Associate Dean William Byrnes, a pioneer in online legal education, will be co-presenting with Director Jason Fiske. Dean Byrnes will be discussing the optimal pedagogy for online legal education, and will provide updates on current trends in the field. This includes the creation of an enhanced online learning environment for students, and how instructors can guide the students in a collaborative "partnering" manner. Also discussed will be how students can form effective learning groups in an online setting. Director Fiske will present on building a new online legal education program at a university. Director Fiske will discuss the implementation process to begin a new online program, and the advanced tools and methods employed. Practical examples will be displayed on the building of online classrooms, including online tools for the effective and efficient delivery of information and assessments (CALI included).

The OASIS Legal Citation Markup Technical Committee has been hard at work creating a markup standard for all legal citations worldwide. This is an effort to work with all kinds of citations styles to facilitate machine readable links between documents in a standard format that all legal information suppliers, and all legal information programmers can use and understand. Several of the TC's subcommittees are working on use-cases for the various types of legal document citations (court documents, legislatiive documents, administrative documents, and secondary source documents), as well as the technical work on the standard itself. In this session, Mr. Heywood will report on the progress of the Technical Committee and its subcommittees this year, and why you should care.

Legal educators were slow to adopt PowerPoint as a teaching tool, but many law professors and law librarians are now using PowerPoint or other presentation software for teaching and presentations. Unfortunately, as anyone who has attended a legal conference can attest, many of us don't have a clue about how to design effective PowerPoint presentations. The result is distracted audiences, confusing presentations, and ineffective teaching. This presentation will focus on some of the most common mistakes people make in creating PowerPoint presentations and discuss how to improve your PowerPoint presentations. Almost all of what I say will also be applicable to other presentation software and most of what I say is also applicable to graphics created for videos.

Technology is advancing and mutating so rapidly that it’s often a challenge for tech professionals to keep up, much less the non-technical people we support. This presents a huge opportunity for IT to redefine its role from one of reactive support to one of proactive innovation. Through combination of curiosity, creative play and experimentation, IT professionals have the opportunity to lead their organizations leaps and bounds forward by anticipating needs and providing cutting edge solutions. Join us for a discussion of some of the things we’re currently experimenting with and how our curiosity for new technologies and creative play are helping us develop tools that meet real needs at our law school.

The A2J Author Course Project ("Project") is a groundbreaking initiative that supports and promotes the teaching of A2J Author in law schools across the country to help lower barriers to access to justice. A2J Author is an expert system with an authoring tool that creates graphical Guided Interviews, which walk self-represented litigants through a legal process.

Legal education is undergoing a transformation. Assessing institutional effectiveness is a growing concern for the ABA and was the subject of several new accreditation standards that were approved in August of 2014. Law schools are finding it increasingly necessary to transform to address the challenges of these new assessment initiatives, or risk becoming obsolete. This session will focus on technological solutions that can help law schools quickly adapt to the rapidly shifting landscape of legal education.

This session will describe how Rutgers-Newark Law Library is creating an archive of regulations from military agencies within the Department of Defense. Many Federal Agencies publish their documents exclusively on departmental websites.  These documents include many regulations, policies, manuals, and other publications with legal significance.   This system of web publishing creates barriers to effective information retrieval by funneling documents into many separate databases with no overarching organization scheme.  The focus of this session will be on using linked data technology to improve access to and discovery of legal information published by government agencies.

Lawyers and judges alike rely on explanatory parentheticals to concisely convey the substance of a decision. Indeed, the common law is infested with these case-summarizing parentheticals. Because these parentheticals follow a common format, including the use of an introductory gerund - (holding, (distinguishing, (rejecting, etc. - they are amenable to automated extraction. During an ongoing fellowship project at Stanford CodeX, the speaker extracted hundreds of thousands of explanatory parentheticals from federal case law. Concise case summaries written by judges have many uses including enabling a curation of opinions that is at once automated, nuanced, and trustworthy. The parenthethicals can also enable an auto-populated citator tool that, though limited in coverage, is not limited treatment to strongly negative treatment.

The ABA Model Rules were recently changed to include a technology component. See Client-Lawyer Relationship Rule 1.1 Competence – Comment which states “To maintain the requisite knowledge and skill, a lawyer should keep abreast of changes in the law and its practice, including the benefits and risks associated with relevant technology, engage in continuing study and education and comply with all continuing legal education requirements to which the lawyer is subject.” As technology gains more importance in the work of the legal profession, law schools face new challenges about how to incorporate technology in the curriculum. Law students are still trained to look at precedent looking backwards, rather than forward to the future of legal services.” The session by Brooklyn Law School Reference Librarian Harold O'Grady and Brooklyn Law School Technology Educator Lloyd Carew-Reid will examine how law schools are now incorporating technology, business development and marketing in the law school curriculum

You can code; you just may not know it yet. This presentation will cover the fundamentals of coding by looking at some of the most popular and important programming languages used today. By looking at different examples and the ways in which they share key commonalities, participants will learn about the concepts necessary to read and understand a block of code. We will include conclude with an opportunity for participants to create and execute a simple script (please bring your laptop if you’d like to get some hands-on coding experience).