Editor’s note: The New Normal is an ongoing discussion between Paul Lippe, the CEO of Legal OnRamp, and Patrick Lamb, founding member of Valorem Law Group. Paul and Pat spend a lot of time thinking, writing and speaking about the changes occurring in the delivery of legal services. We hope you will join their discussions.

Although I am critical of law schools, I am actually quite optimistic, as I believe their capabilities are high and their intentions are good.

The challenge for this session was laid down in part one of this conference held at New York Law School in April, when a senior in-house lawyer from United Technologies, Paul Beach, said “We don’t allow first- or second-year associates to work on any of our matters without special permission, because they’re worthless.”

So this session in Cambridge is designed in large part to bring forth ideas from the law schools to address Paul’s critique.

For a quick summary on some of the earlier (which has in fact been very long-ranging) discussion on whether law schools have become too distant from the profession and too theoretical, see:

Law School 4.0: Are Law Schools Relevant to the Future of Law? (Legal Profession Blog)

When Will Law School Change? (Nebraska Law Review)

Follow Paul Lippe’s Tweets from the conference:

Paul Lippe is the founder and CEO of the Legal OnRamp, a Silicon Valley-based initiative founded in cooperation with Cisco Systems to improve legal quality and efficiency through collaboration, automation and process re-engineering. Lippe formerly was an executive at the electronic design automation company Synopsys and later was CEO of Stanford SKOLAR, a medical digital library and e-learning company sponsored by Stanford Medical School.