With the marketplace shifting, schools have increasingly come under fire for being out of touch.

Catherine L. Carpenter, vice dean of Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles, tracks curriculum across the country. She said schools are trying to teach their students to run their own firms, to look for entrepreneurial opportunities by finding “gaps in the law or gaps in the delivery of services,” and to gain specialized knowledge that can help them counsel entrepreneurs.

At Indiana University’s law school, Prof. William D. Henderson has been advocating a shake-up in legal education whose time may have come. “You have got to be in a lot of pain” before a school will change something as tradition-bound as legal training, he said, but pain is everywhere at the moment, and “that’s kind of our opening.” He advocates putting more technology and practical training into the curriculum to adapt to a field that is less about “expensive, artisan-trained lawyers” and more about providing legal services at lower cost.

Bill Mooz, a visiting professor at the University of Colorado law school, has started a four-week summer boot camp called Tech Lawyer Accelerator to provide, as he put it, “all of the things they don’t teach you in law school and they don’t teach in law firms but which you need to be effective in today’s world.” Students are brought up to speed on tech tools designed to make legal services more efficient. They hear lectures from companies like Adobe and NetApp. After the four weeks, they spend the rest of the summer, or even the following semester, working directly for a company. Mr. Mooz calls the program “drinking from a fire hose.”

Image DAIN BARNETT proposed Law-Spark at the competition. It would provide technical support — developers, product designers — to law-related tech start-ups. Credit... Fabrizio Costantini for The New York Times

At Northwestern Law, Daniel B. Rodriguez, the dean, is expanding clinical education while using faculty members with technical and business experience to instruct in “the law/business/technology interface.”

Law school, he said, used to be a refuge for students who “might be math phobic, who don’t do numbers.” But the practice of law increasingly requires lawyers to understand the work and strategy of their clients, whether that means reading a spreadsheet or going even further.

“That doesn’t mean you need to have a Ph.D. or a master’s degree in math to become a lawyer,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “It doesn’t actually kill you, but makes you stronger, to have a background in statistics.” And, he said, “Not to be too jargonistic, but big-data analytics have pervaded many aspects of the management world, and lawyers need to have some facility with that.”