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IV Ashton on the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s Impact on Legal

Law 2030 Podcast - Season 2 | Episode 6

IV Ashton IV Ashton is President and Founder of LegalServer and Houston.AI. IV helps nonprofit organizations design, develop, and implement vital information and knowledge management solutions.

On this episode, he discusses how rapid advancements in technology can create unexpected and transformational shifts in legal and how we can better prepare tomorrow’s lawyers to anticipate and respond to these changes.

Episode Mentions:

LegalServer

Houston.AI

Our Key Takeaways From This Episode

Don’t think about the future of law in terms of disruption.

Our profession is too established to think of transformation as being X, replacing Y. Instead, think about the incremental changes you can make to improve the delivery of legal services in your work. If we have the right mindset, all of us in the legal profession can grow the ways we deliver legal services and create tools needed to create more access to justice opportunities.

Embrace a growth mindset, now.

The fact is American educators are introducing a growth mindset very early on these days. By the time the youngest students reach our profession, they will have healthier and more helpful ideas about how they can learn to try new things, figure out what works best, and be resilient in moving on if something isn’t working. We owe it to the future of the profession to better prepare the lawyers of tomorrow by inculcating a culture of growth mindset today.

Be expansive in how you’re thinking about the future because some changes in our world are going to create unintended or unexpected shifts in our profession.

An example? Driverless cars. I was as surprised as you may have been when IV spoke about how this technology may have downstream effects on court funding. We have to design ways for law students and lawyers to sharpen their imaginations so we can better prepare for these seemingly unconnected dynamics.

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Full Episode Transcript

Jennifer: What makes you optimistic about the future of the legal profession?

IV: I think it’s really easy for us to look at the world through a lens and see dark days. I mean, we watch the news and we see riots, we see civil unrest, we see wars, disease, but the reality is never before in the history of humankind have we been more advanced than we are now. There are really good people finding great solutions to the world’s problems. And that gives me a lot of hope.

Jennifer: Hi everyone. I’m Jennifer Leonard, Chief Innovation Officer at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. As an alum at the law school who practiced law for a decade in private sector and government practices. I realized there are so many ways we lawyers can better serve our clients. And now through the future of the profession initiative, my colleagues and I focus all our energy on thinking about how to do just that. Our profession is full of bright, engaged lawyers working at the highest levels, but we frustrate many of those we want to serve because of the way we’ve structured the practice of law and our legal systems. And students coming to law school today need new skills that turbocharge their legal education so that they can navigate the dynamic landscape that lies ahead. To develop fresh approaches to the way we educate lawyers and serve our clients we need to open up the conversation.

So on this podcast, we’ll hear from experts working to change the legal profession and leaders who’ve developed creative solutions to complex problems in other fields. We’ll also discuss how the law school is producing the next generation of lawyers, a generation that will create new ways to put the people they serve at the center of everything they do. There’s so much to do. So let’s get started.

Today, I’m excited to welcome IV Ashton, President and Founder of LegalServer and Houston.AI. IV helps nonprofit organizations design, develop, and implement vital information and knowledge management solutions. IV also has significant international experience, helping governments and NGOs in developing IT solutions that increase efficiencies.

In fact, he designed Albania’s legal information infrastructure for the World Bank. He also led a team in building a war crimes database to track the violations of human rights in Kosovo. And he’s led legal information technology projects in Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Albania. He joins us today to discuss how rapid advancements in technology can create unexpected and transformational shifts in Legal and how we can better prepare tomorrow’s lawyers to anticipate and respond to these changes. Here’s my conversation with IV Ashton.

Welcome to the podcast IV. We’re excited to talk a little bit about Legal Tech today.

IV: Well, thank you. I’m pleased to be here.

Jennifer: Before we dive in, I want to learn a little bit about you and I’m very curious to know. I understand IV is not an abbreviation for two other names, but is instead the actual Roman numeral for four, is that correct?

IV: That’s right. My father is Harry Earl Ashton III. And when I was born, my mother agreed to name me Harry Ashton IV, but then they negotiated on what they would call me and they ended up calling me IV for four. And it has been IV ever since.

Jennifer: I also understand, IV, that your entire career can be credited to a conversation you had with somebody and you almost didn’t approach that person. Could you tell us more about that?

IV: Yeah. I was a third-year law student and we had a new dean that was starting in the fall. And I went to the opening session he did where he welcomed everyone back for what was going to be my third year of law school. And at the end of the presentation, he was walking off stage and I thought, look, I’m a third-year law student. I had to go up and introduce myself to him and just welcome him. We’re excited he’s here. He’s actually from Philadelphia. He was a law professor at Villanova.

His name is Hank Perritt and he was the Dean at Chicago Kent, where I went to law school. And I walked up to him and said, “Hi, my name is IV. I’m a third-year student. I’m really excited that you’re here and just want to say welcome.” And you, he looked me right in the eyes and he said, “nice to meet you. Are you interested in Bosnia?” And I said, “what, what?” And he said, “I’ve got a really interesting project and I need a student for it, and you seem like the kind of person that would be interested in that.” Anyway, we went up to his office. We had a long conversation and a month later I was in Sarajevo and literally, my entire career shifted. And that’s kind of what I can credit the shift to is that moment where I just said, hello.

Jennifer: One of the questions I frequently get when I share with people what I do and focus on innovation in Legal is that as much talk there is about all the changes happening in the legal profession, people say things haven’t really changed that much. And yet, as students are going into the same types of jobs, big law firms continue to generate huge profits and are doing just fine. There’s still huge access to justice gulf that we’ve been struggling to try to close. So what do you say to people who say that there’s been no change? Do you think we’ve been changing as a profession?

IV: Absolutely. I mean, I think part of the problem with this conversation is it tends to get framed in terms like disruption. And if you look throughout our history, there have been four industrial revolutions, if you want to call them that, where we’ve had disruption. And when I say disruption, I mean, where one thing replaces another thing, where X replaces Y. So if you look between the year 1760 and 1860, roughly, that industrial revolution was where we started to mechanize things. Where the steam engine was invented, where the weaving loom was invented. And it allowed us to do things differently, faster, use different resources to produce things, and it changed how people live. And then if you look at the second industrial revolution between 1870 and 1914, you can think of that as like where we electrified everything, where we applied electricity to things that we used to do manually.

Then if you get into the third industrial revolution, which is roughly between 1950 and 2000, really, that was an age of automation. And I think that’s kind of what the lens in which we’re looking at the change in profession through when people say things haven’t changed. But just think about in the 90s, the advent of email, or when we digitized information and made it searchable. All of those things happened in that era, that completely changed how we practice law. And so, now we’re in this fourth industrial revolution, some people call it, they predict it’ll be a 30-year revolution, I don’t know. I don’t need to be right about that or I don’t care if they’re right about that, we’re in the middle of something. And that seems to be fueled by adding intelligence to things that would be kind of the buzzword there.

So I think that does get hyped a lot because people then say like, well, artificial intelligence, that means that we’re going to have robo lawyers or robo cops or robo judges, well, we’re going to have replaced humans with machines. And I don’t find it all that helpful to have that conversation in that framework. I think maybe a better way to frame the conversation is just to talk about it in terms of transformation. What are the tools allowing us to do differently today than we could do yesterday? And in that sense, I do think we’re seeing great change in terms of how the profession delivers legal services.

Jennifer: Could you give an example of that last model, something where we’re transforming the way that we did something that we used to do as lawyers, and maybe thinking about how fearful the discussion about technology can be for lawyers?

IV: Yeah. Well, let me give a couple of examples. One is that whenever we apply the term artificial intelligence to something, I think that also is like a trigger word. The reality is that when computers first came out, they were considered artificially intelligent because they could add, right. And then, at some point, people learn that they could program logic into computers so that you could build, and the type of AI is called symbolic artificial intelligence. It’s what we would know today as expert systems. If then we’re going to ask you a series of questions and give you a prognosis at the end of that because we’ve programmed the computer to know certain things. So that’s been around since the 60s. So that stuff isn’t really all that new, it’s just called different names now.

But some examples of things we’re doing today, a good friend of mine, I think I told you this story before, but I’ll share it again. When he graduated from law school in 1992, went to work for a big law firm. And he was a help to the head of the law firm, who was a big litigator. And he went to court with him every day. And at the end of one of the trial days, they came back and Dave said that his day always started about 4:00 PM, because that’s when he would be handed some assignment and have to have it ready by the morning. And the lawyer came in and said, Dave, I need you to look through this stack of depositions and I need you to find a certain word. And the stack of deps, like six feet high. The partner knew it would take Dave all night to read all of the depositions, looking for some keyword and when the partner left, Dave turned to the paralegal and said, don’t we have these depositions on floppy disks?

And the paralegal said, we do. He said, bring me that floppy disk. And he hit Ctrl-F and he found all the different places that he used to document or in the transcripts where that word was used. And he walked into his partner’s office an hour later and handed him the 19 places that he found it. And the partner was in awe. And he thought it was magic. And Dave told the whole story about Ctrl-F. And unfortunately, the worst part of this story is that when the partner told the other partners, they were angry because it costs the firm $1,800 of Dave’s time, which is how much they billed him out at. We could have just paid the human to do it and made more money at it. But that was 1992 and we do Ctrl-F all the time now. So if we think about e-Discovery and being able to read through contracts and pull out phrases and things like that, these are the types of tools that are being used daily now.

Jennifer: Right. And to your point, these tools can allow attorneys to do the things that they wanted to do when they got into the practice of law in the first place. You’re making me think of my early days as a litigation associate, sitting in a room with actual boxes of documents, and trying to read through them and find there was no Ctrl-F to be able to find the words I was looking for. And now you can have all sorts of search capability that then allows the associates to be thinking at a higher level about what story these documents tell as it relates to the case.

IV: And maybe to build on your point, maybe what we need to redefine is where or how lawyers provide value. And when we put it in terms of value, practicing more at the top of your license, doing the things that humans do really well, putting the facts together to create that story is a much better use of your time and is much more fulfilling as a lawyer than reading through hours and hours of documents, looking for phrases or keywords.

Jennifer: I wanted to talk a little bit about the business model in the private sector of legal and how much of that business model and particularly the billable hour drives the way that we’ve been delivering legal services. And my question for you, IV, is, we talk sometimes about the law being a profession, and then at other times, we talk about the law being more of a business, and we need to rethink our business model, which one do you think it is? And does the distinction between the two matter in the way that we approach the future of legal?

IV: It’s a great question. And I think the answer is “yes and,” I would say, “both and more,” right? Viewing anything, you view it through a lens. It’s hard to argue that law isn’t business, money is transacted for goods sold. Certainly, it is a business and it is a profession and it is many other things, as well. So I think it’s helpful to understand the different models through which we look at the practice of law if you want to call it what lawyers do. And I think we would be better off expanding the way we look at it instead of being so limited in how we look at it. I mean, I think part of the challenge here is that lawyers are the only profession that I can think of that self-regulates. And so, this debate sometimes happens, and unfortunately, usually, when the debate happens, the people that are arguing that “well, law is a profession” end up arguing that their obligations to their clients and their ethical obligations are protecting society somehow, as though that is the thing that will serve society.

But the reality is law in any society are the rules that govern us. It’s our contract of how we agree to live together and the system is not working. So it’s hard to look at our system and say, now there’s a system that works really well, right? The system is not working. And so, instead of fighting about the fact that we can’t have other ways of delivering value to clients, we ought to open up and figure out the places that lawyers really add value. And we had to move the focus from the lawyer to society or the client.

Jennifer: Because the bargain we’ve made with society is that we will self-regulate and an exchange will regulate in a way that protects society’s interests, but what we’ve ended up designing are systems that nobody can access as a result of that. So maybe over-protectionism is what we’ve built into the system.

IV: I totally agree with that. I mean, I often say law is written by lawyers for lawyers and I think, we may make certain assumptions in life and sometimes those assumptions turn out to be not true. And we pay the price for making faulty assumptions. I think one assumption that we’ve made is that assumption that the law is about lawyers. And I think we ought to pivot and start thinking about asking a question: what is the best system that delivers desired outcomes and how do we most efficiently and effectively do that so that more people benefit from those outcomes. I hear this from time to time where people consider real lawyers, the ones that go to law firms every day, and we often describe people that have, maybe I would just say, a nontraditional path through their legal career. We describe it in words as like alternative careers. And I wonder if you think that label serves the community or the community of lawyers, or if it’s limiting.

Jennifer: I think the more inclusive and the more broadly we can define what lawyers can contribute and what affiliated professionals can bring to our work, the more we can start to make adjustments that are easier than complete systems redesign to start to shift the culture a little bit.

IV: I think so. And there’s a lot of paths a lawyer can take that are fulfilling, that add a lot of value and make a difference. And it might be at a big law firm and it might be in a courtroom and it might not be, and all of those are needed and valuable.

Jennifer: I’m really glad you raised assumptions because it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. We’ve been reading Adam Grant’s new book as a team, Think Again, which is all about questioning what you think you know and approaching the world more like a scientist and having hypotheses, but then being open to adapting if those hypotheses are flawed. And I’m always struck, IV, that we’re a profession from day one in law school that is so focused on precision and excellence in everything that we do, which is critical for what we do for our clients.

But to your point, despite that focus, we’ve somehow managed to create these terribly flawed systems that override all of it. And we don’t spend enough time focusing that interest in being more precise in developing better systems. So how do you think we can start changing the conversation, maybe even at the law school level, to help new lawyers think in different ways about the need to try new things and how to balance that with ethical obligations that we have to our clients and balance that with learning how to be precise in our research and writing and counseling? I think it’s easy to say, but it’s very difficult to execute and practice.

IV: Well, I think maybe we… And I’m speaking from my experience as a law student and then having worked for a law school for a bit. I think I thought of getting my legal degree as a destination that I would arrive at. And when I arrived at that destination, I would be done. I would’ve accomplished the thing that I needed to get the degree. And then, I would go use that degree to practice law or do whatever I was going to do with it. But I think that is a very limiting belief. And ironically as a parent, I’ve learned a lot about the growth mindset and about how we’re teaching kids to grow, not just to recite back things, but to learn how to fail, how to be resilient, how to just accept that when they tried something and it didn’t work that that’s just more information for them.

And how do you then incorporate that information into the next decision you make? As a business owner, I will just say that I think, every decision we make is based on assumptions, and everyone who ever started a business or a project or an initiative in a company, no one ever started it with the idea that this is going to fail. Everyone, that was the greatest idea ever that we had that when we were going to go do whatever. And what I’ve learned over the years, I’ve learned it from one of my business mentors, is to really look for, ask the question, what am I not seeing? What assumptions am I making that would have to be true in order for this to happen? I just think that mindset of like, it’s okay that we’re going to fail, but let’s fail fast and let’s fail small and let’s correct. And let’s keep iterating until we get it right. I love that mindset.

I think if we could teach more of that in law school, that would be helpful. I mean, I think the other part of it is that from the law school perspective, at least from my experience, is what I thought when I came out of law school… When I went into law school, I thought I would come out with legal knowledge and that I would need that knowledge to be able to be a lawyer. I think what I learned as a lawyer, or what I learned in law school, is I learned how to think. And I didn’t necessarily have the answer, but I knew how to find the answer.

I think in tomorrow’s society, legal knowledge is a plus. It’s something that you’re going to, that it adds to your resume, but it’s not the only thing that you need to have. I mean, I think being able to understand how things like project management, things like how design thinking works, things like how businesses operate, like what are the basics of how businesses work? What is your level of tech proficiency? These are the types of skills that lawyers of tomorrow are going to need. So I love words like upskilling or lifelong learner growth mindset. I think those are ways to characterize what law schools can embrace.

Jennifer: I agree. And I’m happy to report that we’re starting to infuse some more conversations about growth mindset at the law school level, which is a great development. I was always struck when I was in practice at how senior attorneys I worked with still knew where other senior attorneys they worked with went to law school, whether they were on law review, which federal judge they clerked for. And in some cases, those markers of success were 30 years, 40 years removed from what they were doing day-to-day. It’s always struck me that it was such a fixed mindset model of identifying talent and growing talent in your organization. And so, I think that that’s a great adjustment that we can be making as a profession. And I’m wondering if you had an example of an assumption that you held either about our systems or about an idea that you had that turned out to be flawed?

IV: Yeah, of course. I mean, I could probably give you, we could spend an entire season of podcasts talking about the mistakes that I’ve made, but I will tell you that one recently that we had was an assumption that we were developing a product and we were trying to ensure the success of how this tool is going to really help. I mean, we build software for people that can’t typically afford lawyers. So we were looking, how can we leverage this technology to really create a big impact? And our software is a no-code application. You don’t have to be a computer programmer to program in it, quote-unquote. But we had decided that there was this one project we would want to make available to outside developers so that they could make products using our software. And we thought this would be the best path to expanding our leverage and our impact because we could get more people that weren’t employed by us that would take our software and do great things with it.

We got some traction on it—it hasn’t been a complete failure, but we missed the mark probably by about, our outcomes were less than 5% of what we thought there would be. So we reconvened and thought, well, what is the barrier here? And it turns out that part of the barrier we think is that software engineers really love solving problems on their own. And they love home cooking their own solutions and using our software to do it wasn’t really all that appealing to them.

So we adjusted and we built a layer of our software that let non-programmers take it. And with a single line of computer code, they can embed some of our software in any website. It’s called our insert tool. And by freeing up the assumption that had to be a developer that created those programs and expanding it to non-developers, non-software engineers and making it easy for them by removing the barrier of having to know how to code. We actually, in the end, created a product that both serve the developers if they choose to use it and non-developers, software engineers to do it. So, again, we just took the feedback, we went down a different path than we thought we were going to go down at first. And it’s okay.

Jennifer: It’s a good example of the need for lawyers to learn more about other disciplines. And you learned something about how another discipline operates and some of their preferences that ultimately helped you move in a different direction.

IV: That’s right. I mean, I think part of this whole digital transformation we’re in, it’s very holistic in nature. Whether it’s software engineering or lawyers, we’re just a piece of that and really the other disciplines that… Other ways of looking at the problem again, sometimes we can just think of it as other mindsets, like the way that the other people see the problem and how they see the solution is really additive to the outcome that we’re all desire.

Jennifer: Yeah. And thinking about what the future will look like for our students and helping them embrace interdisciplinary. I think a lot about the challenges that our profession faces, which can be greater as compared with other professions. We have worse outcomes on diversity and inclusion. We’re very resistant to change to the point of this conversation. Many lawyers are afraid of technology and don’t look forward to embracing it. And we’ve regulated in a way that we stay in the same jurisdiction to practice. So we think about top talent, five years from now coming out of colleges or coming out of early careers, how do you think we keep the profession attractive to those people who really embrace the opposite in many ways of what we’ve been able to accomplish as a profession?

IV: What you just described as to what the profession is today. I think the first thing that we need to look at is what might the profession look like in the future anyway. And some of that’s hard to predict. And so, I say this in the spirit, not of this is how the profession will be, but here are things that might prove out to be true. And I think, the recent example of COVID has accelerated some of this. In many ways it accelerated a lot of this and things that were never going to be possible are now possible. We were never going to be able to have a status call hearing by zoom, but now all of a sudden we’re having trials by zoom. And by the way, I’m not advocating that we have trials by zoom, but I’m just saying that there are different ways to deliver stuff.

So if we think about what the future of law looks like, we might think about, there’s this transition happening between the notion of law as a service delivering legal service as we call them. And we might start thinking about them as legal products. A lot of people are thinking about, well, what does the product look like? I mean, I think your notion about where we can practice law is slowly eroding where geography may not matter. It could be that I could sit in Chicago and practice law in Florida at some point. If that happens, that changes everything. I think when we think about how we get leverage and how we scale a business and we apply it towards the delivery of law, we might end up with legal platforms that people subscribe to. We might end up with lawyers that are bound together, not by a firm, but more like a match.com type interface where people are linking up.

So if we think about that being how law is delivered down the road, then maybe the way that we attract people is just to say, as they come into law school is to say, if you look at the legal market, it is ripe for transformation, if not disruption. The opportunities are vast. It is a very inefficient system, but what we need are people from all parts of life that have different life experiences that have different ways of solving the problem.

Jennifer: I think that the opportunities are enormous and so different from the opportunities when you and I entered law school. And it makes me excited for new law students and for law schools to be part of the transformation that we’re talking about.

IV: As you prepare students for the future, and by the way, I mean, I’ve met you and attended some of the webinars and read about the law school and I want to just say it, you guys are doing an incredible job of adapting and providing value to the students from your approach, I think. But it’s got to be a huge challenge to teach lawyers how to be lawyers when, as I said, the technology that they might be using in 10 to 20 years, hasn’t even been invented yet. So there’s no way you can teach them about it. How do you teach, so that they’ll be successful in 10 to 20 years from now?

Jennifer: Well, first, thank you so much for your kind words. It’s exciting and rewarding work to do. And just a huge community of people at our law school who are thinking about this. And it is a challenge. I remember a few years ago, there was a big debate in legal education. Should law students learn how to code? Should we be teaching that in courses? Because law schools are struggling with thinking about how to teach technology, and I think I come down in the camp of, we shouldn’t be teaching law students how to code in law school classes necessarily. I think what we should be teaching them is how to find the people who know how to code to contribute to their work. And that’s just one example of a broader skill set of how to find the resources that you need, or the expertise that you need in other areas, and the importance of interdisciplinary.

And I think technology is part of the toolkit. So recognizing that the future of legal practice requires an entrepreneurial mindset in the sense that you’re bringing together lots of different elements to do whatever you’re trying to do. So that might be finding a technologist to help you develop a new platform or finding somebody who’s an expert in some niche area that you don’t know anything about, but is in a business school. And so, one of the things I think law schools can be doing better is doing more interdisciplinary work.

I was talking with someone the other day about building in a project where the students have to solve a problem, and they can’t ask a lawyer. They have to go find somebody from another discipline to help them and think through how they would identify that person and bring them into the conversation.

And then I also think teaching students about metacognition and understanding how they as individuals learn and develop because I think the future as you’re so wonderfully describing is going to move at a very rapid and accelerating pace. And we can’t just rely on three years in law school to sustain us from a learning standpoint. So how do we think about how individual learning preferences and development help us going forward? I think it’s very challenging to do, but it’s also really exciting in a lot of ways.

IV: Yeah. And I was struck by the conversation that I had with you and some of your alums. I mean, it seems that you recognize the idea that your legal education doesn’t up when you get your diploma, that you must be a lifelong learner and we must continue to teach. And I mean, in nature, you’re either growing or you’re dying. Those are the two states. There’s nothing in between.

Jennifer: And I think it’s a great note to move into some lightning-round questions if that’s all right with you?

IV: Of course.

Jennifer: All right. So first, what do you think is the biggest misconception people have about Legal Tech?

IV: The biggest misconception? I would say that you have to plug it in, meaning that it requires electricity. I think innovation or technology doesn’t have to be digital. Innovation could just be redefining a process or a system that gives us outcomes. And so, when we think about Legal Tech, it doesn’t need to be technology in the sense of it has to be on a computer.

Jennifer: What is one prediction you have for the future of legal that might surprise people?

IV: I think there is a real chance that courts will be disrupted by driverless cars.

Jennifer: Really interesting. I want to hear more about that.

IV: I know, as I said it, I realized I should fill in the back story. Well, I took that from a group I was in where somebody asked this question and the answer is driverless cars because think about how courts are funded. And some courts are funded by traffic tickets and parking fines. And if the world really does become a series of driverless cars, they don’t park and they don’t speed. And therefore that source of revenue goes away. Could happen, right?

Jennifer: Yeah. That is really interesting. And my last question for you, IV, is other than lawyers, who, or what do you think will be the most influential driver of change in the future of the legal profession?

IV: I think the advent of quantum computers, which has long been talked about and is now a reality where the speed and the size of computers are so fast, that they can compute so quickly that they can do things that have never been possible before. And I mean, by a lot. And that transformation in terms of technology will enable small devices to be able to apply things that require a lot of computation like artificial intelligence to live on devices, as small as our phones.

Jennifer: Well, I want to thank you so much, IV, for spending your very valuable time with us, dispelling some of the myths around technology and some of the hype and giving us an optimistic, inclusive, and expansive view of what the future of legal services could be.

IV: Well, thank you. Thanks for the invitation. And I always really enjoy our conversations. So it’s been fun.

Jennifer: What an enlightening conversation with IV Ashton. Here are my key takeaways.

First, don’t think about the future of law in terms of disruption. Our profession is too established to think of transformation as being X, replacing Y. Instead, think about the incremental changes you can make to improve the delivery of legal services in your work. If we have the right mindset, all of us in the legal profession can grow the ways we deliver legal services and create tools needed to create more access to justice opportunities.

Next, embrace a growth mindset, now. The fact is American educators are introducing a growth mindset very early on these days. By the time the youngest students reach our profession, they will have healthier and more helpful ideas about how they can learn to try new things, figure out what works best, and be resilient in moving on if something isn’t working. We owe it to the future of the profession to better prepare the lawyers of tomorrow by inculcating a culture of growth mindset today.

Last point, be expansive in how you’re thinking about the future because some changes in our world are going to create unintended or unexpected shifts in our profession. An example? Driverless cars. I was as surprised as you may have been when IV spoke about how this technology may have downstream effects on court funding. We have to design ways for law students and lawyers to sharpen their imaginations so we can better prepare for these seemingly unconnected dynamics.

Thanks to all of you for joining us today. Make sure to subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen. Be sure to leave us a comment and rate the show too. We’ll see you next time on another addition of Law 2030.


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