Initiatives
The Duke Center on Law & Technology coordinates many of Duke’s leadership activities in legal technology; our initiatives aim to understand, re-imagine, shape, and lead the next generation of tech-enabled legal practice and to employ the tools of the law to ensure that rapidly emerging technologies empower and ennoble people.
The Duke Center on Law & Technology's Access Tech Tools Initiative includes incorporating technology into access to justice programs, integrating design thinking processes into academic courses and community workshops, and supporting scholarship on these topics.
Our faculty, staff, and research assistants partner with Duke Legal Clinics and technologists in tech-development projects that aim expressly at expanding access to legal services and increasing efficiency at the Law School.
The Data Governance Design Conference (DGDC), held in November 2019, convened policymakers, industry, academia, and legal practitioners to explore models, needs, and enabling environment for data governance. The DGDC featured expert-level content, for a select audience of data governance leaders, toward establishing a practice-led research agenda that unlocks the field’s tremendous potential.
As an outcome of the conference, a new collaborative research network on data governance was created, involving the Duke Center on Law & Tech, Indiana University’s Ostrom Workshop, The University of Western Australia, and the Digital Civil Society Lab at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society.
The mission of the Digital Governance Design Studio (DGDS) is to empower law students and lawyers to help "technology second" organizations adapt to a digitizing world.
DGDS incubates experiential, interdisciplinary projects that bridge the gap between academia and practice. We collaborate with outside partners to research, develop, and evaluate trustworthy digital governance. We support the next generation of data stewards through experiential classes and training materials. And we develop tools and infrastructure to help communities navigate the uncertainties of a digitizing world.
Duke Law By Design is an initiative to bring human-centered design principles and practices into the law school.
A group of faculty and staff have completed training through IDEO U about design thinking, and are engaging student, staff, and faculty in human-centered design processes with stakeholders, other service professionals, and partner organizations from the community.
Topics have included eviction procedures in Durham, imagine measurements of project and attorney success beyond the billable hour, access to justice, improving forensic reports, and serving human trafficking survivors, and others.
Design thinking for law is a process of experiencing knowledge and exploring the human mind’s ‘playground of ideas'.
Design thinking helps us to change the law for the better by…
- Asking participants to take on a beginner’s mindset
- Looking beyond the borders of the “law” as currently defined
- Stripping away the fear of making mistakes
- Teaching creativity and prototyping as core skill sets
Courses using Design Thinking
Meet the Facilitators
Prof. Erika Buell
“Lawyers bring an analytical mindset to a task or scenario - including rapid assessments, analysis, and conclusions. Suspending this type of ‘lawyer’ thinking and embracing design thinking — watching (without judging) and empathizing with curiosity — is a profound shift in mindset that facilitates new insights.”
Prof. Anne Gordon
"I've had a variety of professional interests and jobs, so I'm used to the idea of trying, failing, and stumbling toward something that at the end will work for me. Design thinking is right in line with how I view life - as an opportunity to iterate towards your final goal."
Prof. Crystal Grant
"I collaborate with professionals across a number of disciplines. Design thinking provides a framework I can use in my interdisciplinary work and client representation. I have expanded my problem solving skills and I can't wait to share my insights with students."
Kelli Raker
"Empathy is one of the cornerstones of design thinking; it impacts how we respond to others when faced with a complex problem. I am a better person and professional when I connect with others around their experience."
Prof. Jeff Ward
"The law, like every powerful institution, needs engines of renewal and disruption, and design thinking fuels these engines, giving students full license to make tomorrow’s law better than today’s."
Duke LawNext is a set of curated, remote, self-directed enrichment opportunities for Duke Law students and recent alumni to explore next-generation legal practice. Launched in summer 2020, this program helps participants explore the ways that both legal practitioners and the world in which they are situated are changing on account of emerging technologies. Participants will choose from these Pathways:
- Tomorrow’s Digital Lawyer - Exploring shifts in the delivery of legal services driven by digital technologies
- Legal Design, Innovation, & A2J - Applying design & tech to enhance access to legal services & solve entrenched social problems
- Lawyering in the Age of AI - Confronting our increasing embeddedness in a world of big data & artificial intelligence
By completing Pathway Foundations (core materials), engaging with Enrichment Windows, and completing a demonstration project, participants will be eligible to add a designated notation to their CV/résumé.
The Duke Law Tech Lab accelerates the next generation of startups that will change the way legal and civic services are delivered.
Working with early stage companies with a legal tech product and a mission to increase access to legal services, the Duke Law Tech Lab builds community, connects companies with valuable partners and mentors, and supports company growth through a three month remote program, culminating in a Demo Day where companies compete for prize money.
Applications for our 2021 cohort opened June 1 and close June 20, with the program running mid-July through October.
We coordinate and support interdisciplinary events at Duke Law and across campus on emerging issues and technologies. We partner with other departments such as Duke Science & Society, Duke Innovation & Entrepreneurship, Innovation Co-Lab, Duke Pratt School of Engineering, Duke Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke Law Start-Up Ventures Clinic, student groups like Duke Law & Technology Society and Ethical Tech, and external groups like Triangle Privacy Research Hub (TPRH).
Some of our recent past events include:
In connection with the Duke +Data Science initiative, research assistants and faculty with the Duke Center on Law & Technology are current developing training modules and learning experiences which involve specialized content on the intersection between law and data science. Stay tuned for more details coming soon!
Rochael Soper Adranly, L ’97/98 is Partner, General Counsel + Legal Design Lead for the international design firm IDEO. In her role as Legal Design Lead, Adranly walks the fine line between the rules-based world of law and the nonrules-based world of innovation, seeing to ensure that legal processes, tools, roles, and assets fit the needs of users as well as the human-centered culture of the firm. In 2015, she worked closely with her IDEO colleagues to create IDEO's Legal Design + Innovation practice to help law firms, in-house legal teams, law schools, public sector clients, and criminal justice reform advocates across the globe embrace human centered design against a rigid legal landscape.
Before joining IDEO, she worked in law firms in Houston, New York, and Silicon Valley and taught client counseling and negotiation at the UC Hastings and UC Berkeley Schools of Law. In 2017, Adranly co-developed and co-taught the Wintersession course, Designing Creative Legal Solutions, at Duke Law with Professor Jeff Ward. Adranly earned her JD and LLM from Duke Law School.
The Duke Law & Technology Society is a student-run organization which seeks to create a forum where like-minded students interested in the intersection of law and technology can share their ideas and satisfy their intellectual curiosity through peer (to-peer) instruction.
Ethical Tech was co-founded by DCLT Fellows. It is a nonpartisan initiative focusing on research, education, and policy development.