Social justice has always played an important role in clinical legal education (CLE). Clinicians are aware that students need to acquire the necessary legal skills and strategies related to client-centred lawyering, process choice and procedural justice. This paper shows that increasingly, despite clinicians’ recognition of the value of teaching social justice in CLE, those who promote it face various challenges in instilling in students the notion that social justice is important. This paper discusses some of these challenges, including, that as experiential education expands, students are being offered clinical placements in the private sector where clients do not face the barriers in accessing justice similar to those in community settings. It therefore becomes imperative to encourage students to retain the notion that social justice is an important value. This paper makes suggestions for how these challenges can be overcome to enhance students’ awareness of the importance of social justice and ensure that it remains a value they retain as 21st century practitioners.

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<p>Over the last 30 years alternative dispute resolution (ADR) has become more prominent in Australian legal practice due to the need to reduce the cost of access to justice and to provide more expedient and informal alternatives to litigation. As legal educators, we need to ask: how should we be preparing law students entering practice for these changes? How can we ensure that once they become lawyers, our students will not rely entirely on litigious methods to assist their clients but instead look at alternatives for dispute resolution?</p><p>In this paper, I argue that there is no alternative to teaching ADR in clinic in order to address client needs and to ensure that students engaged in clinical education are prepared for changes in legal practice today. I show that the increasing focus upon ADR in Australian legal practice represents a challenge for law schools, and that legal educators need to ensure they are educating students about ADR.</p><p>I argue that it is important to determine whether ADR is being taught to students undertaking clinical legal education in ways that will enhance their preparation for legal practice. I will show that there is a need to explore: whether ADR is being taught within clinical legal education, the strengths and weaknesses of existing approaches, and how the teaching of ADR within clinics can be improved.</p>

Globalisation, economic forces and technological advancements are changing the way law is practised. Clients are seeking innovative solutions to an increasingly broad range of legal challenges. They want greater connectivity and streamlined delivery of legal services. The rate of change has accelerated in response to remote working, with the digital maturity of legal firms advancing more rapidly than ever before, utilising technology such as electronic billing practices, digital mailrooms, e- discovery, digital document signing and workflow automation. Newly developed and deployed legal technology within the sector has increased demand for lawyers with the skills to adapt and thrive in a technological environment. Law firms favour graduates with a ‘technology mindset’ and aptitude to think beyond the traditional professional services model. The Monash University Faculty of Law, one of the leading law schools in Australia with a pioneering clinical program, has established a Law Tech Clinic (LTC). The LTC provides a unique opportunity for students to work on real client matters and receive end-to-end industry input to develop client-ready applications. This paper describes the LTC’s structure and how the clinic is designed to educate students on the changing demands of the legal industry, providing practical knowledge on legal technology usage to advance legal services. This paper outlines how the LTC enables students to develop professional and practical legal skills that will help them become successful entrepreneurial lawyers, adept at integrating technology with innovative legal services. Further, this paper demonstrates how the Monash Clinical Program, with a strong focus on best practice in clinical legal education, provides a perfect forum to run such a clinic. We demonstrate how students work with technological systems to assist industry partners, law firms and other organisations and provide accessible legal services to their clients.2 Finally, this paper highlights how the LTC educates students on technological advances in legal practice, equipping them with frameworks for the knowledge, skills and attributes to be technologically proficient future legal practitioners. Although this discussion is in the Australian context, it can also apply to other jurisdictions as the associated issues with legal technology and its effects on legal practice are occurring globally.