Coding for Lawyers (C4L) Summit
Boston, April 10, 2018. A number of law schools have begun to offer "coding for lawyers" (or CS for lawyers) courses to students. This invite-only summit will convene C4L professors/instructors to explore the purposes, methods, and future of these courses, with an overarching goal of being descriptive, rather than prescriptive. Specifically, rather than ask "should lawyers learn to code?," this summit will ask why instructors are teaching lawyers and law students how to code, and the pros/cons of various approaches. The first summit will be hosted at the Suffolk Legal Innovation and Technology Lab directly following Suffolk's Clinnovation conference. The output of the summit will include: (1) a survey of programs; (2) a path forward with working groups; and (3) next steps for future summits (to be held each six months with a traveling component). Over time, our intent is for the community of instructors to grow and to produce free, open-source resources for schools around the world to teach coding for lawyers.