BLS Library Blog

BLS entering students: 

Want an early introduction to first-year legal concepts and foundational skills? 

The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (a law school consortium known as CALI) assembled a free collection of CALI Lessons for pre-law students.  Tenured law school professors or other educational experts authored these interactive lessons. 

Complete 10 lessons in line with CALI’s guidelines to fulfill the 2023 CALI Summer Challenge, gain skills to enter law school better prepared, and earn an online certificate of completion for your efforts. (The time to complete a lesson varies between 20-45 minutes.)

Visit https://www.cali.org/summerchallenge for details.  Obtain the CALI code for BLS law students (needed to register) from askthelibrary@brooklaw.edu or the Need Help? chat link at https://www.brooklaw.edu/Library 

Brooklyn Law School, during the Summer 2017 semester, has taken a first step with its Externship Seminar – Tech Tools For Law Practice, in teaching technology to law students. As more and more states take note of ABA Standard RPC 1.1 Comment [8] and add state level rules which require that lawyers have basic technology competency, more law schools are responding and adding technology courses to their course offerings.

A session at CALI Con 2017, Teaching Law Practice Tech to Law Students – State of the Art, discussed three major themes aimed at teaching a new technology course. Michael Robak offered a walkthrough of the approval process for proposing a new technology course and provided tips for getting faculty and administrative officials onboard. A recent comment, Winning the Battle to Teach Legal Technology and Innovation at Law Schools by Christy Burke, states that many law schools are not yet convinced that this kind of practical non-theoretical education is their responsibility. However, she notes several examples, such as Stanford Law School’s Legal Design Lab, Vanderbilt Law School’s Technology in Legal Practice and Oklahoma University Law’s Digital Initiative, that offer a counterweight to that resistance.

Nichelle “Nikki” Perry discussed methods and options for choosing course content. Knowing where and how your students will practice can make a difference in class coverage. Stacey Rowland gave an overview of a recently taught course at the University of North Carolina discussing technology for new lawyers. This course covered topics such as Advanced Legal Research through Ravel and Bloomberg Law Litigation Analytics, using Word Styles as a foundation for document automation, asking students to construct a mock law firm website, litigation support services as well as hands on experience with CLIO and kCura’s Relativity.

In Brooklyn Law School’s Tech Tools for Law Practice seminar, the first assignment was to have the students complete a Legal Technology Assessment to determine how fluent they were with the basic technology tools of their trade: Word, Excel, and PDF. The website Procertas helped us to answer the question of what are the tech skills we should be teaching law students to better prepare them for working in the “real world?” See Tech Comes Naturally to ‘Digital Native’ Millennials? That’s A Myth by Darth Vaughn and Casey Flaherty which relates that testing of hundreds of law school students resulted in scores as low as 33 percent when asked to complete some simple Word tasks such as:

• Accept/Turn-off track changes
• Cut & Paste
• Replace text
• Format font and paragraph
• Fix footers
• Insert hyperlink
• Apply/Modify style
• Insert/Update cross-references
• Insert page break
• Insert non-breaking space
• Clean document properties
• Create comparison document (i.e., a redline)

Hopefully, as more law schools incorporate teaching law technology into the curriculum, those scores will improve.

At this year’s CALI Conference hosted at Harvard University, Brooklyn Law School Reference Librarian Harold O’Grady and Technology Educator Lloyd Carew-Reid presented a session called Evolving Legal Education to Encompass Entrepreneurship. It featured BLS Professor Jonathan Askin (calling in from London) and two BLS law students, Jared Brenner and Tatiana Borukhova, CUBE Innovator Competition winners earlier this year (calling in from New York). The participants discussed new ideas for legal education and entrepreneurship and exciting start-up proposals and other radical changes to legal education emanating out of Brooklyn Law School. A video of the session, which took place at 9am on Saturday, June 21, runs about one hour and is available below and at this link.

• Flipping the Classroom in Legal Skills Courses 
• Flipping the Law School Classroom: Using Technology Outside the Classroom to Engage Students in the Classroom 
• Flipping Flop?: exploring whether guest lectures can use the flipped classroom format 

• H2O – Create Free Adaptable Digital Casebooks 
• Games Theory: Engaging Students Through Games in the Classroom 
• How do you deliver?… An example of how technology has changed the face of meetings and collaboration. 
• How to Create a Distance Education Course 

• Keynote Josh Clark – The Seven Deadly Myths of Mobile 
• Lecture Capture has a new name 
• Engaging Faculty in the Use of Technology Without Using the “T” Word 
• Up in the clouds 
• Legal education, technology & law practice 
• Keynote William Henderson 
• How to Steer with 20 Hands on the Wheel: Tech Tools That Guide and Stimulate Collaboration

The Brooklyn Law School Library recently held a series of orientation sessions to feature library resources. Among them was the Center for Computer Assisted Legal Research (CALI) which creates CALI Lessons, more than 850 tutorials written by law professors and librarians on a wide range of legal subjects. The lessons help law student learn about a new area of law, review for upcoming exams, and practice their legal writing or research skills. The lessons take from as little as 10 minutes to several hours to complete depending on the complexity of the topic. BLS students have unlimited access to CALI tutorials and podcasts. They now work on mobile devices like iPads and iPhones. BLS student can register for a free CALI password at the above link to access newly released features. The BLS Law School authorization code is needed to access CALI tutorials on primary and secondary legal resources.

Firs year law students may want to try a few CALI Lessons to recall the basics of the law even if it is high school level civics, or to be able to avoid grammar and punctuation problems, or to recognize what plagiarism is and know how to avoid it. See these CALI lessons for example:

• Where Does Law Come From? (Civics review)
• Punctuation and Grammar Basics for Law Students (part 2/advanced available)
• Plagiarism – Keeping Out of Trouble

During their first semester, 1Ls will learn about briefing cases and preparing for law school classes. To get a head start, a tour of these CALI lessons will help:

• How to Brief a Case
• Learning Legal Analysis – IRAC (Issue, Rule, Analysis, Conclusion)
• Preparing for your First Semester in Law School (podcast)

The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI), which helps law schools students use technology to learn about the law, has developed LibTour, a series of electronic law library tours using QR codes a new technology explained below. The series includes legal research sources like USCA/USCS, West’s Digests, Corpus Juris Secundum, AmJur, CFR, ALR, and Uniform Laws Annotated. Brooklyn Law School Library intern Sara Kasai wrote the LibTour on Federal Digests, which you can download here. The transcript is available here. With the help of a free barcode-reading app (like Google Goggles), any law student can use QR codes to access CALI audio files for useful information on the specific resource and its use in legal research.

QR Codes, which are beginning to appear on billboards, flyers, and subway ads throughout the city, are barcode-looking symbols that can be scanned by a barcode reader on a smartphone. They link to multiple kinds of data, including URL links, addresses, and text. QR Codes (standing for Quick Response) became popular in Japan after Toyota developed them as a new way to ID their cars. They are useful as a general marketing tool as well as for law firm marketing. Law firms are now putting QR codes on the back of lawyer business cards to enable prospective clients, with smart phone app, to read a lawyer’s biography on a web page. They can help drive traffic to law firm websites, promote events such as seminars, sponsored programs or association conferences. They can also be used to announce new products (such as scholarly publications or white papers), new services (such as new practice areas), or class action law suits. With a class action, a firm can quickly provide valuable information to prospective class members – especially when dealing with consumer issues. See ABA Journal article Biz Cards Go Digital: Firm Adds QR Codes to Business Cards and QR Codes: How Law Firms Can Use Them Effectively.