Inaugural International Law Lab Showcase Tomorrow!

The International Law Lab Showcase is an online meetup of innovation and technology labs at law schools around the world. It is an opportunity for the members of these labs to meet one another, and for people interested in how these innovative institutions operate to come ask questions.

If you are interested in attending a law school with an innovation and technology lab, or if you are a law school interested in starting one, this is where you should be.

Eight of the labs are located in the US, with one each from Singapore, Hong Kong, and Australia. All of them do at least one (and usually many) of the things on this list:

  • Teach the law applicable to new technologies
  • Teach technology, innovation, entrepreneurship, and design skills
  • Have students build legal technology applications as course work
  • Use external clients or legal clinics as real-world users for those projects
  • Support deployed student projects over the long term
  • Research and build new legal technologies
  • Incubate legal technology startups

I’m proud to be part of one of only two labs attending, SMU Centre for Computational Law, and the Suffolk Law Legal Innovation and Technology Lab, that build and release new legal technologies.

At SMU CCLaw, we recently released L4-Docassemble, which is a tool for rapidly prototyping explainable legal expert systems on the basis of declarative encodings of legal rules.

Suffolk’s LIT Lab is famous for having done some very innovative work in Docassemble, creating an “assembly line” tool that was then used to convert court forms into web applications that could then be deployed by pro bono clinics. They are also the creators of Spot, a tool that recognizes legal issues in natural language questions.

But the winner for most innovative offering is Flinders University, which is the only school that tries to ensure that student-designed legal applications can be realistically deployed and maintained over the long term.

An idea so good, you wish you had come up with it yourself.

The labs are going to be paired up into breakout rooms, so that staff from the labs can mingle with one another, as well as making themselves available to the rest of the attendees.

Professor Lim How Khang is going to be representing SMU CCLaw. Stop by and say hi. Registration is free, and we get started at 12am May 12, 2021, GMT.