Tech Support: Our Ethical Duties to Students, Clients, and Society

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Session Type: Concurrent Sessions

Session Capacity: N/A

Location: Marriott St. Louis Grand

Room: Landmark 1

Floor: Ground Floor, Conference Plaza

In recent years, many clinicians have begun to increase their scrutiny of the various technologies that we use, and the corporations that we rely upon, to serve our clients and prepare our students for careers in the law. Some of these technologies have become entrenched in legal education and practice such that they are now second nature to us (e.g., laptops, cellphones, email). Others are newly emerging and uncertain (e.g., Generative AI tools). But they all pose a wide variety of challenges for clinical instructors and students alike—not only to the professional duties that we owe our clients, but also to our broader commitments to social justice. In this session, we will first focus on widely used legal research and writing technologies and explore ways in which they reinforce existing power structures, exploitative data practices, and forms of surveillance that may oppress and target the vulnerable groups that we seek to support in our clinics. We will then present specific teaching and supervision strategies that participants can use to evaluate legal technologies, their ethical implications, and whether and how to teach their use to students. We will also provide concrete technology best practices and takeaways that clinicians can incorporate into their fieldwork as well as readings that they can incorporate into their seminar syllabi. Participants will leave the session with a framework for confronting the potential benefits and risks of legal technologies and resources for teaching students how to use them critically and responsibly.: