LawWithoutWalls 2025: 1 Offering
In 2025, LWOW is back in-person WITH a 3-day, in-person Sprint in the charming town of BUCKINGHAM, UK, hosted by UNIVERSITY OF BUCKINGHAM Law SCHOOL on the 14-16 March 2025.
LWOW 2025 is focused on building an intergenerational, multidisciplinary exchange while introducing new skillsets to law and business students and legal and business professionals to prepare them to navigate increasingly changing legal environments. Our goal is to prepare our students to be professional, nimble problem solvers, innovative thinkers, to be able to collaborate in all circumstances, and to be culturally competent.
The LWOW Sprint 2025: 14—16 March 2025
What: A full, 3 day in-person experiential learning “weekender” focused on innovation, collaboration, and transformation. Students get hands-on up-skilling on cross-cultural teaming, problem solving, and leadership skills while hacking alongside law and business professionals and innovators who share a passion for intrapreneurship and community exchange.
The Process
Teaming: At LWOW Sprint, everyone is put on a team consisting of a mix of legal and business professionals, academics, and law and business students from around the world. Students are an integral component of these teams. Each team is sponsored by a corporate legal department, law firm or legal tech company that assigns a narrow business-of-law challenge or corporate social responsibility (or ESG) challenge to the team to hack on and solve.
The 3-4-5 Method of Innovation: Over the course of 3 days, teams learn and apply design thinking principles and new methods of collaboration and innovation via the The 3-4-5 Method of Innovation™ created by LWOW Founder Michele DeStefano (read about LWOW’s leadership here). The 3-4-5 Method™ is divided into 3 phases, over 48 hacking hours, and delivered in 5 steps.
The culmination of the three days is a short ConPosium in which teams pitch their solution to their challenge “Ignite-style” (5 minutes, 20 self-advancing slides) to a panel of multidisciplinary judges (including venture capitalists), who ask questions and provide feedback.
Projects of Worth: Over the course of the 3 intense, high energy days, LWOW teams hack to solve a real problem at the intersection of law, business and technology. Although the level of viability will vary, all teams’ solutions will be “Projects of Worth” yielding substantive growth in problem-solving, skills, mindset training, networking and relationship building.
The real value, the “WORTH” in the Project of Worth, is not the solution, but the journey to get there. It’s the change that happens in behavior, connection, collaboration, and in community exchange as teams move from problem, to problem refinement, to consumer-story empathy, to solution, to solution refinement, and finally . . . to the pitch.
7 weekly Pre-Sprint 2025 Training Modules: (15 Jan 2025—5 Mar 2025)*
Just like you wouldn’t show up to a job interview unprepared, students also cannot show up at LWOW Sprint unprepared. We prepare LWOW students prior to Sprint so that they are ready to leverage what could possibly be the coolest opportunity to make professional connections in their lives.
As such, during the 7 weeks leading up to Sprint, students attend a series of interactive training modules (delivered both asynchronously and synchronously) covering key steps of the 3-4-5 Method of Innovation™ (e.g., problem finding and refinement, consumer storytelling, and prototyping and solution ideation). We will also cover professionalism, presenting & presencing, project management, collaboration and teaming.
Participation and completion of these modules are MANDATORY so that students arrive at Sprint with an understanding of the concepts we will explore over the 3 days, they are ready to work alongside experienced law and business professionals to make the most of this opportunity. *Note: this pre-Sprint work will happen from 15 January 2025 through the week prior to Sprint 2025 on 5 March. Synchronous sessions are expected to begin at UTC 20:30 for 90 minutes. *Exact schedule to be confirmed.
Final Student Self-Assessment
To help preserve students’ learnings and experiences at LWOW, and to communicate the benefits back to the sponsoring institutions, students are also required to complete a creative and engaging post-Sprint overview and assessment that presents their experience at LWOW Sprint, the process, project development, learnings and professional development. We urge students to complete this in a creative way e.g., via video, or dynamic recorded presentation, podcast, interview, or something visual, as opposed to just a 4-6 page written paper.
Student APPLICATION, Selection, and Timing
Students from participating and non-participating schools can apply. The application consists of the application form, a short video, and letter of recommendation. We may also require a short interview. We will select approximately up to 40 students to participate in this year’s program.
Student applications will open 18 September 2024 and students will be accepted on a rolling basis until 11 November 2024. Students will be notified of their acceptance no later than 2 December 2024. Your participating school may have a different (earlier) deadline and a different application process, so please check with your institution before applying through the LWOW portal. That said, no matter what the process or timing, all students must fill out an application and submit it through the LWOW portal.
Fees and Course Credit
There is an administration fee to attend the LWOW Sprint, depending on your school (Note: this fee includes participation in LWOW Sprint 2025 but does not include travel or lodging; however, as in years’ past, we will select reduced-rate hotels for students and pair them 2 per room. Students can also request a single room). Although many schools do not offer credit for LWOW, especially those that offer LWOW as part of an advanced law degree, some schools do. We will confirm school credits in Fall 2024 based on the proposed 2025 curriculum (note: LWOW 2024 was the equivalent of 3 credit hours in the U.S. system). Please email anita@lwow.org for further information on the student administration fee.