Teaching Legal Design: Lessons from Five Years of Student-Led Innovation in Tech4Justice

Abstract

Drawing on insights from the Tech4Justice Lab at Macquarie University and its five-year collaboration with the National Justice Project, the article explores how design thinking methodologies can be embedded into legal education. Tech4Justice focuses on developing important legal design and leadership skills that are highly sought in the job market. Tech4Justice students use no-code software to build chatbots to help people make discrimination complaints. Their chatbots are designed to fit within a broader strategy to facilitate easier access to complaint making (see hearmeout.org.au). We identify three notable pedagogical features that distinguish Tech4Justice from other legal design education initiatives: a sustained focus on a single problem, a mixed teaching model, and student leadership. Drawing on both the case study and existing literature, we then present an integrated framework identifying the key knowledge and skills a legal designer needs to have – and which law schools must, therefore, teach. Finally, we explore implications for legal education more broadly, arguing that our case study offers lessons that extend beyond legal design to legal education generally.