Fast-Tracked Podcast Episode 9: The history of lawyer formation has given rise to an educational structure that intentionally separates learning from practice, making it challenging to adapt to the modern pace of changing conditions. The arrival of next-generation technologies begs the question: How do we rapidly reimagine the future of associate development to ensure that legal educators and legal employers co-design a scaffolded and coherent approach to setting new lawyers up to succeed while delivering value to clients?
Our guests, Alice Armitage of UC Law SF and Heidi K. Brown of New York Law School, have spent their careers infusing law school curricula with the mindsets and skills a rapidly changing world requires and law students and new lawyers deserve, and are uniquely skilled in matters ranging from design thinking to prompt engineering.
PLI’s Fast-Tracked: Emergent Issues in the Legal Profession podcast, brings you conversations with thought leaders, delving into the most dynamic trends shaping the legal world, from AI to DEI – and everything in between. PLI is proud to keep you ever current with timely programs, publications, and podcasts. Visit pli.edu/ftpod for more episodes.
Please note: CLE is not offered for listening to this podcast, and the views and opinions expressed within represent those of the speakers and host, and not necessarily those of PLI.
Featured In This Episode
Alice Armitage
Professor Alice Armitage is the Director of Applied Innovation, which includes overseeing LexLab, an innovative hub on our campus focused on the many impacts that technology has and will continue to have on the law. Alice began her career as an international tax attorney at Arnold & Porter in Washington DC, moving from there to a position as a federal regulator in the Office of the International Chief Counsel at the US Internal Revenue Service to develop tax policy for complex cross-border financial transactions.
More recently, Alice took a break from practicing law to found two startups. Her experience as a two-time entrepreneur ultimately led her to UC Law SF as Director of the Startup Legal Garage. In her time as Director of this popular program, Alice developed an extensive network within both the tech and the legal communities of Silicon Valley. Alice now teaches four courses for law students that are part of the concentration in “Technology and Innovation in the Practice of Law”. These courses include “Generative Artificial Intelligence: Impact on the Substance & Practice of Law”, “Creating & Building Legal Tech Startups”, “In-House Counsel Toolkit: Strategies & Skills” and “Legal Operations”. In addition to building out new programs and courses at UC Law SF, Alice’s research interests focus on the intersection of technology, design thinking and regulation. Alice published “Design Thinking: An Answer to the Impasse between Innovation and Regulation” in the Georgetown Technology Law Review, and also has a chapter on design thinking in “The Cambridge Handbook of Law an Entrepreneurship in the United States,” published in April 2022 by the Cambridge University Press.
Professor Armitage is a graduate of the Yale Law School where she was the first woman Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Law Journal since World War II. She also has an A.B. and an M.A. in British and American Literature from Brown University.
Featured In This Episode
Heidi Brown
Professor Heidi K. Brown is a graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law, Associate Dean for Upper Level Writing at New York Law School, and a former litigator in the construction industry. Heidi is the author of three books about well-being for law students and lawyers: The Introverted Lawyer, Untangling Fear in Lawyering, and The Flourishing Lawyer. In 2021, Heidi earned a master’s degree in Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. She is the 2023 Award Recipient for “outstanding contributions to well-being in legal education” from the Association of American Law Schools’ Section on Balance and Well-Being in Legal Education. Building on a foundation of thirty years of experience in legal practice and academia, Heidi champions the importance of openly discussing stressors, anxieties, and fears in lawyering, and helping quiet and anxious law students and lawyers tap into individual strengths to become profoundly effective advocates—in their authentic voices. She is an internationally-recognized public speaker on issues of lawyer identity, writer identity, peak performance, and flourishing.
