All Issues

Parenting and caregiving in the legal profession—like in any career—poses challenges.

Exploring small communities of practice and emerging legal areas for insights about the profession

Featuring insights from After the JD, a national, longitudinal study of lawyer careers.

What does it mean to lawyer on behalf of a campaign?

Immigration lawyering means engaging in a bureaucratic, opaque system where lives and futures are often on the line. What tools and methods do such lawyers bring to the field?

How is the legal profession considering the debates around licensure?

Who determines what qualities make up the perfect law firm partner? What metrics should we use to make the calculation?

In the United States, student debt has risen to such an extreme that it is regularly regarded as a "crisis." Law school is also not cheap. What is the effect on lawyers, and more broadly, society?

Diversity, equity, and inclusion is important in every sector, not just the legal profession. What strategies and tactics have the most impact and actually create system change?

How do law firms think about strategy? Using quantitative and qualitative data, this issue explores the growing world of formalized strategy thinking to understand movement across the industry.

When Open AI released ChatGPT in late 2022, it galvanized the collective imagination—and collective anxiety. Even lawyers wondered how such new AI technologies would change their profession.

Why is ESG falling on the desks of lawyers? In this issue, we explore sustainability at law firms, present data on ESG and in-house departments, and shine a light on critical topics in the space.

How do lawyers navigate countries during or recovering from conflict and authoritarianism, which often face profound rule-of-law challenges.

What are the tools and methods disability cause lawyers bring to achieve their strategic aims? How do these tools and methods work in different jurisdictions?

Studying judges and judicial decision making reveals surprising facets about the profession.

What do election lawyers do? And why is it a burgeoning field across the U.S.?

Questions of legal innovation form a critical part of a larger story and emerging field: legal informatics. How can an understanding of and training in legal informatics transform the field?

Does traditional legal education and training in law school and through common career paths prepare lawyers well for the rigors of lawyering in crisis situations?

What factors do lawyers take into account when exploring their employment options? In this issue, we dive into how partners and associates weigh money and meaning at various points in their careers.

A vertical view of legal work would recognize legal expertise and experience as central to all legal service, but adopting this view will require innovative processes and technology.

While the Big Four (or Big Five) have been threatening entry into the legal market since the late ’90s, they have been quietly adding capability. How are major global law firms responding?

Legal regulation is a state-by-state issue. What rules and insurance requirements constrain innovation? How are different bar associations experimenting and opening up access to justice?

What draws people to the law? Drawing on Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot's ethnographic method of portraiture, this issue examines race, legacy, and professional identity in the legal profession.

Between the spread of COVID-19 and renewed calls for racial justice, whatever trends and expectations held true at the end of 2019 have inevitably been upended in one way or another.

What happened to courts when the COVID-19 pandemic stormed the world? In this issue, we explore the changed world of justice systems, zeroing in on how technology has changed the legal profession.

Evidence suggests that an increasing number of banks and financial institutions now include lawyer-directors on their boards. Why? And what avenues did such lawyers take into the boardroom?

Mental health in the legal profession has long been a problem—and yet ignored. Systemic change is necessary.

Clinics have exploded over the past decade, with law schools recognizing the need for experiential education. But what do clinics give students? And faculty?

In the flow of Smarter Law, the progressive lawyer drives better personal performance as an individual and by doing so improves the performance of their legal department or law firm; consequently, tho

Litigation finance is transforming civil litigation at the case level as well as, incrementally, at the level of the civil justice system as a whole. It is beginning to transform the legal industry.

As more and more alternative legal service providers emerge, we examine the state of the market. How are traditional firms reacting? What are clients demanding?

The in-house lawyer occupies a complicated role—one that demands a fine ethical sensibility, between influence and compromise, professionalism and misconduct.

Law libraries are essential arenas for innovation and research in the legal profession. The Harvard Library Innovation Lab, in particular, is pushing the boundaries of what a library can do.

This issue is dedicated to exploring some of the underlying concepts pertaining to innovation generally, and innovation in the legal professional specifically.

The participation of Asian Americans in the legal profession has reached levels unthinkable just 30 years ago. In this issue, we consider the progress that has been made and where we still have to go.

In the 1990s, major transformations shifted Brazil's political economy, leading to new laws governing corporate activity, and creating demand for new kinds of legal services.

As a profession, attorneys have yet to achieve a comprehensive, sustainable answer to close the access-to-justice gap. Are new paraprofessionals the answer?

How do students decide what to do after law school? In this issue, we explore the tension between public and private law and how students navigate careers between them.

In this issue, we explore the origins, conceptual applications, and tensions surrounding the legal profession’s “character and fitness” qualification—a prerequisite to practice in the U.S.

A shift from a closed economy to an open economy in the 1990s significantly altered the legal profession in India, calling for new types of corporate lawyers.

While the traditional U.S. model of legal education prepares students to “think like a lawyer,” it frequently falls short in helping them understand how to apply their legal reasoning.

Transforming U.S. law into an evidence-based profession by implementing and publishing rigorous, empirical studies to create credible evidence about what works and what doesn't.

This issue explores the CLP report, "Harvard Law School: Report on the State of Black Alumni II, 2000–2016," a major survey of black HLS graduates.

After several years of weak demand following the Great Recession, it’s a good time for a fresh look at the strategic options available to big law.

Unlike businesses, law firms don’t just go bankrupt—they collapse. How does that occur? And who does it impact?

Gentle pushes—or “nudges”—and a consistent organizational process with well-defined decision points may allow firms to achieve diversity goals that has, to date, eluded them.

Law firms are brands, like any company. How are they wrestling with marketing and business development in an increasingly competitive legal marketplace?

Big Law is rising in China. Despite the short history of its legal profession, China is now home to some of the largest firms in the global legal services market.

Compliance is an increasingly important field. Should chief compliance officers take the reins?

The power and prestige of in-house lawyers in the United States is only continuing to grow. What does this mean for the legal profession?

How does becoming a lawyer change you?

The Big Four's legal ambitions are changing the market for legal services. What will the profession look like in the future?

Lawyers’ dominance in Congress is in a slow but steady decline. What does this mean for lawyers' influence in society and the profession as a whole?

The growing complexity of legal work—work that is increasingly cross-practice and multijurisdictional in nature—requires lawyers to collaborate across expertise and organizational boundaries.

In the midst of declining applications and an uncertain job market, law schools are caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place.

American women have made significant inroads in law. Still, the legal profession has more work to do if women are to gain equal representation across the field.

What it means to be an ethical legal professional is an increasingly pressing question in a time of intense global competition, corporate scandal, and public mistrust.

Though some may be surprised to hear it, legal services fit the classic profile of an industry on the verge of disruption.

Fundamental changes in the worldwide delivery of legal services in the wake of globalization and technology are inevitable, and they’ve already begun.