Byron G. Stier (Southwestern), Applying Steve Jobs's Insights on Innovation, Leadership, and Technology Toward an Apple-Inspired Law School, 38 Notre Dame J.L. Ethics & Pub. Pol’y 217 (2024):
Perhaps the most successful technology entrepreneur, Steve Jobs developed numerous innovations that transformed personal computing, computer-animated film, mobile phones, and music distribution. Over several decades, his efforts turned Apple Computer from a start-up in his parents’ garage to the world’s largest company by market capitalization and produced Pixar, the world’s leading company in computer-animated film. Jobs, along with other technology entrepreneurs, affixed Silicon Valley as the world’s leading center for innovation in technology.
After exploring Jobs’s formative influences and interests, this article reviews his remarkable progression of innovative products at Apple. The article then assembles and details his approach to leadership, product design, management, marketing, and leadership succession and applies those insights in turn to an area not widely lauded for innovation and entrepreneurship: law schools and legal education. Leveraging the innovation insights of Steve Jobs, the article reimagines law school if it were to incorporate the lessons of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship and product development at Apple. In an Apple-inspired law school setting, the article envisions values-based leadership focused on aspiring to great teaching, scholarship, and service, not merely regulatory compliance, rankings, or revenue; passion for legal education and law; and creative and innovative exploration of technology-aided adaptive learning and online education. Translating Jobs’s views on product design into the legal education setting, law schools would bring empathic attention to the needs of students and alumni; integrate the liberal arts and technology with law; approach the design of curricula, programs, scholarship, and spaces as artmaking with an aesthetic emphasizing ease of use; undertake committed, continuous improvement of teaching, programs, and scholarship; and selectively focus on fewer undertakings to make them better. Considering Jobs’s insights on management, law schools would seek to produce “A” player—not “B” or “C” player—faculty and administrators and design programs with an integrated team of different perspectives. Channeling Jobs’s approach to marketing, a law school would utilize advertising to convey its values and innovative programs. Law schools would also act to preserve and project their organizational values beyond current decanal leadership, learning from Jobs’s attention to preserving Apple’s values amidst leadership succession. The article concludes that to obtain the innovation, energy, and advances achieved by the technology industry in the United States, law schools and legal education should consider studying the organizational structures and culture of the technology industry.
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