Educate and inspire

The town of St Gallen, just off Lake Constance in the east of Switzerland, is best known for its picturesque old streets and world heritage abbey. It also has one of the best management schools in Europe, rivalling the likes of the London Business School and Insead, and its university is home to a successful international annual student-run business symposium. Last weekend it was also host to an unusual initiative: the so-called KickOff session of this year's Law Without Walls.

Set up a few years ago under the impetus of former Baker & Mackenzie US senior partner Peter Lederer and Miami University, LWOW describes itself as a 'part-virtual, collaborative academic model' bringing together students, universities, lawyers and business people 'to innovate legal education and practice'.

It sounds a bit worthy and shapeless. 'Our goal is to jointly develop creative solutions to real problems in the way law is taught and practised,' the project's website says. It is also a tad exclusive, with only 12 universities involved, most of them from the US; UCL is the only British member. But there is something exciting about LWOW, and those taking part talk about the experience with the enthusiasm of the converted.

There is nothing quite like it anywhere else. Think of it as a cross between Dragons' Den and Davos for junior lawyers. Law schools' business modules tend to focus on business processes rather than the strategic development of ideas. There are of course a few specialist degrees combining law and the business of law, but, interesting as they may otherwise be, they also suffer from the same mechanical approach to management.

In contrast, LWOW student teams work on their own projects with the assistance of mentors from practice and business and present to a panel in April. The objective isn't to secure funding for the implementation of the projects, although it can be available if some of the entrepreneurs or organisations involved wanted to help. Instead it aims to hone unused skills and encourage participants to look beyond the boundaries of traditional teachings. And, while the scheme has a very strong international flavour, past projects such as securing access to justice through third-party funding for individuals ineligible for legal aid, litigants in person, and facilitating cross-border dialogue between national legal regulators, show that they can reach out to local communities where the real problems are.

LWOW claims that it is the future of legal education, an ambition that is not entirely convincing at this stage, but it sends an inspirational message that lawyers are more than robots delivering legal advice and can have a specific role to play in the community. This should be a constructive proposition that could purposefully feed into exercises such as the current legal education and training review undertaken by the SRA