David B. Wilkins on innovating and the changing legal profession
CLP faculty director David B. Wilkins gave an interview to LawTech.Asia following the conference, “The Next Frontier in Lawyering: From ESG to GPT,” held at Singapore Management University Yong Pung How School of Law in conjunction with the Singapore Academy of Law. In the interview with Jose Lee, Professor Wilkins spoke about what needs to occur for legal training to evolve:
For law schools to change, there has to be more pressure from the end users of law schools. These are the employers and people who need the skills of lawyers to solve complex problems. This pressure is building – just not as rapidly as I would have hoped. Because many legal organisations still think that if they hire in the old-fashioned way, from law schools that teach in the old-fashioned way, we can still train them once they enter the profession.
This is increasingly a problem. Many students do not want to do the traditional things lawyers used to do. Thus, they need to have skills that allow them to do new things. While academic institutions change slowly, I hope that conferences and discussions like these, and publications like yours, are going to put more pressure for law to join the rest of the digital transformation happening in other industries.
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