There’s a variety of affordable—or free—ways to teach legal tech, law school librarians say
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Deborah Ginsberg doesn’t teach a specific legal technology class at Chicago-Kent College of Law. Instead, the educational technology law librarian goes to various classes and provides students with information relevant to legal practice areas taught in the course.
“I do technology as an embedded librarian, because we want to help as many students as possible. We started doing this as brown-bag lunches with free cookies, but that wasn’t enough, students were too busy. We had to reach them where they needed to listen,” said Ginsberg, who spoke Thursday at an ABA Techshow panel titled: “Law School Tech Training on a Shoestring.” The panel focused on getting students technology-ready for legal practice—at little or no cost to the law school.
Other panelists were Kristina L. Niedringhaus, the associate dean for library and information services at the Georgia State University College of Law, and Joe Mitzenmacher, a reference and electronic services librarian at Loyola University Chicago School of Law. The event was part of Techshow’s academic track.
Many universities provide free access to Microsoft Office 365 for everyone, said Mitzenmacher, and he recently discovered that Ross Intelligence, an online legal research tool that uses artificial intelligence, offers students free trial subscriptions. Mitzenmacher co-teaches a legal technology class and often relies on guest speakers to speak for free on topics like cybersecurity.
Mitzenmacher also invites vendors to his class to teach students about software.
“For a practice management session, we used Clio with a free vendor demo. If Clio is not your thing, you could probably ask some of the other vendors,” he said. “The idea was to get them using some practice management system so they could use any practice management system.”
Niedringhaus recently began teaching a law practice technology class alongside the director of the State Bar of Georgia’s law practice management program. At some point she would like to offer the course online with no limits on class size.
“It is the most fun I’ve had at work in a while, and I love my job, so that’s a high bar,” Niedringhaus said. “It was so much fun to co-teach with someone, and it’s really fun to be learning the stuff yourself, too.”
From left: Joe Mitzenmacher, a reference and electronic services librarian at Loyola University Chicago School of Law; Kristina L. Niedringhaus, the associate dean for library and information services at the Georgia State University College of Law; and Deborah Ginsberg, educational technology law librarian at Chicago-Kent College of Law. Photo by Stephanie Francis Ward.
Follow along with our full coverage of the ABA Techshow 2019.
