Global News
Neota Logic, creators of the leading artificial intelligence (AI) platform for the automation of legal services, is pleased to announce new education partnerships with London South Bank University, The University of Limerick and Ulster University.
Earlier this year, Neota Logic announced their first education partnership in Europe with the University of Manchester and Freshfields demonstrating that legal tech education is taking hold in the UK, and beyond.
Over the course of a semester, students at these schools will learn how to design, build and test digital legal solutions that solve a specific access to justice problem. These solutions, or web applications, will be built to the specifications of a local organisation acting as a “client” to the student groups. At the end of the semester, the students will aim to have a set of apps ready to be deployed for their “client” to use.
Andy Unger, Head of the Academic Division for Law at London South Bank University commented: “For Law Schools and the Legal Profession, Legal Tech is developing very fast. What seems certain is that when they qualify many of our students will practice law in radically different ways to today. We have to try and prepare them for that. Our response at LSBU has been to bring together law and computing students together in a new Law & Technology option. Students will work together using Neota Logic’s platform to create Access to Justice resources for the local community to be deployed as part of our Legal Advice Clinic services.”
Neota Logic has been running education programmes in the US and Australia since 2014, and over the past year the team in EMEA have been working with universities in Europe to launch their education programme here. The new career paths being forged by legal professionals are growing in number. Neota Logic is one of the few legal tech companies actively engaging with law students before they enter industry.
“We are passionate about empowering law students,” Maeve Lavelle, Director of Education for Neota Logic in EMEA, who came across the company’s education programmes on Twitter when she was a law student herself in Dublin. “The future of law is the cohort of students currently pursuing their law degrees or going through their professional training. How can we possibly expect the industry to evolve if it continues to be populated by people being taught in the same way as the people about to retire?”
Two Irish Universities will also be running the module. Sinead Eaton, former practitioner and in-house counsel at The University of Limerick, will be leading on this new module, in partnership with McCann Fitzgerald. Eaton commented:
“I am working through the online training in the Neota Logic Academy and am very impressed by its capabilities. If anything, I am becoming more enthusiastic and convinced of its importance for our students.”
McCann Fitzgerald, one of the top law firms in Ireland and a customer of Neota Logic, has been paving the way in both local and international markets over the past year. As well as running the first Legal Apps Hackathon in partnership with Neota Logic in March, McCann Fitzgerald has been actively pursuing a more advanced model for the delivery of legal services. The team at McCann Fitzgerald are committed to future-proofing their team, and part of this commitment, for them, includes investing in the upcoming generation.
“Law firms are very traditional spaces. There is a lot to be done in bringing change to that space with the use of technology and also in introducing new team structures and dynamics,” says Gráinne Bryan, CEO of Legal Technology Solutions at McCann Fitzgerald. “However, education and awareness is fundamental to the future law firm and those future lawyers are currently sitting in our universities. We are delighted to be partnering with the University of Limerick and Neota Logic to kickstart this education around technology and how it can not only benefit your career but also your future colleagues and clients.”
Ulster University is also running the programme. Eugene McNamee, Head of Law School at Ulster University commented: ‘We have been running our Legal Innovation Centre at Ulster for 2 years now, providing a publicly available resource in legalinnovation.ai and running educational courses at undergraduate, postgraduate and professional level. We’re delighted to begin working with Neota Logic to provide students with natural language app development skills, and see this as an exciting and productive avenue for future development.’
The universities will be launching their inaugural courses with Neota Logic in spring 2019.
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