If you ask Daniel Linna, professor of law at Michigan State University College of Law, what changes he'd like to see in legal education around technology, he probably won't share a list of programs and curricular offerings he's helped put together. Nor is he likely to tell you offhand what changes some of his colleagues at other schools have instituted. Instead, he'll tell you to check the data.

“We need to become more data-driven in this industry. We can't just talk about innovation, we can't just talk about technology. We've got to describe what it is, and then we've got to measure it,” Linna said.

Linna is director of MSU Law's LegalRnD program, which trains students in leveraging technology and nontraditional workflows for what its website refers to as “leaner, more effective legal-service delivery.” In August, Linna and a group of students launched the Legal Services Innovation Index, a data collection of law firms' use of technology and “innovative” workflows.

Recently, he and Jordan Galvin, LegalRnD innovation counsel, expanded the index to measure law schools' work around innovation and technology. The index now outlines how many different legal technology disciplines 40 different law schools offer.

So, who comes in as the most innovative law school? Turns out MSU Law and Chicago-Kent College of Law at the Illinois Institute of Technology top the Law School Innovation Index with 10 different disciplinary offerings apiece. Stanford Law School follows close behind, with nine different disciplinary offerings. The index additionally found that 19 law schools hosted centers or institutes dedicated to legal service delivery innovation and technology.

Business of Law was the most common discipline addressed by law schools measured, with 28 of them offering at least one course focused on the discipline. Twenty-three schools offered similar opportunities around Innovative/Entrepreneurial Lawyering, and 21 schools offered coursework on Empirical Methods.

Linna hopes that the introduction of data into this space can help law schools think methodically about potential programming to help students adapt to modern legal service delivery, and help students and prospective employers think about the potential importance of these skill sets to their future work.

“You have to measure things for people to pay attention,” he said.

That attention seems to be coming through. Linna said the index has gotten over 16,000 hits, and it has been subject to reviews and inquiries from legal educators across the nation and abroad. “It really points to the fact that this is a global marketplace,” he explained.

Words like “innovation” and “entrepreneurship” tend to invite generic applications, a deep source of frustration for Linna. “We've got to move past generalizations across the whole industry. We have to move past these generalizations about technology and innovation,” he said.

“I want to try to bring some data to this and keep improving it and raise awareness, and then let's see about what the consumers think of this,” he added.

The Law School Innovation Index doesn't purport to be a definitive indicator of successful technology curriculum, and Linna stresses it is not intended to “rank” schools against one another. Instead, it's intended as a jumping point or prototype for future measurements of law school programming around technology and innovation.

“It's not a ranking. It's a measure of one thing: whether certain legal service disciplines are being taught. I don't think anyone in this space would tell you, 'We've got it figured out, we've got the magic formula,'” Linna said.

The index creators have also included notes about a few potential ways to expand upon and flesh out the law school index in coming years. They hope to eventually factor in data points like event programming, inclusion in traditional first-year curriculum, and experiential learning opportunities around innovation and technology to the index scoring.