Michigan State University College of Law has opened the Center for Legal Services Innovation, which offers interdisciplinary classes in an effort to help law students improve the efficiency and quality of legal services.
“(The center) aims to lead the legal industry through the use of scientific research and development, organizational excellence, and technology,” says Daniel Linna Jr., assistant dean for career development and director of center.
Linna says the center will offer classes on delivering legal services, legal analytics, entrepreneurial lawyering, and quantitative analysis, among other offerings. “As a solution, we intend to engage in the research and development the legal industry hasn’t done to develop 21st-century legal practice,” he says.
Linna says he wants to help lawyers learn and work across in multiple disciplines. The center, which launched this month, will begin offering classes in the fall semester.
IN RELATED MSU NEWS, the university has been awarded $22.5 million by the National Science Foundation to continue research, education, and outreach activities at the BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action.
The center, which opened in 2010, has its headquartered at Michigan State’s main campus in East Lansing. Partners include University of Idaho, North Carolina A&T State University, University of Texas at Austin, and University of Washington. BEACON researchers have provided insight into the evolution of disease, reducing the evolution of antibiotic resistance, and predicting how populations of organisms respond to climate change.
“In the first five years, BEACON has changed the landscape of evolutionary computation, creating a set of multidisciplinary scientists making strong contributions in both biology and engineering,” says Erik Goodman, director of BEACON. “The second five years promises new advances in taking inspiration from the algorithmic nature of the evolutionary process to deliver robust solutions to some of the most-difficult problems in both science and industry.”
