BYU Law Collaborates with Code180 to Offer First-of-its-Kind Legal Coding Workshop

Sponsored by Casetext and Themis Bar Review, recurring program will showcase coding's application to the law for the modern lawyer

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BYU Law

Oct 25, 2018, 13:37 ET

PROVO, Utah, Oct. 25, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- BYU Law School, a leading national law school focused on innovation in the legal field, will host a coding workshop that teaches the fundamentals of web development and coding in just 180 minutes. Presented by Code180, the hands-on training will focus on coding's application in the law and is designed to prepare students for future careers that utilize artificial intelligence (AI) and other technology.

"For the modern lawyer, understanding code is part of being literate in the language of business," said Gordon Smith, Dean of BYU Law. "Code180 allows our students to look into the logic and purposes of coding – specifically as it relates to their future legal aspirations."

BYU Law alumnus and Code180 founder and Executive Director Derek Parry, an attorney at Parr Brown Gee & Loveless in Salt Lake City, focuses his practice in software, licensing and intellectual property. Through his practice, he recognized the benefits to attorneys becoming conversant in code. "Code180 started as a CLE presentation that began to generate a lot of interest. We then expanded it to three hours to include the hands-on component. Code180 is the course I wish I had when I first started learning how to program."

After a trial workshop in August presented by Parry, BYU Law became the first institution to offer the workshop on a recurring basis each semester. The first course offering, taking place Friday, Oct. 26 from 1 to 4 p.m., is already at capacity.

The new workshop and partnership with Code180 is an example of BYU Law's ongoing commitment to legal technology innovation. It follows on the heels of the Law School's work building events around leading-edge technology such as blockchain and artificial intelligence. In early 2018, BYU Law was a host site for the first-ever Global Legal Hackathon, which featured (among other things) state-of-the-art research on topics related to mergers and acquisitions. The school has also been recognized for its work with the LawX clinic, a legal design lab that solves one legal challenge a semester.

"Not every lawyer needs to be an expert software engineer, but every lawyer will have to work with technology as it is increasingly leveraged in legal services," said Matthew Jennejohn, associate professor at BYU Law and founder of BYU Law's Winter Deals Conference. "To successfully collaborate, attorneys need basic literacy in these new languages. That is where programs like Code180 can be so beneficial – they provide a framework for understanding and navigating this new frontier."

This recurring workshop is sponsored by Casetext (https://casetext.com/), the most widely used AI legal research technology, and Themis Bar Review (https://www.themisbar.com/), the first fully online bar review.

About BYU Law School
Founded in 1971, the J. Reuben Clark Law School (BYU Law) has grown into one of the nation's leading law schools – recognized for innovative research and teaching in social change, transactional design, entrepreneurship, corpus linguistics, criminal justice and religious freedom. The Law School has more than 6,000 alumni serving in communities around the world. In its most recent rankings, SoFi ranked BYU Law as the #1 best-value US law school in their 2017 Return on Education Law School Ranking. For more information, visit http://www.law.byu.edu/.

About Code180
Code180 is a professional training organization with a national mission of making coding education accessible to the general public. Code180 workshops are held at universities, colleges, high schools, private companies and in other organizational settings. Code180 workshops are provided at no cost to the individual participants and are made possible by workshop sponsors or the hosting institution. For more information, visit www.code180.org.

SOURCE BYU Law