How agile curriculum design helps law students keep pace with the profession

As digital disruption reshapes legal practice within increasingly protean regulatory environments, law schools are innovating at scale to give students the knowledge and skills that employers are looking for.

The School of Law at City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK) has adopted an agile approach to curriculum design, enabling educators to identify new and emerging areas of law and update course content accordingly. CityUHK offers a growing range of credit-intensive master of laws (LLM) courses that offer students an immersion in contemporary legal issues.

“Short courses allow us to respond quickly when practice in areas such as AI, data protection and compliance, and capital markets and public sector regulation moves ahead of existing textbooks,” says Tianxiang He, LLM programme director at CityUHK. “Curriculum design at the School of Law is built on the idea that our graduates need a solid foundation in core legal principles and familiarity with the frontiers of practice.”

These short courses help students see how these challenges are tackled in the real world. By the end of their courses, students should not only have an in-depth understanding of the law but also know how to apply it. The school enables students to work under the guidance of an expert, helping them get to grips with the theoretical and practical considerations of a particular legal issue. 

“Our courses integrate case-based teaching, drafting exercises, advocacy and negotiation tasks, group projects and problem-based learning,” says He. “For example, a corporate or securities law course is likely to include tasks with sample transaction documents and regulatory filings. An intellectual property or patent course will involve drafting and analysing claims, and public and criminal law modules ask students to write submissions or simulate client interviews.”

CityUHK is committed to delivering impactful teaching to ensure its graduates go into the workplace ready to make a difference. Its curriculum reflects the demands of the Hong Kong economy, with the new courses designed to support its position as a regional and international innovation hub.

The university brings together academic talent from different regions to shape its academic community. It invites leading international scholars to teach and seeks the counsel of experienced legal practitioners to shape course content. It identifies emerging areas of law by leveraging the expertise of its faculty of active researchers, monitoring legal trends closely and incorporating student and alumni feedback.

“When all of these inputs point in the same direction – such as a growing demand for expertise in AI, data governance and environmental, social and governance-related regulation – we are able to design, approve and deliver new modules in a relatively short cycle,” says He. This helps CityUHK’s curriculum stay ahead of textbooks, providing its graduates with cutting-edge legal education that’s designed for employability.

Find out more about the School of Law at City University of Hong Kong.