21st century lawyer

Overview

What you will study

This is what you can expect from the 21st century lawyer course offered by University of Cape Town:

• Day 1: What does 21st century law and lawyers look like? What does this mean for the practice of law and the delivery of legal services? We will talk trends and what the future looks like.

• Day 2: Soft skills are the hardest skills. We believe that the 21st century lawyer is creative, has ‘Range’ and borrows liberally from disciplines other than law. We will talk about creativity, legal design, behavioural economics, cognitive science, information design and what being open-minded really means.

• Day 3: People are the key to lasting transformation. Wait, what? Yes, people, not tech. We will talk about how systems thinking can help you understand the interdependence between people, process and technology. There will be tips, tools and tricks to help you understand why change is hard for people (especially lawyers!) and how to make it easier.

• Day 4: Processes are where the rubber hits the road. We will talk about the difference between the practice of law and the delivery of legal services and how waste and over-lawyering can be reduced through sound end-to-end processes, continuous improvement, data and outcomes thinking. 

• Day 5: And finally, we get to ‘legal tech’. We will talk about the difference between law tech, law of tech and legal tech, the South African and Africa legal tech landscape and stakeholders, the technologies that are disrupting the legal industry, categories of legal tech and how they can help the 21st Century Lawyer and some of the challenges you have to overcome to successfully deploy.