The Institute of Applied Law
The IAL's focus is on the synthesis of academic education and practical application to business. Expertise and excellence in legal practice rest on bridging that gap and maintaining a sophisticated codex of know-how material and methods.
The IAL intends to support that role by setting standards for the general practical skills education and developing know-how for specialised industry skills. The prime responsibility belongs to law firms and in-house legal departments which have the duty to train junior lawyers and maintain and develop competence through legal education and continuous development.
Members of the IAL are active legal practitioners. The know-how they develop and the practical skills training they provide are based on ongoing legal practice and experience, not on study. General practical skills are common to all practitioners and include legal research, legal drafting , contract law and legal negotiation. Industry-specific skills vary from sector to sector and even sub-sector. The initial focus of the IAL is on energy law and cybersecurity policy.
WHY? Because two recent trends have made such an institute indispensable.
Firstly, the development of information technology, and in particular the ubiquity of online research engines and tools, have changed the way legal research is conducted by junior lawyers. Legal research was always an important part of practical legal education and involved an informed use of indexes of books and journals in paper form. Advanced online search engines have rendered index research obsolete and the development on electronic resources seemingly have the same effect on paper resources. This in turn is threatening legal books of obsolescence. One sign of that is the effective substitution of the practitioners' legal libraries by online subscription services where know-how is aggregated around a search engine (LexisNexis, PLC, Westlaw, etc.). However, legal research requires a qualitative appraisal of the tools available which online research does not factor in. The IAL considers that legal research methodology must be redefined so that junior lawyers learn to find the knowledge and content they need by a proactive use of the new toolds that emerged.
Secondly, Since 2008, legal practice has witnessed a progressive depreciation of legal services. Legal practitioners were the first to be affected by reduced use of external lawyers by business and then diminishing legal fees. This trend is also manifest in a reduction in legal education budgets and time spent on professional education, both in-house and in private practice. The result is that inductions programmes, which were the primary bridge between academic preparation and on-the-job training are increasingly neglected and depreciated. This affects the quality of the legal services provided which in turn reduces their value. As a result, depreciation feeds depreciation and lawyers become less and less relevant to business decision-making.