E-Law's Bright Future

(U.S. News & World Report)  The intersection of technology, commerce, and the law is the new terra incognita of the legal world, and Jamila Johnson hopes to be one of its pioneers. The third-year law student at the University of Washington edits the school's Shidler Journal, an online publication that focuses on E-law. "The digital world is changing nearly every rule we have about commerce and privacy, so the need for lawyers is acute," she says.

The law often moves with glacial slowness, sometimes relying on precedent that extends back to English common law. The greatest challenge to the legal system is how it adapts to the computer age, where standards of copyright, privacy, and commerce are being re-examined. Those changes are forcing law schools to refocus their curricula and abandon rote memorization for agile thinking and interdisciplinary study. Unlike other fields — constitutional law, for example — E-law is proving especially lucrative for younger lawyers weaned on computers. "For hip law students, specializing in the intersection of law and technology is a great investment for the future," says Rod Smolla, dean of the University of Richmond School of Law.

Intellectual property is most often mentioned as the area of law that is most under siege from technology. Lawsuits over pirated music made headlines, but just imagine what will happen when high-speed Internet connections make catalogs of copyrighted television programs accessible to viewers around the world. Then there are the world's libraries and publishing houses, many of which are digitizing their catalogs-and, of course, the home publishers, bloggers, and webmasters, all speaking to a worldwide audience. "A great many more ordinary people are confronting highly complicated, even unsettled, areas of the law as technology expands into more areas of their lives," says Associate Prof. Jennifer Urban of the University of Southern California's law school. "A lawyer's greatest value often is to be able to translate these complicated and dynamic issues for nonlawyers."

Commerce is another branch of the law in flux. From pornography to poker, existing statutes are being applied to emerging technologies in novel ways. What laws govern an online gambling site run from a foreign country? How do local standards of decency apply to out-of-state companies that trade in electronic images? What laws apply to E-mail traffic if those messages pass through servers in a foreign country? "How do you set rules for the movement of electrons?" asks Jessica Litman, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School and author of the legal text Digital Copyright. "We are used to teaching law and thinking about law in terms of geography — what each country or state can control — but many of those rules often no longer apply."

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Special Section: America's Best Grad Schools

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The importance of the international aspects of a legal education was reinforced last year when Harvard Law School announced the most sweeping revamp of its first-year curriculum in more than a century; it will require students to take one course in international law. Harvard was not the first school to institute this requirement, but now that it has, many others will most likely follow. "Even lawyers working on mundane local issues will find that they are encountering international components in the future," says Evan Caminker, dean of the University of Michigan Law School.

Upgrades

Technology is also changing the law school classroom. As courts adopt more technology-from electronic case filing systems and online case research to videoconference depositions-law schools are expanding their course offerings. Prof. Charles Nesson at Harvard, for example, teaches a class called CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion. It explores the challenges of arguing in both the multimedia world and the courtroom and features a website with videos and course materials free for students and nonstudents alike. At Columbia Law School, students in the Lawyering in the Digital Age Clinic focus on how technology affects lawyers themselves, including how search engines work, the particulars of electronic discovery, and how to navigate a law firm's internal electronic research tools. "Law firms are often very sophisticated places, and law school now needs to prepare them for that," says Brian Donnelly, a lecturer at Columbia.

The absence of pertinent case law and the constant flow of new technologies also mean that law school clinics are becoming particularly influential in establishing legal precedent in the lower courts. This trend mirrors the way legal clinics influenced early environmental law, experts say. It's a marked departure from their founding purposes. "Traditional legal clinic work has been students helping to file cookie-cutter motions," says Deirdre Mulligan, who heads the University of California-Berkeley's Samuelson Law, Technology, and Public Policy Clinic. "Our students now are just as likely to be establishing law as providing those services." Legal clinics have recently represented nonprofits fighting outdated fair-use statutes, filed briefs to Congress and the Supreme Court on emerging technological issues, and counseled software developers challenging parts of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The fluid nature of E-law means that schools are focusing as much on the unknown as the known case law. "We have to teach lawyers to have a tolerance for uncertainty, which is not always easy for lawyerly minds to accept," says Urban. Johnson, the student editor who hopes to work on E-commerce law in the private sector after passing the bar, says the newness of the field is what attracted her. "It is exciting to be one of the first people to tackle these issues," she says.

Smart Choices

PUBLIC SECTOR. State and local government offices-the public defender's, for example-typically don't pay well. But they offer a great start to a career, and many schools provide funding for students with debt who enter public-service fields.

TRANSACTION LAW. Once pooh-poohed by law school career offices, the rise in deal making between companies has meant more work for lawyers outside the courtroom.

Insider Tip

Law is a language all its own, but fluency in another tongue will make you numero uno in the workplace of tomorrow: Businesses, governments, even NGOs all need multilingual attorneys. The Lauder Institute of Management and International Studies at the University of Pennsylvania has expanded its elite language program from M.B.A. students to the law school. Look for other schools to follow suit-and come up with courses that emphasize legal and professional terminology, along with culture-specific courses in growing markets like Asia.

Reality Check

The largest 250 law firms in the United States grew by 4 percent in 2006.

Employment in the law is expected to increase between 9 percent and 17 percent in the next decade. Fields in high demand: healthcare, intellectual property, elder law, and environmental law.

First-year associates at small law firms had average starting salaries of $43,500 to $67,500 in 2006. Average annual total compensation for new corporate attorneys in 2005 was $67,500.

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REALITY CHECK SOURCES: NATIONAL LAW JOURNAL; DEPARTMENT OF LABOR; 2006 ROBERT HALF LEGAL SALARY GUIDE; ALTMAN WEIL PUBLICATIONS Inc.


By Alex Kingsbury