CLP Advisory Board Member Brad Smith Visits HLS

The Center on the Legal Profession welcomed advisory board member and president of Microsoft Brad Smith to its offices on Tuesday, Oct. 5, 2021. David B. Wilkins, CLP Faculty Director, showed Smith how both CLP and Harvard Law School Executive Education (HLSEE) have been using the 10 Microsoft Surface Hubs and over 75 Surface Pros gifted to us in 2016. Microsoft’s generous gift has helped to advance our joint mission of conducting world-class research on the global legal profession and teaching law students, practicing lawyers, and other legal professionals across the arc of their careers. Examples include:

• Using the Hubs and Surface Pros as part of a “professional identity mapping” project aimed at understanding how law students and young lawyers conceptualize their identities as lawyers/law students, particularly in relation to their other identities (e.g. race, gender, etc.).
• Incubating the Harvard Law School Access to Justice Lab, including hosting their Inaugural Showcase event in which students, practicing lawyers, and others used the Hubs to design legal self-help materials relating to debt collection.
• Launching our Globalization, Lawyers, and Emerging Economies project (of which Microsoft has also been a longtime supporter) in Africa using MS Teams as our primary organizing and community platform that will bring together researchers from around the world.

Microsoft technology and software have also allowed HLSEE faculty to create active learning experiences for participants to engage in collaborative problem solving, as well as helped bridge connections across diverse locations. We are grateful to Smith and Microsoft’s continued support and look forward to collaborating further in the years to come.