The Twelfth International Conference on Substantive Technology in Legal Education and Practice (SubTech 2012) will be held Thursday through Saturday, July 26-28, at New York Law School in New York City. (http://www.nyls.edu/ ) 

 

SubTech has been held every other year since 1990. Its venues have included Salzburg, Chicago, Paris, Montreal, Stockholm, Cambridge (MA), Warwick (UK), Seattle, Oslo, Williamsburg, and Zaragoza. It is the premier international multidisciplinary gathering of specialists who work in the confluence of legal education and the technology of law. 

 

SubTech is dedicated to distinctively legal applications of information technology, as used or studied in legal education. By “substantive” we mean technologies of law teaching or practice that involve significant legal content. Artificial intelligence, computer-aided instruction, practice systems, online legal research, and Web-based applications are typical examples. By “legal education” we mean all contexts in which law is studied and taught, not just traditional law schools. 

 

Much of SubTech's success depends on keeping our participant roster appropriately sized, to preserve the informal atmosphere that differentiates it from other conferences.

 

We decided to run the conference a little differently this year.   Legal education and practice face some profound challenges, and we wanted to explore how SubTech can address those challenges.   The New York location offers us a perfect opportunity to do this, and we want to cap the event at 30 people.  We think this will make the discussions particularly fruitful.

 

 

 

We will initially convene on Thursday, July 26, at a dinner to get to know all the participants.  Then, on Friday we will all meet as a committee of the whole, to discuss the opportunities and implications of the rise of substantive advice giving systems and new online educational technologies (including legal expert systems, online automated document repositories, online educational innovations like MOOCs and electronic casebooks, automated learning tools, legal learning games, and so forth.)  We will ask how such systems can be developed and deployed to increase access to justice and enhance communications between government and citizens.  We will consider how in house legal departments can use such systems to re-engineer legal processes and provide efficient legal guidance to employees.  And we will discuss the implications of these developments for legal education.  We will also discuss the regulatory environment and available business models and career paths for recent law graduates.

 

On Saturday, we will take time to reflect on the lessons of the previous days, and participants will have the opportunity to make short presentations regarding their own projects and recent innovations in light of this. We will make also time for such reports in the context of the broader discussion and brainstorming sessions of the Friday session.

 

We hope that the conference can produce innovative ideas and concrete suggestions for changes to legal education, and we hope that the group will develop ideas for new, innovative projects involving various participants.

 

A list of those expected to attend can be found here.