Tech Law Mcgill

We are McGill law students who are passionate about the intersection between law and technology. Our goal is to bring critical Internet and technology issues to McGill`s legal community and facilitate discussion and debate through panels, workshops, podcasts and our blog. Hannes graduated from Lund University in Sweden in 2018 with a Master of Laws focused on data protection and big data. He spent an exchange year at McGill University`s Faculty of Law. In addition to his law studies, Hannes has been interested and active in technology and programming, for example by participating in hackathons and developing several smartphone applications. Law schools` adoption of an approach to legal education that meaningfully integrates AI and technology into the curriculum depends on the willingness of relevant stakeholders to advance the profession. Long-time observers of Canadian legal education, such as former McGill Dean Roderick Macdonald and Thomas McMorrow of the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, postulated in 2014 that legal education in Canada has a fixed ethic that resists change, and that it is the responsibility of faculty and students to resist stagnation. In order to remain relevant educational institutions, law schools should begin to orient themselves towards education and criticism of the modern world. Robert Gordon, a renowned legal historian and educator, noted in 2007 that the main entry point for curriculum changes remained faculty receptivity to introducing external disciplines into their courses. It is important to note that teachers must also be able to integrate these disciplines into traditional teaching models. Some law schools have clinics focused on technology and innovation, allowing students to prepare for practice in the ever-changing technology landscape.

The Initio Technology and Innovation Clinic at Dalhousie`s Schulich School of Law supports technology start-ups in Atlantic Canada in their search for initial legal information on technology, intellectual property and commercial law issues. It also provides students with the opportunity to learn more about the practice of start-up law and how they can use technology to improve service delivery. Esade is a global educational institution in Spain that is primarily a school of economics and law. In both faculties, Esade integrates AI and technological innovation into his curriculum. For example, the institution offers a bachelor`s degree in business administration and a bachelor`s degree in artificial intelligence for businesses. The program provides students with the tools to integrate business knowledge with AI and can serve as inspiration for law schools and how to modify their curriculum. Esade`s Bachelor of Laws ensures that its students are familiar with market realities. The program includes subjects in economics, accounting, and finance, and allows students to choose specialization paths early in their academic careers. One specialization track includes “Law 4.0”, which covers several areas at the intersection of law and technology, including those on disruptive technologies and artificial intelligence.

The Esade model of business and legal education can serve as an inspiration for law schools considering the integration of AI into legal education. Implementing AI throughout the core curriculum of law schools presents significant challenges. The first is that few lawyers have the technical background in computer science to meaningfully integrate the study of AI and law into their curriculum. This is often the case because most AI and law research has been done by computer scientists, not lawyers. In order to overcome this problem, lawyers and legal educators must be able to acquire sufficient computer literacy. “Lawyers need to enter the workforce who are aware of AI and its transformative impact not only on economic and financial services, but on virtually every area of today`s social and political life, and with a reasonable understanding. However, this assumes that we do not treat “AI and the law” as an exotic and distinct element in curriculum design and modification. This would risk making the same mistake that law schools around the world have made and continue to make with respect to occasional courses on “law and globalization” – which remain largely isolated from the rest of the law school curriculum.