Laura Norris (Santa Clara) & Eric Goldman (Santa Clara; Google Scholar), How Santa Clara Law’s ‘Tech Edge JD’ Program Improves the School’s Admissions Yield, Diversity, & Employment Outcomes, 26 Marq. Intell. Prop. L. Rev. __ (2022):

In 2018, Santa Clara Law launched an innovative new certificate, called the “Tech Edge JD” (TEJD), for JD students who know when they apply to law school that they want to pursue technology law. TEJD students acquire valuable professional skills by completing milestones, not just specific courses, with support from a faculty/staff advisor and two practitioner mentors. This paper describes how the certificate works and highlights some program outcomes, including the program’s success at simultaneously improving the law school’s admissions statistics and yield, diversity, and employment outcomes.

What’s Next
Due to its initial success, Santa Clara Law is expanding the TEJD experiment. In February 2022, the law school approved a new “Public Interest JD” certificate that follows the TEJD format but is adjusted for students pursuing public interest and government jobs post-graduation. If that certificate succeeds, the law school may implement the TEJD model even more widely.

More generally, TEJD illustrates one possible roadmap for the future of legal education: where student progress is measured by skill acquisition rather than the completion of courses; where incoming students with a career plan can start their professional development earlier, and go further, than other incoming students; and where students get individualized support for their professional development.