unLAW massive open online community

Participants:

• Meredith Jacob
• Sherwin Siy
• David Hansen
• Peter Brantley
• Andrew Rens
• Ahrash Bissell
• Jason Schultz
• Audrey Watters
• Philipp Schmidt

Focus:

• Jason: Don't focus on training lawyers to take the bar
  • Andrew: 
    • But don't abandon the legal education angle completely
    • This is also an opportunity to learn legal practice - especially through game playing
    • Law schools may be an interesting place to start with this 
  • Jason: I think law firms might be most interested in this - law firms may like to hire the No. 1 rated player on lawgames.com
• Could be for lawyers to specialize / or refresh (Jason)
• Enable more people to handle and tackle legal questions (Jason)
• Inspired by work in law clinics / pro bono (Jason)
• Meredith: Help people who want to do pro bono work (but are worried they don't have the experience needed)
  • dealing with complex systems (WIPO, admin) 

Possible topics:

• e.g. asylum
• indigent benefits
• eviction / housing
• law of genocide

Entry requirements?

• Ok for people without any legal expertise or minimum requirements?
• Actually want market displacement effect, IP lawyers in the asylum class
• Mix people with different levels of skill

Tools / methods we could use:

• Lectures
• Engagement with peers
• Engagement with experts
• Games / Gaming
  • Two teams to debate - "beat the other side"

Challenges / Tension:

• Will MOOCs replace a more ambitious "open" approach? We are impressed by scale and give up some of the requirement for openness
  • Competitive right now with respect to donor funding and attracting talent to work on the projects
• Especially for legal topics, students like reassurance that a "legal expert" reviewed and commented on their work
  • How do you scale the "expertise" 
  • Work with activitists who are willing to do more than just retweet
• Where to host / anchor something like this?
  • If you want to organize as spoke and wheel scenario - where do you position?
  • Make it easy for law schools to buy in and participate (not anchor within one law school)
  • Could work with National Lawyers Guild (includes strong student network)
  • If anchored at independent third party (like EFF) - challenge is to tie into teaching / implementation (who will produce the content?)
  • Leverage Samuelson Clinics

Possible prototoypes:

• EFF "Civil Liberties" bootcamp
  • http://schedule.sxsw.com/2011/events/event_IAP6773
• Turn it into a MOOC
  • Add assignments
  • People submit "real problems" - the group solves them
  • Apply the materials to you own situation
    • Have lawyers and other participants give feedback and review

• FOIA request (freedom of information access request)
  • Prepare some general video content
  • Tie a course into a "current issue" (FOIA the USTR) so more people care about the overall outcomes (collective success)
  • Best requests get a prize (e.g. "ACLU offers to take it to court")
• How do we connect experts into this?
  • Law clinic students (proto lawyers)
• Partners:
  • Yale law clinic does FOIA work
  • EPIC
  • ACLU
  • Metcalfe (American University/ Meredith's )
  • Journalists / Reporters Committee
  • Jason to introduce to Baba (one of his law clinic students)
  • Knight/Mozilla News fellows
    • FOIA database on all requests

• Patent course for engineers - how to find prior art

Where is the demand?

  * badges for law firms, showing expertise in process stuff
  * certify or enable to respond to real problem? 
  * replace Bar preparation courses...huge numbers, relatively stable content? therefore worth presenting in different way?