An op-ed article written for The New York Law Journal by Dean Matthew Diller and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Joseph Landau was quoted in a Law.com article about different law schools’ responses to the increased prevalence of virtual litigation.
As Matthew Diller, dean and Paul Fuller Professor of Law at Fordham University School of Law, and Joseph Landau, associate dean for academic affairs at Fordham Law School, wrote in a recent commentary piece for The New York Law Journal: “[L]aw schools cannot simply hold our collective breath awaiting a return to a pre-pandemic normal that is unlikely to ever materialize. Instead, we must counter these far-reaching changes to the legal industry with meaningful and lasting adjustments of our own.”
Making those adjustments, Diller told Law.com in an interview, must start with two key questions: “How does our profession rethink advocacy strategies and how do we best prepare our students for both?”
“As these new dynamics influence the courtroom and related dynamics, so too must they permeate any classroom that seeks to prepare students to operate in that courtroom,” Diller and Landau wrote. “Law schools must track evolving (and competing) best practices and incorporate them into our litigation classes. Faced with a dearth of virtual courtrooms for budding lawyers to walk past and observe, we must compensate with other opportunities for students to observe, and simulate, virtual litigation.”
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“[L]itigators have had the opportunity to rethink a host of practices: When addressing the court, is it appropriate to stand or sit? What advocacy styles translate well to the virtual world and which fall flat? What is more important for the jury to see: Your entire standing body from head to shoes or your eyes?” Diller and Landau wrote in their article.
Diller said that they are finding that “students’ faces being pretty close to camera creates more intimacy,” though it is at the cost of sacrificing nonverbal cues.
“Words become much more important because they can’t communicate in other ways,” Diller said. “Law students are always taught how to be precise in words but it’s extra important now.”
