About LPS

"The traditional law practice business model constrains innovations that would provide greater access to, and enhance the delivery of, legal services."

This finding, a key part of the ABA's 2016 Report on the Future of Legal Services, confirms that innovation in delivery of legal services is both necessary and inevitable to meet the needs of ALL legal services consumers. Specifically, the Report recommends that "[t]he legal profession should partner with other disciplines and the public for insights about innovating the delivery of legal services."

Legal Problem Solving acts on this recommendation. Starting from a historical context for the current state of legal services delivery and the many challenges and opportunities faced, this course introduces proven creative problem-solving frameworks and methods from other disciplines to provide a stakeholder-centered focus for creating innovative and effective methods of delivering legal services to a wide range of consumers in the 21st century.

To quote Professor JB Ruhl's syllabus for Law Practice 2050, Legal Problem Solving is an unusual law school course — by design. The forces shaping legal services delivery in 2021 — the very forces that will shape your professional opportunities — are not adequately addressed by the traditional law school curriculum. This course seeks to fill in the gaps, to provide tools, methods, processes, and mindsets required to meet the needs of all stakeholders in our 21st-century systems of justice.

Human-Centered Design. The primary lens for work in this course is Human-Centered Design ("HCD"), a fluid framework for discovering problems, ideating solutions, and iterating to continuously improve. HCD provides a methodology for considering both legal services delivery challenges, as well as clients’ legal problems. The HCD method also serves as a tool that individuals can use to craft a rewarding, successful legal career.

Ultimately, this is a course about doing, creating, and making — from the perspective of the many stakeholders in our systems of justice and across the legal profession.

In addition to the weekly course assignments (podcasts, videos, readings), course content includes presentations, class-wide and small group discussions, expert guests, and creative problem-solving exercises. Collaborative design projects will challenge you to use HCD and other methods to create relevant solutions to real legal problems faced across the legal services spectrum.