IE Law School hosts Law Without Walls kick off at Segovia

On January 19 and 20, IE Law School hosted Law Without Walls Kick Off in IE University´s Segovia Campus. Nearly 200 students, professors, entrepreneurs, legal and business experts from law firms and companies –such as Elevate, Axiom, Eversheds, Microsoft and many others – reunited to rethink the profession and propose cutting-edge solutions to issues faced by lawyers and law programs as well as to assess the future of the legal practice in an international and diverse environment.

LawWithoutWalls is a part-virtual collaboratory which is designed to enable students, academics, and professionals to connect over issues facing the legal profession, solve legal problems, and develop the skills students need to compete in a global marketplace.

Thirty of the world’s top international law schools — including Harvard Law School, UCL Laws, Stanford Law School, Fordham Law School, University of St Gallen, among others— participate in LawWithoutWalls and team their students with two lawyer team leaders along with an academic, business, and entrepreneur mentor. The teams identify a problem related to law, business, and technology and develops a practicable solution (including a prototype and a business plan).

In the process, LWOW: Refines 21st Century professional skills including entrepreneurial, leadership, presentation, networking, technology, teamwork, project management, business, and cultural competency; recharges the law market with innovations across law, business, and technology and revitalizes relationships with colleagues, clients, and future talent across the globe.

What is the KickOff?

LWOW begins with a collective experience—either in-person (LWOW Original, two days) or all-virtual (LWOW X, three days)—filled with idea generation, teambuilding, personality assessments, and other exercises that begin to break the barriers between professors and students, partners and associates, and lawyers and clients. We gather as a community to transcend cultural divides and embrace our global mission. We get to know each other and, in the process, get to know ourselves even more. Together, we innovate solutions, hackathon style, to hot problems in legal education and practice.

Law Without Walls (LWOW) knocks down the barrier between law and business, contributing to the creation of an innovative global community where all these skills can be honed by future legal professionals.

The event was the first part of a four-month program in which students engage with leading practitioners and mentors from across the globe through weekly virtual mentoring sessions to create a project of worth that proposes a solution to a real-life problem regarding the legal marketplace. This experience will end with the “ConPosium” where the students will present their projects of worth in front of a panel consisting of venture capitalists and multidisciplinary judges. Results will be judged on the basis of the creativity, viability and substance of the projects. The “ConPosium” will be held in Florida on April 14 and 15.