About the project · Project leads & contributors

Two readings of the same transformation

This project brings together Anthea Roberts and David B. Wilkins to read how AI is reshaping the legal profession through complementary lenses. One reads AI and complex decision-making; the other reads the legal profession as a century-long institutional system. Together they see things neither sees alone. The evidence base they read — Second Chair — was created by the two of them as part of this project, then structured and analyzed by Insight Bridge and read through Dragonfly Thinking’s multi-perspective agentic method.

Project lead

David B. Wilkins

Lester Kissel Professor of Law · Vice Dean for Global Initiatives on the Legal Profession · Faculty Director, Center on the Legal Profession, Harvard Law School

David B. Wilkins is the Lester Kissel Professor of Law, Vice Dean for Global Initiatives on the Legal Profession, and Faculty Director of the Center on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School. For decades he has studied the legal profession as a system — who enters it, how careers unfold, how firms make money, and how the profession globalizes and transforms. He has written over 80 articles on the legal profession and directs major studies including Globalization, Lawyers, and Emerging Economies and After the JD, a ten-year longitudinal study of lawyers' careers. In 2007 he co-founded Harvard Law School's Executive Education Program, and in 2012 he was elected a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Harvard Law faculty profile → Center on the Legal Profession →

Project lead

Anthea Roberts

Professor, Australian National University · Visiting Professor, Harvard Law School · Founder, Dragonfly Thinking

Anthea Roberts is a Professor at the Australian National University and a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School. She is an interdisciplinary researcher and legal scholar who focuses on new ways of thinking about complex and evolving global fields. Anthea is also the Founder of Dragonfly Thinking, which develops AI tools and techniques for complex decision-making. The League of Scholars has named Anthea the world's leading international law scholar, Australia's leading international law scholar, and Australia's leading law scholar. Her books Is International Law International? (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Six Faces of Globalization (Harvard University Press, 2021, co-authored with Nicolas Lamp) have won multiple international awards, including being listed on the Best Books of the Year by the Financial Times and Fortune Magazine.

Harvard Law faculty profile → Dragonfly Thinking →

Contributors

The people the project reads with

Beyond the two leads, the series draws on people who bring something it could not build alone — the view from the top of a large firm actually making these decisions, the view from inside the general counsel’s office, and the pipeline that turned fifteen hundred sources into a record any question can travel through.

Contributor

Mitchell Zuklie

Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, Orrick · Advisory Board, Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession

Mitch brings the view from the top of a large firm making these decisions rather than forecasting them. He has led Orrick since 2013, concentrating the firm on technology, energy and infrastructure, life sciences and financial services, and on how AI is changing each; he launched Orrick Labs and the firm’s legal innovation and AI-adoption work. The Financial Times has named him one of the most innovative law firm leaders globally of the past two decades. He co-teaches Large Law Firms in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, Integrated Solutions, and Generational Change at Harvard Law School with David B. Wilkins, and sits on the advisory boards of the Centers on the Legal Profession at both Harvard and Stanford.

Orrick ↗ The HLS course ↗

Contributor

Bjarne P. Tellmann

CEO, FjordStream Advisors · Senior Visiting Fellow in Practice, LSE Law School · Author, Law in the Era of AI

Bjarne brings the view from inside the client. He spent three decades in senior global legal leadership — founding General Counsel of Haleon plc, Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel of Pearson plc, with earlier roles at Coca-Cola, Aramco and Kimberly-Clark, and a start at Sullivan & Cromwell and White & Case. His Law in the Era of AI: Clients, Firms, and the Future of the Legal Industry (Wiley, 2026) argues that the disruption reaching law firms arrives through AI-enabled clients rather than from legal technology itself — a reading the corpus records as complicating this project’s own. His honors include General Counsel of the Year at the British Legal Awards and the Burton Award for Legends in the Law.

LinkedIn ↗ bjarnetellmann.com ↗ Law in the Era of AI ↗

Contributor · Insight Bridge

Sam Bide

Founder, Insight Bridge · Founder, AI CoLab Alliance & CoLab Foundation · ANZSOG Innovation Fellow

Sam built Insight Bridge to open dense evidence bases to whoever has a question — the pipeline that reads every source in this project’s corpus end to end and turns it into the topic map, the stances and the live figures behind Dragonfly Insights. He established Australia’s Office of Supply Chain Resilience and has advised the Australian Government on AI policy and adoption. His work sits where policy and technical domains meet — building the partnerships, institutions and AI systems that connect them.

LinkedIn ↗ Insight Bridge ↗ AI CoLab Alliance ↗

The series pairs each essay with an interactive visualization, so the argument and the evidence architecture travel together. The lenses are being tested and refined — not finished pronouncements.

Read the series introduction→