May 20, 2025
Coding is not just for computer scientists.
As artificial intelligence promises to reshape legal practice in the coming years, tech skills are increasingly valuable for young lawyers.
With that in mind, Osgoode recently revived its legal information technology course for JD students, rebooting the class as an experiential learning course led by Professor Sean Rehaag, in which students use the programming language Python to complete several small coding projects.
“The version of the course that I’m teaching is heavily focused on practical, hands-on learning and specifically ways of leveraging coding and data analysis to enhance access to justice,” he says. “That might mean leveraging translation or analyzing patterns in the law to make it easier for people without legal training to understand.”
The updated three-credit course, Legal Information Technology: Data Analysis & Coding for Access to Justice, counts towards Osgoode’s praxicum requirement.
“I don’t anticipate that many of these students are going to go off and build their own legal information technology apps,” he says. “But by understanding how the technology works, understanding the limitations of the technology and getting excited by the potential of it all, my hope is that they will feel less intimidated by technology and engage with it in a more sophisticated way.
According to Rehaag, his class is often the first contact students have had with coding and computer programming content.
“The vast majority have never written a line of code in their life,” he explains.
Like many of his students, Rehaag started out his legal career with very limited technological experience. As a professor whose research focuses primarily on immigration and refugee law, he took his first steps in the direction of legal information technology during a project on church sanctuary, looking at the experience of migrants who entered religious buildings as a last resort to avoid removal from Canada.
“One of the things they told me was that the official refugee determination process had made mistakes and that there were patterns of error in decision-making,” Rehaag says. “I wanted to see if I could substantiate that, so I got some data from the Immigration and Refugee Board and started analyzing it.”
“Then I just kept on doing it,” he adds.
As time has passed, Rehaag’s analyses have became more complex. He now runs his own lab and holds grant funding for research involving new legal technologies, artificial intelligence and quantitative research on Canadian refugee adjudication.
“I actually think people with legal training have an advantage with programming, because in some ways it’s a very similar skillset,” Rehaag says. “You’re taking a problem, breaking it down into manageable steps and solving those specific steps. Then you try to articulate those solutions in specific language, which is kind of what you do if you were drafting a contract or drafting legislation.”
He says recent developments have made it easier than ever for legal professionals to embrace coding, since generative-AI powered assistants are now able to automatically correct syntax errors, freeing up lawyers to get more creative with their analytical goals from a lower base level of technical skill.
The skills that students pick up in the class are likely to be most useful for those who end up practising in smaller settings, without access to the kind of institutional support that comes with a larger law firm, Rehaag says.
“If you’re a big Bay Street lawyer, you’ve got an IT department to help you figure out what the right tech is for your particular process,” he explains. “A refugee lawyer or a family lawyer doesn’t have that type of help, so the ability to get your hands dirty and try out new technology in a safe way can turn into a superpower over those colleagues who can only use technology that is prepackaged for them.”
Before taking over the legal information technology class, Rehaag previously served as Academic Director at Osgoode’s legendary Parkdale Community Legal Services. He brings some of that clinical background to the course, aided by the structure of the class, which proceeds via a combination of online modules that students complete in their own time and synchronous hybrid discussions.
“This is an opportunity to do similar kinds of learning without being in a clinical setting,” he says. “It’s not just me talking, them listening, and then telling me back what I said. We’re on the same side of the desk, working together on problems and finding a way to succeed.”
Want to learn more about how Osgoodes JD program combines rigorous legal education with direct, hands-on experience to prepare you for your future career?
Sean Rehaag – Associate Professor, Osgoode Hall Law School