Most agree that lawyers of the future will need a greater understanding of how technology can be used to design and deliver legal services. The issue for those involved in setting content for any route to qualification is defining the extent to which this must be regulated, as much as identifying the right level of technological capability. The issue is not merely one of content, but the acquisition of competences. Any accreditation must look beyond simply ensuring capability in relation to discrete tools, looking instead to ensure that future solicitors have the ability to adapt to new technologies. Separately, consideration has to be given to the emerging profession of legal technologists. Whilst some technologists may be legally qualified, those that are not must understand the ethical boundaries and regulatory requirements that lawyers work within. The organisation of the legal profession and the regulatory boundaries shared between various stakeholders require us to consider whether accreditation is the right way forward, where responsibility for accreditation should lie and who should take initiative in this space. This chapter explores these issues by contrasting the approach adopted by the Solicitors Regulation Authority in England and Wales with that of the Law Society of Scotland.

In this chapter we describe a discourse framework for understanding the historical development of modern reports into legal education in England and Wales by analysing the textual features of genre markers. We then apply this framework to a specific subset of topoi within such reports, namely the coverage given to digital technologies within legal education. We make three related claims. First, the discourse and rhetorics of reports on legal education has scarcely been analysed in the research literature, and we begin that process here. Second, the culture and context within which digital innovation is reported, analysed and recommended upon in regulatory reports is relatively shallow and ‘theory-lite’. We need to draw sophisticated insights into our understanding of digital in a variety of disciplines and discourses (e.g. media, education and discourse analysis generally), and apply those to legal education. Third, the genre-form of reports on innovation inhibit or constrain our ability to develop imaginative, theory-rich and persuasive accounts of digital cultures for legal education. Our case study has implications not just for law schools, but also and more significantly, for regulators and accreditors.