Dean Lumen Mulligan on Legal Education, Technology Competence and AI

Well, Daniel, Brandon, thank you both for having me. It's an honor and a privilege to be here. And anytime we can deepen our relationship with NeLI and have a chance to visit with the best practitioners in the United States, that's a thing we want to do here at UNCC Law. Well, that's fantastic. And what a great segue to our opener. Dean Mulligan, you have a very impressive background.

I'll be happy to. I'm the product of actual Haight-Ashbury hippies out in San Francisco. And my proper first name is Lumen, meaning Latin for light. So I eventually had to cut my hair and go to law school to rebel, becoming a great disappointment to my parents later on. But by the time I was four or five, I grew up in the Kansas City area on either side of the state line. My dad was a laborer at the water department and my mom, while she had myself and my brother put herself through nursing school and became a registered nurse and became a nurse educator over time. But we didn't have a lot when I was growing up and we moved house a couple of times at midnight.

And I know what that means now that we were skipping out on rent. But for me, that sticks in my mind, both the example of my mom advancing herself with a higher education degree and then myself being able to go to public university and public law school. I have two daughters who've never moved house at midnight. And that that power that being able to do that is really what we're all about here at UMKC Law School. I'll talk a bit about myself in a second. But what we really are about are changing the lives of our students, changing the lives of their families, changing communities through that power of public education. I was privileged to go to University of Kansas to earn my bachelor's degree.

I have a master's degree in philosophy from University of Colorado and my JD from University of Michigan began my career clerking for then chief judge to Nelta, the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and was a litigation associate at Pulse NeLI. I had my own law firm for a while called us still well in Mulligan. We were representing nonprofit organizations. And then someone accidentally fell into teaching at the business school, back up the University of Michigan, then was at the Law College at Michigan State for a number of years, 14 years at University of Kansas at the College of Law and then as a vice provost for the whole university. And three years ago, UMKC calls ahead. You've thought about being the law engineer hometown.

And so that sounds pretty cool and had that opportunity to come over here. Was able to do a lot of when I was still a professor, not so much an administrator or did a lot of consulting work over time on large MDLs here in Kansas City, brief several United States Supreme Court cases, set the CGA appellate panel for a number of years and was Kansas Governor or Kelly's Chief COVID litigator. So just a couple of things you've done in your path or demo again. Yeah, a couple of things.

Whether educators are more powerful than our practitioners who are solving clients existential problems, whether it's in the criminal justice system or preserving a business or working on a family law issue. I don't know with one is greater than the other but in terms of being an educator exactly so, if you're doing it at its highest level, it's exponential. I have 75 folks in a classroom at a time and you're impacting those folks who are gonna go on to do incredible things. And then next semester, there's two more rooms of 75 people in them and we're building skills and we're thinking more deeply, we're building discernment. We're creating that foundation of professionalism and ethics and those folks are gonna go out into the world. So you do have that multiplier impact there.

We have four retirements here this year at UM KC Law School folks who've been doing this for decades and we were counting up the number of students and when you start getting into the thousands, that exponential impact of what that person's had, the lives that he or she has touched, it's a privilege to do this job, it really is. And you've been doing it for quite a while and you've done it in a number of different forums. We've talked about some of the different schools where you've taught and now you're in more of an administrative role. There's been a lot of change in the practice of law over the course of your career as an educator.

Well Brandon, thank you for that question as a civ pro geek myself, and these are near and dear to my heart. Let me start with one's always a little scared to talk about legal education generally because that's a broad landscape of lots of different things. But I would say at the top of the mountain level looking at all 200 law schools in the United States, eDiscovery education would be probably uneven and evolving. You're gonna have some schools that have really leaned into that, especially heavily going to the sixth and the seventh course and all that type of thing to other schools that maybe don't even have an opportunity to engage in that at all. And you would have that full spectrum. But I would also say that I'm seeing in the stronger schools, eDiscovery moving from specialty to more core.

Not a required class, but part of that core litigation curriculum in the same way that if a young person says, I'm thinking about being a litigator and well, evidence, let's get in whatever your school's version of CIFP Pro 2 is called. Are you in Fed courts? Are you in the trial advocacy progression? Are we gonna get you into a live client clinic? All those types of things. And you're seeing the stronger schools and have an eDiscovery class or classes or it's embedded in a clinic or it's a simulation. There's some way of engaging with those folks is that so core civil litigation track. And you're definitely seeing that here at UMKC for the longest time. We've had an eDiscovery class where people are engaging in requests and responses and that type of thing.

And the last number of years, we've been able to engage a bit more even on the, using some tech tool sides. How would we do this? Can we have a model opportunity to visit with a vendor? What are the types of things you might be able to do in-house if you're at a smaller shop and trying to save a little dollars? You know, that sort of thing. So I see it definitely becoming a core piece for that person who knows. He or she's going into civil litigation.

You have to learn how to think like a lawyer. You have to learn how to write like a lawyer. There's this whole analytical aspect of it. So if you come in with like a liberal arts degree, you may not be ready as much as somebody came in as a poly-sign major, right? Et cetera. So there's things to learn, right? There's things to learn. At least I'll speak for myself, at least for me, right? As a liberal arts major walking in the door of law school.

I'm, again, I'm not empowered to speak on behalf of my 199 other team colleagues. Sure, sure. But what I can say is I might parse some of those pieces out Daniel, talking about laws of business, technical competency and eDiscovery is one particular aspect of those. I agree almost every law school in the country is doing some way of engaging at what is law as a business. And indeed, and what it means to be a professional there's a new ABA standard or newish about professional identity formation. And you're absolutely right on rules of professional responsibility on having technical competence, right? And there's a new ABA formal opinion 512 addressing AI competence in particular. Bear in mind though, we've known since there's these big reports on legal education and one of the most famous of those is this called the McCrape report.

And that's getting to be 25 years old or almost 30 years old now. And even then, we knew at that time that the overwhelming majority of students who graduate law school do not go into litigation of any kind, criminal or civil. And that only grows every year. We also know in the practice that people who go into litigation leave it into a regulatory or a transactional or an in-house position. So, and then if you carve out the number of folks are gonna go into a criminal practice, which is usually not like the number of folks from any law school that are gonna go into a civil practice and that's gonna vary from law school to law school. But to talk about mine, that's less than one in five.

So, when we think about being competent in technology, we think of it and not in terms of particular tools for and say that everyone is gonna, we're gonna pretend that 80% of these students are gonna be civil litigators when they're not. We talk about how are we providing tools and pathways and good advising? So, the folks who are on a litigation track are getting those great skills. And the folks who are gonna go on a transactional track are introduced to Spellbook or these types of things that folks who are gonna go into a regulatory space have those tools. So, to have everyone go to an area of law that they're not the statistically they're not going to practice they're vocalizing they're not going to practice it isn't helpful and tends to have the opposite effect of turning people off and making them jump for hoops that they don't want to do.

Yeah probably when we should be that person wants to be a transactional attorney or that person who's going to be a public defender or that person who's going to do trust in the state work and so on and so on is getting an introduction to the technology that she's going to be working with. So I hope that answers the question that you know the eDiscovery of folks in our world like well that's the whole game but we're not we're not every lawyer right and I think all of our good law schools are all saying we have to how we've provided that fundamental intellectual about foundation but then how are we advising and tracking our students so they're hitting their goals and their dreams this person wants to be a legislative aide coming out of school and that person and so on and so on and so on uh so it's a bit more multivarious than assuming the eDiscovery is the task that all folks are going to be engaged in their career.

Absolutely and we could talk about AI forever and Brandon I totally agree with you that is one of those more foundational tools we can dig even a little deeper when we talk about AI education here at UMKC we're trying to not focus on what we would call the technical term as I understand sort of the wrappers of are we gonna talk about Harvey or whatever but rather the underlying formatting and technology there that someone can be educated about so the whatever new skin is placed on top of that over time that person has that slightly deeper knowledge not a computer scientist knowledge but a deeper engagement that I would let me start at the broader national level and then we can talk a bit more about what we're doing here at my school but you know at the national level you're seeing lots of different movements of course courses dedicated to AI you're seeing credentialing and pathway programs around AI you're seeing required AI competency tests at some schools you're seeing student AI access initiatives because there's an equity piece right do my wealthier students have it already and my folks who don't quite have those access not you're seeing experimentation and applied AI you're seeing faculty scholarship around AI you're seeing public programming and tools around AI coming into the marketplace and you're seeing infrastructure and policy being developed so you're seeing like across every node not just in the even the educational mission you're seeing different pieces of different schools at different places on that sort of AI journey if you like and with different schools with different missions leading into that and in different ways I can talk a bit about you know UMKC which I know you know obviously a bit more about you know we have 28 different courses here at UMKC law that are either fully 100 about AI or have a meaningful component of AI in it you can't take a copyright class now without having a meaningful unit on AI so even those things you would think it's not a tech course it's impacting you know everything we do stuff on cybersecurity and related fields and of course now AI is a big piece of those courses our experiential programs are rolling in AI for a real client so we're using a spellbook licenses in our business law clinic how are we you know introducing folks to those types of tools are friends in the family law clinic and IP clinic are looking at what it you know how do we integrate there so maybe a step or two behind on integrating that into their clinical experience but you know we're working there on that piece of it.

You'll see us hiring coming in this fall we have soon to be Professor Bautua who's a former senior software engineer at Lyft about ten years of experience there before going back to Harvard Law School and practicing and having a Federal Circuit Court clerkship he's going to come in and his upper division classes are all going to be in the sort of law and tech and AI space so we're adding in personnel here at UMKC law around that we already have a micro credentialing program we allow students to do X number of classes which would include some of our mini-term classes where you build your own LLM and that type of thing and get a credential. Those things are challenging for universities who are not known for nimbleness and speed.

To build a curriculum in this evolving environment is a challenge like for me to even change one credit hour on something I have to get my faculty approval the university approval the University of Missouri system has to approve it this thing called the Higher Learning Commission has to approve it then the Missouri Department of Higher Education has to approve it and then I have to slaughter 18 goats and give up one of my children so that they it's that so it to move at the speed of the technology it brings problems that's part of my job to navigate but so we're how are we trying to remain nimble in that space couple of the things I'd like to talk about here at UMKC law we have NeLI partners with our continuing legal education unit here last year we more than doubled our AI related programming there we're moving towards having a AI suite of programs there for the practicing bar that one might think about having a year-long curriculum that someone engages in AI programming we're looking at AI weekends where you might go away you know as part of a CLE experience and really have a deep dive for that for as folks are getting retooled in that space we recently just passed last week at our faculty meeting the promise to all of our students we will give an AI a legal AI tool to all of our students I have we haven't we just got that pass in the faculty what tool that's going to be tune in but that first became an equity piece because our folks who have some more resources were already buying their commercial Claude or whatever and we wanted to make sure that we're putting everybody in the same footing that doesn't mean that you a faculty member has to allow it in her class it just means that everyone has access to that tool as part of the same way you have a Westlaw password as a lawsuit you have you have that access to that tool and we through our Innovation Center are producing software tools to attack social justice problems right now so for example on the our law schools right here on the state line between Kansas and Missouri on the Kansas side we created an AI tool is working with one of the Kansas courts and was called Johnson County Kansas on to help with eviction pro say filings to you and we developed that software key to Kansas statutory law that helps people to produce those filings there's making a big difference we have a tool on the Missouri side we're having some issues with unauthorized practice of law here and then those are understandable but the works with expungement and how are we allowing folks to who need to proceed pro say to use some of those tools to help them generate pro say petition so you're seeing our school courses pathways and certificate programs resources training for our faculty experiential education creating new tools to meet the marketplace continuing legal education we're hitting all of those spaces so AI is everywhere I think it's admirable and I think it's fantastic how much you have integrated like you said each one of those different nodes that you're leveraging AI all these various different ways I have a related question to that so the made me think about something else there's an interesting study that now wasn't peer reviewed but MIT came out with this interesting study about how and you.

We're deeply leaning into that as a question of education and how do you use this tool? So, you know, you can open a beer bottle with the screwdriver, but that's not what a screwdriver is for, right? And it might, maybe you don't hurt yourself and maybe you don't blow up all the beer, but better to use a bottle opener. And something of the same thing is happening here. If, you know, your legal AI gives you an answer and you don't read the statute and you don't read the relevant cases, you don't hit the separatize button yourself, you don't read, you know, that particular learned treatise on the area, right? You've used the tool inappropriately, right? So it's a great way to speed up research, you know, but if you go like, oh, it did it and I have no duty to look at any of these things, to learn anything about it, to make sure it applied to the facts of my case, that I, when I'm reading this, didn't go like, oh, I never knew there was sub issue three because I didn't know that and didn't, right?

So AI shouldn't be taking any of those things away from you. And I think that's where people are getting in professional responsibility trouble and having those other things where you say, well, it is, I don't have to do anything else. That's error. Well, can this be a great tool? Can it give you a nice first draft? But you still need to go read those primary source materials. I mean, if you value your license, if you wanna make sure you're not hurting our fellow citizens who are your clients, if you wanna make sure that you're upholding your duty to be informed and to duties of candor and other things to the court, you better. So I think that it, but that's about education in the same sort of way that's, you know, the iPhone.

comes out in 2007 and it's just now we're kind of figuring out what are parenting standards, when do you give this to them, do they have them in school, does it work, does it not work. This pace of technology is a little bit faster than the sociology that surrounds all those things but that's a place where I think law schools can really step up and be leaders. Not only in what we're doing in the classroom but in CLE and other things. How do you use it? It's a 15 year attorney. Claude or Harvey is not a two year associate. That's an education process is the short answer for how we attack that. I think they will have impacts for lots of things though. Maybe the billable hour is not really going to remain king.

We start billing out projects and we don't want to have that disincentive from clients and you went and looked up all the things that Claude gave you. What were you billing me for that? This particular project costs X dollars. I'm going to do a heck of a job because I want to repeat business and I want to be ethical and I want to make sure I've covered all my bases and I want to be efficient as well. I'm already seeing lots of law firms talking about what does this mean for pricing? What does this mean for business models? What does it mean internally for how we even work comp in-house if it's not going to be this every associate needs to hit 18, 50 hours and that's how we need to really changing that whole broader structure.

To me anyways I think that's the healthier way to think about it. If I could add one last gloss on your question. For me it's really important when we think about AI to not only think about it as an efficiency tool that makes things faster but as a market expansion tool. Depending on which study you read 80 to 90% of legal need in the United States is unmet because folks can't afford a lawyer. If we have AI that's not just making stuff more efficient for that 15 to 10% who can already afford lawyers that's great but actually digs into that access to justice problem making it a little easier to get. Let's just take divorces. I happen to sit on the Civil Rules Advisory Committee in the state of Kansas.

In the state of Kansas 93% of all divorces have at least one unrepresented party and nearly 80% have both parties unrepresented. If we could have some tools that could help people access an attorney in even an uncontested divorce because those things were a little more attainable there's a lot deeper into that market. I think that has impacts for rule of law. I think it has impacts for people's faith in institutions. I think it would have an impact in the health of our democracy. So I think we need to think both and I know a lot of us who are running law firms like well how am I going to get this cheaper how can I have the cost of this M&A transaction. But I would like us also to think how do we provide legal services to a broader meaningful segment of our fellow citizens who have been shut out by price because now we have an opportunity for probably not everybody but we have an opportunity to get a little bit deeper that person who's setting up his or her own little business maybe can get some actual professional legal help on how am I going to structure it.

I could get some legal advice on what's how do I properly and ethically employ people and all those kinds of things that startup restaurant say maybe can't do but maybe we can now. So I want to continue to insist that we think about both and that we're broadening that access to rule of law as again I think that's going to be healthy for our nation in a lot of different ways. That's a great perspective on things and it's another illustration of how we started out this conversation at least that last question that was asked talking about AI and AI integration into you know legal education and now we're talking about some of the ripple effects of AI's presence in the legal profession in general how many changes that can make you know from your position as an educated you're looking at these young students who are going to be attorneys in two three years you're seeing all these changes that could be happening to the profession.

What are the things about what you see outside the halls of education out where practicing that make you most excited for your students who are there now. Like, oh, I can't believe they're going to have the opportunity to do X in the next three to five years. Yeah. There's so many things that I'm excited about my students for and, you know, a couple of broad themes in that space. I think our profession is becoming more interdisciplinary, just this conversation that we're having here. It is one that's bounding upon different things and the liberal arts and, you know, computer science, business savvy, but it's becoming more interdisciplinary, more entrepreneurial. And I think, therefore, more impactful as a broad theme. I also see as a broad theme, our students now are much more mission driven.

Then, and that's true, not just with law students, but all the students that are going to college right now, really looking for a career path that aligns with mission for them. You're seeing majority women graduating at a law school nationally since 2016. Each year's national graduating class has been majority women. And I know we're still having challenges with those women advancing through at least on the private practice side, but that's going to erode away. I'm confident. And we're going to have more women in leadership and that's going to have impacts that are various and fecund. We're seeing our workforce get more diverse and we're, which will have impacts, which will be various and fecund. And we're seeing, I think, an interesting space where sometimes the smaller law firms are now because of different AI tools or eDiscovery vendors or other things that are able to compete for business and clients that used to be only the big law folks could be in.

Well, and that's just good for a market. When you can enter into these different spaces and a shop of eight people can take on a wrongful death suit for the local utility, when before that had to be a 300-person law firm, that's just so much more dynamic and engaging atmosphere that's going to empower folks to be their own boss and have their name on the door. So it's a very impactful time. So you can really, I think, my grads are going to be able to craft practice as they want it more than maybe folks in the past could. I think that's exciting. I think there are going to be more fluid between sectors. We're already seeing that. Someone goes into the prosecution side for eight years, jumps over to a plaintiff side practice, then maybe ends her career as an executive director of a nonprofit organization.

And that, as numbers, is becoming more prevalent. And I think that's exciting. And I guess I would end, I think, as our practice has more AI infusion, I think we're really going to be looking to lawyers to bring judgment, discernment, experience, because I will get my list of cases like that. But what my counsel brings is discernment, judgment, professionalism, compassion, empathy. And so those are all the things that, and I'm so excited about future generation of lawyers, I could answer Brandon, your question for longer than you would like me to, but there's just so much upside going on right now.

Well, I think that's important. And I'm happy for this to be an advertisement for you. UMKC Law School, please come. We have a great, it's a wonderful community and we would love to have a year. But in fairness to our other law schools, I mean, our other law schools in the United States are doing this work too, 100%. And they're leaning into that. And I think all of us are saying we need to give people these technical tools, but we don't need our lawyers to be profit maximization, automatons. We need those folks to bring ethics and judgment. And wherever that comes from for that person, this person's maybe humanist, this person's deeply, in the Christian tradition, that this person comes at it from a different point of view, but they're going to bring those values.

Because at the end of the day, law is a human profession. Law is a service profession. And we can get lost in the weeds of this ESI fight or this request for admission and yada, yada, yada. We can get just stuck in that. But at the end of the day, what are we doing? This is a human profession, providing services to humans or the humans who own this company. And all those folks have ends and have value and have children in wants and dreams. And it's important to center that, I think. And I think that helps, again, if we're skewing away from technology, but I also think that helps with wellness and the profession. That you know that you're engaged in a human profession that is helping.

We're not building bridges, but we're helping to resolve conflict. We're helping to reorder your life. We're helping to make sure this community has growing jobs and opportunities so that it's thriving. That's what the lawyer does when he or she is at work. And I think when we reframe that, I think that's exciting. And again, I'm going to stick with rule of law as a heck of an inheritance that we have. And I think that each and every one of us has an obligation and a moral duty as lawyers to stand up for it and foster it and promote it and hold it dear. Because when we look around the world and we see places that rule of law has not been fostered and held dear, that's hard to recover from.

So we want to make sure that we are safeguarding that inheritance, not that it's perfect, not that we don't have work to do. Yes, yes, yes, yes. But gosh, it's a blessing what we have. So we have a duty to lean into that.

It was absolutely a joy, Brandon and Daniel love it so much. I look forward to our next.