The staid and stuffy Harvard law professor regaled at intimidating first-year students in the movie "The Paper Chase."
Fast forward to the new millennium of law school education: the cyber chase and the virtual law school. No bricks, no mortar. Instead, law professors ply the high-tech world of streaming video, online chat and discussion rooms, e-mail and real-time audio lectures.
Distance education becomes instant learning. Concord Law School, created in 1998 as the country's first virtual law school, may rock the foundations of bricks and mortar legal education fortresses. Concord thinks it can radically change the way law is learned. Its strategy harkens back to the pre-bricks-and-mortar era, when the likes of Abe Lincoln and Huey Long of Louisiana "read the law." Only today, the reading and interaction is played out in cyberspace.
Concord plans to extend legal education to all corners of the nation, and for that matter, the Earth. But it also continues to challenge the American Bar Association's traditional refusal to accredit distance-education schools.
Now we pose the question to you: Would you choose a lawyer who earned his education through "distance learning" or would you choose someone with a more traditional education?
Source: South Florida Business Journal - by Stephen Van Drake