Law without Walls 2014

LawWithoutWalls 2014 Conposium was held on the 12 and 13 of April at the University of Miami School of Law in Coral Gables, Florida, where a number of legal technology projects were presented by students from the best universities all over the World. IE was represented in Miami by Ana Martínez Valls and Wojciech Zaluska, both students fron the Dual LLB+BBA Degree, who presented their final projects in front of several leaders of the legal community.

LawWithoutWalls is a part-virtual collaboratory course that develops the skills necessary to provide effective legal services in today’s global, multi-disciplinary, and cross-cultural marketplace. It centers on the intersection of law, business, technology and innovation. This award-winning course is pioneered by University of Miami School of Law and taught in conjunction with leading law schools across the globe including UCL Laws, Harvard Law School, Stanford Law School, Fordham Law School, New York Law School, Peking University (STL), University of St Gallen and University of Sydney.

The course explores innovations in global legal education and practice through weekly virtual classes and collaborative research. Students attended and participated in virtual classroom sessions and were grouped with students from other participating law schools to conduct a piece of research on an assigned topic. The topics were interdisciplinary and wide-ranging, looking to the future in their anticipation of changes to legal practice and education within a virtual landscape.

Students engaged during the course with leading practitioners and mentors from across the globe through weekly virtual mentoring sessions. Central to the course is the idea that students should engage with one another in person as well as virtually.  To that end, a Kick Off event was held at University of St Gallen in Switzerland last January for students and mentors to meet and prepare for the course.

This year, IE University also offered a second LawWithoutWalls program, "LWOW X", in which our Dual Degree student Eric Cuevas took part. LWOW X is an all-virtual pilot program that offers the same components and benefits as LWOW, but makes use of technology to configure the program on an entirely on-line basis. In doing so, LWOW X seeks to make the benefits of LWOW available to a greater number of students. The universities that participated in the pilot were UCL, University of Montreal, Miami Law and IE University.