10 Finalists Named in Bloomberg Law’s Inaugural Law School Innovation Program

ARLINGTON, VA (January 17, 2023) — Bloomberg Law today announced that it has named 10 finalists in its inaugural Law School Innovation Program, which recognizes law schools and their faculty and staff that have implemented and led innovative programs into their curricula that advance new methodologies and approaches to student instruction, legal technology implementation and usage, experiential learning, and other facets of legal education.

Bloomberg Law received nearly 90 applications from 60+ schools across 25+ states that were evaluated by a panel of internal and external experts, including Bloomberg Law analysts and industry authorities from all segments of the legal ecosystem.

Innovations submitted for consideration were grouped into six categories: technology, business, justice, experiential learning, pedagogy, and student development. In addition to the 10 finalists, highest scoring innovations were identified in each category.

The 2023 Law School Innovation finalists were recognized based on the criteria of innovation, impact on students, ability to advance the legal industry, and replicability.

The inaugural Law School Innovation Program finalists are:

• Suffolk University Law School’s Legal Innovation & Technology Concentration, the first such academic concentration at a United States law school, which signals a novel approach to integrating innovation and technology into legal education as part of Suffolk’s nationally-ranked LIT Institute. Akin to an academic undergraduate major, the LIT Concentration bundles required and elective upper-level JD courses together with a project and externship to create a training ground for students that prepares them for modern delivery of legal services.
• Georgia State University College of Law’s Legal Analytics & Innovation Initiative, which equips students with competitive skills needed by law firms across the country as they adopt new technologies. Led by a team of top-notch faculty, students learn to use legal technology, innovation, and analytics to advance the practice of law efficiently, ethically, and analytically.
• St. Mary’s University School of Law’s first ABA accredited fully-online J.D. program, which provides a pathway of online education towards that increases access and opportunity to the legal profession and ultimately expands access to justice.
• University of Richmond School of Law’s Legal Business Design Hub, which is the epicenter for applied research of the business design discipline within the global legal markets and the growing “business of law” domain. It is dedicated to advancing entrepreneurship capabilities in students, lawyers, and faculty in order to accelerate and instigate the building of new business ventures and modern solutions that address critical challenges facing the future of our legal system.
• Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law’s Leveraging Technology to Promote Access to Justice Course, in which students engage in self-regulated learning to build legal tech solutions for community partners, producing a tangible work product designed to systematically improve access to justice for the underserved while also creating independent thinkers who become future leaders in questioning the status quo, using logic and analytics to determine a course of action, and employing technology to drive functional change in the legal profession.
• Brooklyn Law School’s Brooklyn Law Incubator & Policy Clinic, a student-run, full-service law firm for socially-virtuous startups and entrepreneurs, typically pursuing ventures and issues that the law has not anticipated. BLIP provides transactional, IP, litigation, policy advocacy, and other legal counselling services, as well as running a Justice Lab to build apps and automation tools to advance access to justice for underserved communities.
• Drake University Law School’s First Year Trial Practicum, which allows first year law students to watch a real jury trial from voir dire to verdict and to have the opportunity to interact with the presiding judge, the trial attorneys and, after the verdict, the jury.
• Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law’s National Appellate Clinic Network, a collaborative project led by Northwestern Pritzker School of Law’s Appellate Advocacy Center and comprising faculty and staff from several dozen other law schools. The Network brings technology into appellate clinic practice by providing a searchable public database of over two hundred briefs, as well as other classroom and oral advocacy resources.
• Santa Clara University School of Law’s Privacy Law Certificate, which helps Santa Clara Law students build strong foundations for their professional success and positions students to become the next generation of leaders in the privacy field by completing a rigorous set of certificate milestones in and outside the classroom.
• University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School’s Integrated Education on Well-Being and Thriving in the Law, an interactive conversation among students, faculty, alumni, and mental health experts in its Professional Responsibility curriculum. The class highlights potential challenges to well-being in the legal profession and provides guidance on how to plan for, avoid, and help others address those challenges over time.

“The ten finalists recognized by Bloomberg Law’s inaugural Law School Innovation Program are an impressive group of programs and initiatives that represent creative and compelling ways that legal education is keeping up with the demands of the legal and business markets,” said Joe Breda, president, Bloomberg Law. “As a company, we prioritize innovation, and we are proud to recognize the law school faculty, staff, and administrators who are driving these educational innovations.”

For more information on these finalists and additional innovations, visit https://news.bloomberglaw.com/bloomberg-law-analysis/analysis-bloomberg-law-announces-top-10-law-school-innovators?trackingcode=BLAW23109354&utm_medium=pr.