Equipping the Garage Guys in Law

The twin structural changes of the last few decades – globalization and the emergence of a web-based platform for economic activity – have transformed the economic demand for law. The market for law, however, has struggled to keep up with these changes, showing few signs of the kind of innovation that we see in many other sectors of the new economy. Even our most sophisticated and innovative corporations report difficulty in finding lawyers with the kinds of risk-attuned and creative problem-solving skills that they need (Hadfield 2011). Some large corporate clients have gone so far as to refuse to hire new law firm associates, finding the value they deliver too far below the hourly rate they are charged for their services. There are many causes of the growing mismatch between what clients want from law and what law delivers, and no silver bullet to solve the growing discontent in the market. But the stagnant nature of legal education clearly plays a role. In this paper, I discuss my experiences with problem-based teaching methods in a mainstay of the traditional law school curriculum: first year and upper year contract law. These experiences demonstrate how much we need to do to bring legal education into the 21st century, and suggest some concrete changes we can make in how we teach to nurture the development of a new generation of innovators in law. \\jciprod01\productn\M\MLR\70-2\MLR211.txt unknown Seq: 1 10-MAR-11 17:46 EQUIPPING THE GARAGE GUYS IN LAW GILLIAN K. HADFIELD* “Somewhere there’s a 26-year-old out trying to destroy your business.” I. A CLASSROOM EXPERIMENT Recently, I conducted an experiment. Prompted by a student who had established a new joint law school-business school student group at the University of Southern California, I ran an extracurricular case study session in which J.D. and M.B.A. students worked together to find a solution for a real company facing a very real business challenge. The case involved a startup in Toronto called Innovation Exchange (“IX”), an online open innovation platform connecting sponsor companies posting innovation challenges (for example, a new type of yogurt container or a new banking product) with a community of innovators. Innovation Exchange was encountering the following problem: In a significant number of cases, getting potential sponsor companies to sign up was slowed down or even halted by the complexity and legalese of their contract. As CEO Stephen Benson put the challenge, “It would be great if we could get this thing down to a page or two of easily readable content that the nonlawyer Chief Innovation Officer of a potential sponsor company could easily understand and communicate internally.” Copyright  2011 by Gillian K. Hadfield. * Many thanks to my J.D. students in Advanced Contracts at USC and to the students from both the Gould School of Law and the Marshall School of Business who participated in the IX simulation exercise in the Spring of 2010. Special thanks to Philip Castro and Paul Del Piero for their initiative in putting the exercise together. I am also grateful to Stephen Benson, Mike Roster, and Ed Kleinbard for their contributions to the exercise and to the participants in University of Maryland School of Law’s Conference on the Profession and the Academy: Addressing Major Changes in Law Practice for comments. Financial assistance from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation through their funding of the Southern California Innovation Project and from the USC Law School is gratefully acknowledged. 1. Webcast: Future Ed Conference: New Business Models for U.S. and Global Legal Education, Panel 1, held by New York Law School and Harvard Law School, at 12:53–13:00 (Apr. 9, 2010), http://www.nyls.edu/centers/harlan_scholar_centers/institute_for_information_law_and_policy/events/future_ed (follow “For Video of the Conference” hyperlink; then select “Future Ed Conference – Panel 1” hyperlink) (remarks of Paul Lippe, Founder and CEO of Legal OnRamp) (attributing the quote to Bill Joy, cofounder of Sun Microsystems). 2. INNOVATION EXCHANGE, www.innovationexchange.com (last visited Dec. 21, 2010). 3. I am on the Board of Advisors for the company, and my brother was one of the founding partners.