Impetus
The future of law requires a mentality of a world of law without walls. Given the needs of the new global, complex, multi-disciplinary legal marketplace, successful lawyers and law schools of tomorrow must be creative problem solvers and leaders with a higher risk tolerance and business mindset who can use technology, social media, and teaming and communication skills to overcome the walls of law.
Solutions to the challenges of tomorrow call for even more collaboration and permeability between legal practice and legal education (during and after law school), an interdependent relationship with reciprocal obligations, and more interaction among people of different disciplines and different cultures around the world.
The mission of LawWithoutWalls is to accelerate innovation at the intersection of business, technology, and law through a dynamic, transformational, collaborative experience that seeds a community of global change agents that can, together, meet the needs and solve the problems of today’s complex, technological, global marketplace.
why social entrepreneurship?
Although advancements in many areas over the past decade have helped to improve the quality of life around the globe, we continue to face significant social issues related to the law market including access to justice, accessibility to legal education, minority rights, disability rights, immigration, and human trafficking to name a few. LWOW seeks to leverage an already successful and proven format to develop innovative solutions to law-related social problems in order to create and sustain social value that serves the common good in the greater global society. Social entrepreneurship is a growing and proven successful approach to creating sustainable solutions and platforms for the world’s most entrenched social problems.
Most of LWOW’s programming and initiatives lean, in part, towards developing legal businesses and maximizing profit gain; however, LWOW X focuses on the creation of early stage social purpose ventures and nonprofits designed to maximize gains in social satisfaction and value. LWOW Social Entrepreneurship uses the proven methods and disciplines of LWOW and the power of the marketplace to help advance social, environmental, and human justice initiatives.
LWOW X topics center on issues in the public interest related to social, environmental, or human justice, including issues concerning youth advocacy, juvenile justice, human rights, and access to education and justice for vulnerable client populations. The goal is for the teams to identify a discrete problem within the assigned topic, and develop a Project of Worth: an implementable solution to that problem combining innovative business principles with public interest goals to affect change and create value.