Law Prof as Innovator of Online Legal Transactional Skills Training Platform

Drexel Law prof Karl Okamoto's LawMeet teaches lawyering skills by having students post videos advising "clients" on hypothetical transactional scenarios. The students then receive feedback on their performances through a voting system. The top-rated performances are reviewed by experienced transactional lawyers in a competitive setting.

It has been reported that several law firms are using the online training platform with junior associates and faculty at 48 law schools expressed interest in testing LawMeet exercises after Okamoto demonstrated LawMeets at AALS this year. Hopefully interest in this platform will expanding legal skills offerings for law school courses and in-house law firm training with additional topical competitions for transactional lawyering. Perhaps someday LawMeet execises will offer law school course credit and CLE credit hours as standalone transaction-based legal skills offerings.

LawMeets was launched by two-year old start-up ApprenNet. Okamoto's venture recently received a $500,000 Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Science Foundation to expand LawMeet. For more see Drexel Law Prof to Use $500K Grant to Expand LawMeets, an Online Lawyering Skills Platform and Philadelphia Inquirer Features Professor Karl Okamoto's Online Experiential Learning Platform. [JH]