How Law Schools are Embracing Flexibility, Justice and AI

Episode Notes

Transcript

Kellye Testy:

We don’t have to choose between excellence and innovation. Sometimes I think people have a little bit of an adolescent view of innovation where any change, just for the sake of it, is a good one because it disrupts something. I don’t believe that. I think that change needs to be changed that’s going to propel us forward.

Announcer:

Equal access to justice is a core American value. In each episode of Talk Justice and LSC Podcast, we’ll explore ways to expand access to justice and illustrate why it is important to the legal community, business, government, and the general public. Talk Justice is sponsored by the Leaders Council of the Legal Services Corporation.

Cat Moon:

Hello and welcome to Talk Justice. I’m Cat Moon, your host for this episode. Today, we are joined by Kellye Testy, the executive director and CEO of the Association of American Law Schools. Kellye’s career really encompasses legal education at so many levels. Prior to joining the Association of American Law Schools, she served as the president and CEO of the Law School Admission Council. Before that, she served as Dean and Professor of Law at University of Washington School of Law and at Seattle University School of Law, which is where she began her career as a law professor. And as a law professor myself, I’m so excited to speak with Kellye today about the current legal education landscape and how things like technology and increased attention on expanding access to justice are shaping it today. Kellye, thank you so much for joining me.

Kellye Testy:

I’m so pleased to be with you, Kat. I look forward to talking.

Cat Moon:

All right. Well, let’s jump into it. Let’s start off with this. Could you tell our listeners a bit more about the work and the purpose of the Association of American Law Schools?

Kellye Testy:

Yes, I’d be happy to talk about AALS. I’m really enjoying my new role, serving as its executive director and CEO. And I was involved with the organization for a long time prior to this, so it’s much of that work that led me to love it so much that I was eager to accept this opportunity to lead AALS. And ALS is interesting because it has a dual mission. On the one hand, it’s a membership organization, and we focus on advancing excellence in legal education. So we work with the schools and their leadership and really all the stakeholders in the schools to support their efforts to continue to excel. But it’s also the learned society or the scholarly society for law faculty. And so there, we serve for law as the organization that helps further scholarship and research on law and provide opportunities for people to meet and gather like the big annual meeting that we have every January.

Cat Moon:

So that’s a really broad mission. Encompasses a whole lot, gives you a lot of opportunity to do a lot. And I’m curious, because of this role, can you tell us a little bit about your experience with legal education? Because you’re kind of now the leader of legal education. How is it that you came to go to law school? And what are your reflections on that experience looking back now?

Kellye Testy:

It is a broad role. There’s so much when you talk about working for excellence in legal ed, it can take you in a lot of directions. And one of the things that I really love about this role is getting to work so directly with the deans and the faculty and the staff and everyone who’s trying to do such good work out in our law schools. And in some ways, that fondness for that service to legal education really stems from the fact that my own pathway to law school is a little bit unconventional. I was not, despite this role as some people might expect, I was not always thinking about becoming a law professor or dean or even a lawyer. I’m a first gen college grad in my family. And so when I went to undergraduate school, in many ways, I did that more out of a desire to keep playing sports.

But once I got there, I realized, hey, I kind of like this academic side and majored in journalism and business as an undergrad. And it was during that time I had a class in communications law and the professors said, “There’s one case that matters so much. It’s New York Times versus Sullivan. So I want all of you to find the law school on campus and find the law library and go read that case.” And I can still remember how I felt when I was in that library for the first time. There was something about that that really just triggered a love for law in me right then. And in reading that first case, I was kind of amazed to think that, my goodness, there’s just all these stories and these reporters and all these interesting real life encounters to learn about. And so I kind of got right then thinking law could be for me.

But as a first gen college grad, I needed a little time to have the money and the bandwidth and everything to go to law school. So I actually had about five years in between undergrad and law school and then made my way back to Indiana University in Bloomington to go to law school.

Cat Moon:

So a couple of things about what you just shared. I want to focus on, one, I love how you referred to cases as stories. I think that is such a really lovely way to talk about them and frame them. And I think that comes from your journalistic background, right? You approached it a little bit differently than perhaps a very studious law student might coming to it actually a little bit overwhelmed, frankly. I can still remember my own 1L experience back in the ’90s. So thank you for that framing. The other thing, a thread I want to pull just a little bit is your experience doing things between undergrad and law school. And so in your last role, and I think even in this role, that experience and your perspective on the value perhaps that it brings for a person to spend a little bit of time doing some work in the real world, having some experiences instead of just going from K through JD, as we like to call it.

Can you expand on that a little bit because there’s a pretty straightforward traditional model, but we’re seeing the expansion of how people come to law school, law school itself. So I’m curious how you see that perhaps shaping and framing some different ways for us to approach law school admission.

Kellye Testy:

There is a lot happening out there right now in terms of more formats to study law and more ways to study law in terms of different kinds of degree programs. And I find that all very exciting because I think in many ways law schools should think of themselves not so much as just educating lawyers, but actually educating the public about law and teaching more people about law. And so I delighted to see some of the innovation and the changes that have happened over the last decade or more and that continued to happen in legal education. So I would say that my own pathway had a fair amount of influence in the way that I approached teaching and the way that I approached being a dean and now my work with deans. And in large part, because in between undergrad and law school, I worked in business and marketing and sales.

So I learned a lot about running businesses then. And I often say that in some ways it’s that that helped me do well as a dean a little more than being a faculty member. And I think that’s something I think a lot about today is I work with all the deans around the country and other leaders in the law schools because much of the work as a faculty member does not prepare you well to be a leader as an associate or vice or a dean in a law school because those roles are very leadership and management oriented. I like to say that in many ways the role of the dean is 40 miles wide and an inch deep, whereas a faculty member, you’re very narrow and deep into your particular subjects. And so I often credit my experience in business in between undergrad and law with helping me have some of the skillsets that have allowed me to enjoy being a dean, and also then to help other people pursue that pathway.

And I enjoy my time at ALS in part because I do get to work with all the law schools that are members and support those deans and support people who are aspiring to be an academic leader in a law school. And it’s one of the things that I have found helpful is to just help them understand the range of skills that will be necessary in order to allow them to thrive in the role and also to enjoy the role. Because when we love what we do, we tend to do better. So I’m a big advocate for that. And I was an advocate for that with my students. And you mentioned the fact of thinking about law as a story, and that’s also been very important to me because I think we have to always remember that these are real people. The law works on real lives and has harm and help.

And it’s something that I’ve always encouraged in my teaching my students to remember. And I think it is something that helps build more of a humanity in law that I hope all lawyers will take to heart so that they remember that part of the privilege of becoming a lawyer is that you have real power to influence people’s lives and understanding that those are real lives helps you use that wisely.

Cat Moon:

Absolutely. And that segues so well into another topic I would love to explore with you. There have been a few notable judges on this podcast who I can think of, Nathan Hecht, who was Chief Justice of the Texas Supreme Court and more recently Chief Justice Steven Jensen of the South Dakota Supreme Court, who both said that they didn’t really learn anything about the justice gap when they were in law school and really didn’t even come to understand how intense the civil justice gap is until they were behind the bench seeing it firsthand. Do you think this has changed a lot in the past few decades? Are students hearing about the justice gap?

Kellye Testy:

It has changed a great deal. And when Justice Hect and Jensen were in law school, I’m sure there was some measure of this and they were maybe not part of it or it wasn’t very big in the law school, but today you can’t miss it. And I’m happy that it has. And one of the things that I really enjoy talking with people about who have been out of legal education for a while, we all remember our experience as students, but in many ways, thankfully, law schools have changed quite dramatically since many of us were students. And so I am a big fan of encouraging justices and judges and lawyers to really get to know their law school today because the changes are ones that I think make legal education right now stronger than it’s ever been. And those changes include the way that we talk about justice.

It used to be that we were so focused on teaching students law and the language of the law and the way to think like a lawyer and all the things that yes, we really need in order to be effective for our clients, that sometimes justice got put aside because we didn’t want to have the students take a shortcut and just talk about what they thought was just. We wanted them to learn how to reason like a lawyer. But today, I think the justice word and the law word are brought together much more intentionally and much more frequently in many different ways in law schools. One of those ways is just in the way classes are taught broadly in the law school. There’s much more teaching methodology. There’s a difference in who’s teaching in law schools today and their own relationships to justice. And that I think has an influence on how we teach and how we interact with our students.

Experiential education has grown dramatically. Students take many more credits for credit under the tutelage of clinical faculty, and there are also many more opportunities today for externships and for an infusion of real world experience while you’re in law school. What I love about our law schools today is that you go to them and you see them as kind of a hub of the ecosystem within their region, their community, their city for what is a very vibrant legal community. And that law school makes it more vibrant. Any place where there’s a law school or schools, you see that the legal profession really values that and it makes the entire ecosystem, I think, much stronger when that exists. But I am pleased to see that today there is much more discussion of the connection between law and justice, and there’s much more discussion of the widening inequality in terms of who has access to legal resources.

There’s many more programs for students to pursue an equal justice public interest focus in their work and much more support for that along the way. I’m going to guess that even when Justice Jenkins and Hect were in law school, there was some measure of the law school focused on this, but it may not have been common or broad enough. Today, I think it would be hard to not hear it, and I think that’s a good thing.

Cat Moon:

Spending my days in a law school, I agree with you. And so I’m a Vanderbilt graduate, and since I graduated almost 30 years ago, but the number of offerings, to your point, in terms of clinical opportunities that speak directly to addressing the access to justice gap have increased exponentially. And let’s dig into that just a little bit, because to your point that law schools really become part of the justice ecosystem in the community where they’re located. And this can be through a clinic, it can be through a lab like the Vanderbilt AI Law Lab that I co-direct, but it does give us a chance to really connect with the legal community and the community writ large and contribute. What do you think the benefits are to students beyond just helping them have an understanding of the access to justice gap? What do you think the benefits are for the students?

And the flip side of that, the benefits for law schools really embracing these kinds of clinical programs.

Kellye Testy:

Sure. I think the benefits are many and they’re multidirectional. So it certainly benefits the legal community, it benefits the law school, it benefits the students, and then they benefit future students. So I’m just a big fan of the way that ecosystem can work well together. And I know that it’s sometimes common to set up practice on the one hand and theory or academics on the other, but they’re best when they’re connected and fused. And in many cases that I’ve worked on, some of the most complex cases that I’ve worked on raise really interesting scholarly issues and scholars have been helpful in resolving some of those complexities and those new ways of thinking. So we want to each know that we have a role that compliments and really respect that entire ecosystem, work well together. But in particular, Cat, when I think about the contribution that clinics make and that the law school having a strong connection to practice makes, it’s not only in that particular class and the way that the student gets to see a variety of lawyering styles or really learn by doing, but it’s also the way that it brings a different group of people into connection with the law school.

And many times those then serve as adjunct faculty for other courses. And that is a wonderful infusion because there’s nothing like having a professor who spends their entire life focused on two or three subjects as a real expert, but there’s also nothing like having somebody as well who’s practicing in it day-to-day. And when you get both, then that’s when the education is really top-notch when you get the well-rounded sense. So I think too that what students receive then is they get some models of what does it mean to be a lawyer Because you come into law school and today it’s so quick you’re asked to make decisions about employment when you don’t know a transactional from a litigator and you’re trying to imagine yourself as a lawyer. And so that infusion helps students see what’s possible. How can I be a lawyer? How can that fit for me and who I am and what I’ve done before?

And so I think that not only that exposure is very helpful there. And then further, that exposure to actual clients, again, that takes me back to my point about the humanity and remembering that the people we serve are very diverse and their needs are not just legal needs. People don’t come in and say, “I have a legal need.” They come in with a problem and law school at its best teaches people how to be complex problem solvers, not just issue spotters or problem spotters, but problem solvers. And when you have a real person sitting before you who has a web of problems that are connected, you can really start to see the multiple roles that law plays and how it needs to work sometimes with other fields too, to make a real difference.

Cat Moon:

So much about what you just shared. I would love to spend the rest of our time talking about a couple things I will highlight. I think absolutely the richness of learning experience when you have the doctrinal perspective from an expert combined with boots on the ground, professors who are adjuncts who can come in and bring you that real world experience, that really is so ideal. And so bringing in lawyers from the community that way, I think really, really enriches the experience for students. I find that when I’m talking to students about legal problems, and I too try to help them situate the human in the situation, I approach it from the perspective that someone comes to you with problems and there is a legal element to the problems, but that’s just an element. And I think you used the word web, and I think that’s a good way to look at it.

And so absolutely students, when they have those clinical experiences, I think get such clarity around how that web is really much more complex than it seems when they’re reading a story about a case in a casebook, right? Giving it that kind of messy human element, I think prepares students so incredibly well for the actual practice.

Kellye Testy:

It really does. And you’ve reminded me too, Kat, that one of the other things that it provides is not only the doing, but the time to reflect and to talk about it, because that’s when learning really takes hold, when you’re not just so busy do, do, do, but that you have time to say, “Hey, what did we just do here? What happened? And what did you think about it and how did that feel?” And that’s one of the things I really love about the experiential method of education is it really allows that immersion into not only the doctrine, the theory, the practice, but the real reflection about our role, our ethics, the tactics, strategy, all those things that go into being a great lawyer.

Cat Moon:

And that is such a luxury once you enter the practice. So to appreciate it in law school, it’s hard to appreciate what we don’t yet understand will be such a luxury. All right. Well, this leads me to a topic that I think is tangential, but it’s related. And this comes up periodically on this podcast and it’s the phenomenon of quote public interest drift. So often students enter law school and they come in with a goal to pursue a legal career that clearly serves the public, but we know that the rates of lawyers entering public service are lower and that along the way, students change course. And I think our system suffers from it somewhat. So what do you think law schools can do to better support students who come in or develop kind of that mission while they’re in law school to do that work?

Kellye Testy:

This is a complex question and I thought a lot about it because like you, I’ve often had people say to me, “Dean, why don’t you do more to encourage students to pursue public interest careers?” And that question always was one that surprised me a little bit in the sense that as I sat there in law school as Dean, the problem was not that I didn’t have enough students wanting to do public interest careers. The problem was there weren’t enough jobs for those students and not enough paid opportunities for them to be able to get the experience in the summers that would continue to hone their pathway and enough positions upon graduation, they would’ve taken them. If there were the positions, there would’ve been no lack of demand for those positions. And so I think on the one hand, schools are doing a very good job of helping students see that this is a great career of encouraging pathways for students who want to pursue it, but it’s a little bit tricky because sometimes you get people all revved up for it and then there’s nowhere for them to go.

And that leads us to a very big topic, which is just funding for legal services in our nation and funding for public education for so many things that are public. And I think that if we invested more, it would help close the access to justice gap because there are unmet legal needs and there are students who absolutely would go do that work if they could do it. And so I think that we need to work a lot of us together and not just say it’s the law schools that aren’t encouraging them, but it’s a much more complex situation where the roles and positions also need to be there. I do think though that there is some drift in this sense. Many times students come into law school with a very different idea of what they want to do, and then they start taking classes and their passion is lit up by something else, or they have one of those encounters with that wonderful ecosystem we talked about where they meet an inspirational lawyer who does fill in the blank, and that person sparks their passion and they get opportunity to do that.

And that’s not a bad thing. We want people to find their pathway. But one of the things that I’ve always tried to help students see, and I think it can help us with this bigger access to justice issue we all care about and are trying to address, is that you can be a public interest lawyer without being a “public interest lawyer.” In other words, every role in our legal profession has opportunity to give back, to do pro bono, to use your power in ways that empower communities, to see the inequality issues in whatever area you’re practicing in and do something about them. So I’m also a big advocate of encouraging every law student, no matter where they go, to realize the third part of that public interest ecosystem too, and have that duty to give back in whatever way they can. And sometimes people have to work … Let’s say you’re first gen like me and you maybe have more educational debt, maybe you need to take a position for a while that’s higher paying in order to be able to make other decisions later.

So I know that will bring up a lot of questions about the cost of law school and is it too high? And so that’s a topic we can also talk about as we talk about newer formats or other ways to try and give students opportunity for legal education that is affordable so they can make those choices.

Cat Moon:

I think that’s a really nice segue. I’ll just insert really quickly that to your point about availability of opportunities when it comes to public interest, this is absolutely the case. I see students competing for what end up being very competitive opportunities because there are so few of them, right? Correct. And so students who want to go in that direction really are foreclosed because they can’t afford to work for free, even though they have made the decision to work for much less. We know that there are firms that start first year associates out well over $200,000 and the positions we’re talking about pay significantly less, let’s just put it that way. And then there is, as you noted, the reality that some students just simply can’t afford to go in that direction, even if it were offered to them. But I love segueing into a conversation about how we can make law school more affordable, more accessible.

Many years ago, I wrote an article about needing more flavors of law school because it seems like we had really one flavor. I don’t want to call it vanilla, but we need some strawberry, we need some more sherbet. So Arizona State University recently launched an online part-time JD program, for example, and their thinking is that expanding how and where students can earn a law degree will strengthen the profession and can also help potentially address critical gaps in legal services nationwide. So what are your thoughts on expanding access through more flexible and different flavors of programs?

Kellye Testy:

I’m a big fan of that expansion. Arizona State, Stacy Leeds is on our executive committee at ALS and a wonderful leader. She’s now become Tulsa’s president. So congratulations on that. They’ve been an early mover in this way. St. Mary’s and Texas, Patty Roberts also have been doing a great job. There’s many other examples. William Mitchell was in this early on and there’s a lot of schools. And I mentioned some of those because I think it’s important to realize that in legal education, there’s a lot of innovation happening. When I think about all the things I see popping up in the schools, there’s a lot of effort to try some things out and see if we can make things work. Nobody’s sitting there saying, “Oh, it has to be the same forever.” And so I’m a big fan of those alternative formats because I think it allows people that are in different life situations.

Maybe they can’t move, maybe they have care giving responsibilities, maybe they’re in the military. There’s any number of reasons why we can’t all pick up and go to a particular place for law school. So I like the idea too that there’s formats that are not full-time because again, that could allow someone to keep working and make it more affordable. And so both the online and the part-time options expand access in many ways. The one thing that I’ll say about this that I think is really important is that we don’t have to choose between excellence and innovation. Sometimes I think people have a little bit of an adolescent view of innovation where any change, just for the sake of it is a good one because it disrupts something. I don’t believe that. I think that change needs to be change that’s going to propel us forward.

And you don’t want to have a situation either where you say, “Well, student, I know you can’t afford to take this kind of a course, so you can take this one, but it’s not going to be as good.” And so we want to have a high standard of excellence throughout these formats, and that’s something that I think we can have. I believe that good teachers are excellent, whether they’re in person or online, that’s not what’s going to make the difference between a good and a bad teacher. There are bad teachers that are in person and there are bad teachers online, and they’re excellent ones in both formats. So I am excited for the innovations I see within the schools. I like how they’re proceeding in many cases carefully to start small, do some study, look at some data. That makes a lot of sense. So that we’re, again, remembering that these are real people.

These are students who are paying money and counting on this for their careers. So we want to do it right.

Cat Moon:

Yeah. Proceeding with intention I think certainly makes a lot of sense. So I want to focus in on the word innovation since you mentioned that. So that’s the work I do at Vanderbilt Law School. And I agree with you. Change for change sake is not the mission. It is change that creates value that moves us forward, that is our objective. So the buzzword, I don’t know that we’ve even said these two words yet. Could this be that we haven’t said the words artificial intelligence? I don’t think we have. How could we have gotten this far? But AI, it’s there. It’s kind of the elephant in the room, the lion in the room. I’m not even sure what it is at this point. But we field queries from law firms daily asking, “What are you doing to prepare students for the AI powered practice of law?” Folks are really curious and there’s this dialogue going both ways.

I’m really curious to hear your thoughts about the role of AI in legal education, when we should introduce it to students and how you see this evolving going forward. If we continue on this trajectory, change is definitely happening. And I personally believe we must be proactive and shape the direction of this change. Nothing is inevitable. We still have choice. We have agency. What are your thoughts on the role of AI in legal education?

Kellye Testy:

Sure. It’s such a huge topic and one that is definitely in the discourse in such a big way right now. And I was thinking when we started that, was this the real cat Moon or the botcat Moon, given your expertise in this area. But I really wanting to just also say that I admire so much of what you do at Vanderbilt. I think that the work that you’re doing to help bring more awareness to the way that artificial intelligence is changing our profession and how law schools can then respond and make sure our graduates are as prepared as possible to be leaders in that world is really vital. And I think I’m pleased to see that it is taking hold now throughout the country in our law schools. As with many new things, the first instinct is always kind of push it away. And there’s certainly a few years ago, so there were some people more there like, “Don’t use it, clamp it down.” A little bit of fear.

That’s long gone. People understand now that it’s something that the schools need to really get their hands into and really understand and help their students understand. So I will say that I’m pleased to see a lot of innovation happening and work. ALS has tried to further that. We are kind of the hub for all the schools. So we have a partnership with West that’s putting on webinars about AI and creating resources and clearing houses and other ways. Many of our sections at ALS are also really active in this. We have a new section on AI. We have a law and technology. You’ve been active in many of these. So the state of play is a robust one. There’s a lot going on and I’m all for it. I think that technology will always change everything. I’ve spent a lot of my professional life here in Seattle where there’s a tech firm or two.

And one person one time told me that when I imagined how technology would change something, that I should think about it and then multiply by 25. And then I still would be way off and underestimating how much technology will change anything that you’re looking at. But the best thing to do is kind of get on that surfboard and go and not to resist, but really understand it and find ways to use it for good. And I think our schools are in that place right now where they are really, there’s so much happening in terms of how it’s being brought into the classrooms, clinics, scholarship, just every aspect of operations. And there’s still a lot to learn. A lot of times I think everybody wants there to be a clear answer right now about exactly which things should I use and how should I use it?

Well, we’re just not all there. It’s the state of the development of the field isn’t there. And so I think we will have some complexity, we’ll have some evolution, but people are at the task as I think they should be.

Cat Moon:

So I agree completely. And I’m going to go back to your point earlier in the conversation that we’re training students to be complex problem solvers. So we are really training students for this moment. I believe that. We in our lab and in our curriculum, we focus on, we teach them tools, yes, but we focus on the mindsets and those problem solving skills because those transcend the particular tool they’re going to use today to do that work.

Kellye Testy:

That’s right.

Cat Moon:

And that is the power of legal education, which I think is so exciting. And in so many ways, I think we are built for this moment despite our constantly looking in the rear view mirror for precedent. Yes. That’s the one thing we have. We’re struggling with just a little bit, but not much.

Kellye Testy:

I agree with you, Kat. And I think in a way too, it’s not even a bad thing that we do, kind of that check the rear view mirror once in a while because anytime again, there’s change. It’s very easy for everyone to be just only focusing in one direction, but there’s a lot of times that we can learn from what came before. And so I think that it’s important that we do that. And I think you’re right that we’re built for this. I mean, we did it with the desktop computer, the laptop computer. We did with Lexus and Westlaw. I mean, I can still remember when I was a federal clerk, my judge one day coming into my office and saying, “I hear you don’t have to look at a shepherd’s book anymore. Can you show me what you do? ” And so our students will be in that position.

They’ll be able to help their colleagues who didn’t have the time or opportunity to learn as much about it when they were in law school. But I do think the methodology of legal education and its forward-lookingness. And I really saw that clearly when ALS recently celebrated its 125th anniversary. And my predecessor, Judy Irene, who is a wonderful leader for a decade for ALS, helped pull together the history of the association. And when you sit down and look at that, you realize all the things we’ve encountered over those 125 years as an association with our members. And this too is one that we will be able to address well and confident.

Cat Moon:

And I think even more so with your leadership. So I was a huge fan before. I’m an even bigger Kellye fan now. Thank you so, so much for taking your time to share your thoughts with us. I’m incredibly grateful and thanks as well to the listeners for tuning into this episode of Talk Justice. Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode.

Kellye Testy:

Thank you so much. It was an honor to be with you and let’s all keep talking justice.

Cat Moon:

Absolutely.

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