I am thrilled to share that I’ve joined Northwestern Pritzker School of Law as a Visiting Professor of Law for the 2018-19 academic year. I’m very excited to have this opportunity to contribute to Northwestern Law’s many initiatives to continuously improve the value of the education delivered to its students and prepare its students to have an impact in our society.

Northwestern Law’s Strategic Plan, “Leading Law,” recognizes that law schools are “educating lawyers for a profession that is undergoing enormous change.” The Strategic Plan says that Northwestern Law  “accept[s] the changing, dynamic profession not with resignation, but with excitement.” This excitement stems from the opportunity for Northwestern Law “to leverage our competitive advantages, to expand our impact and our reputation.” What are these competitive advantages?

  1. Northwestern Law is a place of innovation.
  2. Northwestern Law is student-centered.
  3. Northwestern Law is interdisciplinary.

I share this excitement about meeting the challenges of our changing profession. In the future, today’s law students will improve legal services-delivery, expand access to legal services, expand the rule of law, and contribute to multidisciplinary teams solving society’s “wicked” problems. We must innovate and think big, especially in law school. (I developed these thoughts a bit more in an Above the Law interview, alt.legal: Law Schools Can, Should, And Must Teach Innovation.)

Interdisciplinary opportunities at Northwestern Law include working with talented law faculty with PhDs and expertise in many domains and well-established relationships with other Northwestern schools. I’ve already benefited greatly from initial meetings and discussions about interdisciplinary research and classes. These opportunities are reflected in the classes that I will teach:

  • Artificial Intelligence and Legal Reasoning (Fall 2018; JD students)
  • Innovation Lab (Spring 2019; JD, Master of Science in Law, and Computer Science students; co-teaching with Law Professor David L. Schwarz and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Kristian J. Hammond)
  • Law of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (Spring 2019; JD students)
  • Assessing AI and Computational Technologies (Spring 2019; Master of Science in Law students)
  • Assessing AI and Computational Technologies (Spring 2019; San Francisco Immersion Program; JD and Kellogg School of Management students)

My connection to Northwestern Law began several years ago with an introduction to Alyson Carrel, Clinical Assistant Professor of Law. Alyson was very generous with her time and answered all of my questions during my early days of teaching Negotiation at the University of Michigan Law School, while I was still practicing at Honigman. Several of my Michigan Law classes completed negotiation simulations with Alyson’s Northwestern Law students.

Later, Dean Daniel B. Rodriguez appointed Alyson as the new Assistant Dean of Law and Technology at Northwestern Law. Since then, my interactions with Alyson have focused on improving legal-services delivery, technology, and legal education. While at Michigan State, I greatly appreciated and benefited from opportunities to collaborate with and the support provided by Alyson and Dean Rodriguez. They also see the enormous opportunities for collaboration and interdisciplinary work to generate both individual and collective value for law schools, the legal profession, the emerging legal industry, and society at large.

In addition to my work at Northwestern Law, I remain an affiliated faculty member at CodeX – the Stanford Center for Legal InformaticsI am also working on updates to the Legal Services Innovation Index. In future posts, I plan to write about these projects and complete a wrap-up post about LegalRnD projects completed during my final year at Michigan State. (Most have known about my move to Northwestern Law for awhile, including from a March 1, 2018 Dean Rodriguez tweet and March 15, 2018 Northwestern Law tweet.)

Now that I’ll be living in Chicago, I look forward to more frequent meetings of the Chicago Legal Innovation meetup as well. We’ve had strong attendance at meetings by Northwestern Law students in the past, and I look forward to seeing many more Northwestern Law students at future meetings!