregon State Board of Bar Examiners opened up applications for its Supervised Practice Portfolio Examination in May, some members of its Licensure Pathway Development Committee were nervous.
