Law and Technology in the US Law School Industry

Abstract Law schools are increasingly pressured to rethink the character of next generation research, policy impact and curricular training in the wake of computer-oriented technologies. For all its heralded importance and the proliferation of markets and talk around the topic of law and technology within the law school industry, there are still no systematic scholarly attempts to understand how these dynamics currently play out in practice for law schools, what such an investigation might tell us about the present and future composition of legal academia, or how one might begin in the first place to even identify, gather and make sense of data toward these ends. The purpose of this paper is two-fold: on the one hand, to analyse the methodological and theoretical challenges involved in this sort of blended empirical/qualitative study that might be applied to similar studies in any global context, and on the other hand, to draw out a clearer picture of the dynamics of organizational change in US law schools in relation to the phenomena of digital technologies – and all too often underexplored, to unpack some of the dynamics of culture, profession and wealth at play. In more vernacular terms, our aim here is to get a better sense of how and what we talk about when we talk about law and technology as legal academics.