meaningfully with them. While these legal information engineers may sometimes be able to provide this themselves, you and other legal academics will probably be better placed to do so in a general way. Secondly, those seeking to specialise further and become `specialist advisors' may undertake at least part of their training at your law school. Thirdly, newsletter software in 2020 will probably be able to identify the potential for new fields of law to be developed. Because of fewer demands to produce value-added legal information of immediately obvious relevance to existing clients, you or your colleagues in academia may be able to lead developments in such new fields, at least initially. On the other hand, newsletter software may provide advance warning that entire areas of law may become increasingly obsolete. In such cases, of course, law schools will also have an important role in retraining. Finally, as well as receiving continuing education in substantive law (or legal information) per se, legal information engineers will come to learn how to deliver or repackage legal information for a very broad audience, since legal academics will continue to concentrate more on this. Related to this will probably be a greater involvement by law schools in professional legal education: practical training required before being admitted to the legal profession, whatever its precise contours by 2020. In Japan, the opportunity for this is already emerging following agreement in October 1997 to reduce the training period at the state-funded LTRI from two years to 18 months.