The Legal Innovation Centre
Overview
Established with funding from Allen & Overy, Baker McKenzie, and Invest Northern Ireland, the Centre promotes and supports innovation in legal services and access to justice. Ulster University School of Law and School of Computing and Intelligent Systems have joined forces to bring together research into the application and impact of new legal technology and opportunities for the education and training of current and future lawyers in essential legal tech skills.
The Centre seeks to innovate by:
- Providing education and training to create innovative law students and legal professionals
- Undertaking research for industry clients, the public sector and the academic community, to better understand how innovation can improve legal service delivery and access to justice
- Engaging in collaborative research and development through partnership with stakeholders to capitalise on the benefits of innovative approaches to legal practice
Benefits/Outcomes
- Solutions to opportunities and challenges facing the legal industry
- Improving economic efficiency and access to justice
- Access to leading edge research to improve practices
- Helping to educate future legal professionals creating a talent pipeline
- Advice on what is happening within the sector in real time
Speaking at the launch, Ulster University’s Vice-Chancellor, Professor Paddy Nixon, said:
“There is a growing recognition of the crucial and ever-expanding role of technology in law. The Centre will undertake much-needed research on technological innovations to facilitate legal process improvement, and so promote greater economic efficiency and improved access to justice.
“The Centre will also enable those interested in LawTech, whether legal professionals, law students or others, to study the technological transformation of legal practice, and the implications of this change. In this way it will foster the emergence of legal technologists, ready for the challenges of legal service provision in the information age.
“The legal sector is immensely important to our economy and in recent years Northern Ireland has attracted significant investment from several global law firms which has created a hub of legal expertise with a focus on innovation. This new Centre will underpin the strength of our legal sector and further enhance Ulster University’s global reputation for law and computer science research excellence.”
Find out more about The Legal Innovation Centre