2015 Issues Added Soon
The Practice
January/December 2015
2015 issues include: Lawyers in Politics, Teamwork and Collaboration, Legal Education for the Future, Women as Lawyers and Leaders, Professionalism in the 21st Century, Disruptive Innovation.
January/December 2015
Navigating a Brave New World
The increasing reliance on quality metrics and other output-based performance measures are upending traditional ways of measuring work. And globalization has created not only new markets to do business but also new players that are increasingly challenging established ones on their home turf. As a result of all these changes and challenges, law firms are faced with the urgent question of how to adapt to a changing legal marketplace.
The Reemergence of the
Big Four in Law
To the extent that the world of law is increasingly turning to traditional business methods such as unbundling, outsourcing, process management, and partnering to reduce costs and increase effectiveness, the legal networks of the global accounting firms have a distinct advantage. The Big Four have successfully utilized all of these processes to transform themselves from accounting firms to professional service organizations.
Regulating a Changing Profession
William Hubbard, a partner with the Columbia, S.C., office of Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough, is immediate past president of the American Bar Association. Hubbard recently sat down with David B. Wilkins, faculty director of the Center on the Legal Profession, for a one-on-one conversation on the reemergence of the Big Four in law.
Life in the Big Four
What is it really like to work for the Big Four as a lawyer? In this article, we explore the work culture of the major accounting firms—and whether they will be increasingly attractive places for lawyers from around the world to work.
Thinking Outside the Box
No matter how much time passes or how technologically advanced we become, we continue to wrestle with an age-old question: Where do good ideas come from?
Innovative Lawyers of 2015
In some ways the global economic crisis was a cautionary tale that compelled companies and firms to exercise greater restraint and adopt change more slowly, but in other ways it created an environment that encouraged companies and firms to take on more risk by putting immense pressure on them to do more with less. In the aftermath of the crisis, lawyers “were called on to steady business and governments.”
The Professional Identity - Formation of Lawyers
Where do new lawyers locate their professional identity among the other roles in their lives? More specifically, how does the law student’s conception of his or her professional role shift during the law school experience?
The Health of the Profession
Substance use and other mental health concerns among lawyers have received greater attention in recent years, but important questions remain. An article published in February 2016 by the Journal of Addictive Medicine attempts to address some of these questions.
Professional Identity in Practice
What is the professional identity of a practicing lawyer? To answer this question, many reach for a technical definition, seeking to describe what lawyers do in their day-to-day jobs. On a quotidian level, lawyers file briefs, conduct depositions, write memos, and provide legal opinions. More broadly, they seek to interpret and apply the law on behalf of their clients, practicing the zealous advocacy that characterizes the legal profession.
What Is Good in the Law and in Life
Howard Gardner is the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the director of the Good Project. Gardner recently sat down with David B. Wilkins, faculty director of the Center on the Legal Profession, for a one-on-one conversation on professional identity in the professions.
Drawing Your Own Path
It is clear that the professional identity of lawyers will continue to grow and change in the coming years. While all may not agree with the drastic picture painted by thinkers like Richard Susskind—who portends the end of the professions as technology disperses expertise—no profession is immune to change. As Susskind argues, the tasks that a doctor or nurse does today are quite different than they were 50 years ago.
Model Objectives
After substantial debate, at the February 2016 mid-year meeting, the American Bar Association (ABA) adopted Resolution 105—Model Regulatory Objectives for the Provision of Legal Services. At its core, the resolution, which came out of the Commission on the Future of Legal Services, “provides model regulatory objectives for state regulators considering how to regulate nontraditional legal service providers.”
The In-House Counsel Movement
GCs have strengthened their presence in policy debates within the bar and in broader discussions about law and legal institutions. This heightened public profile has helped to cement the GC’s standing as a member of the company’s senior leadership team. Indeed, many top in-house lawyers have traded in the legal-sounding title of GC for the more corporate sobriquet of chief legal officer (CLO) to signal that they are part of the company.
General Counsel in Practice
Even the most astute GC will not succeed if he or she, and his or her department, are not integrated into the organization. Gone are the days in which there were strictly “legal” and “business” matters—if such a division ever existed. Today, as businesses expand into areas where the law is blurry, at best, it is critical that GCs and their departments are involved in business development and strategy from the beginning.
Asleep at the Wheel?
The case study “Driving Blind at General Motors,” presents GM’s slow-footed response to a widespread safety defect and the resulting federal investigation. Focusing on the actions—and inactions—of the in-house legal counsel in dealing with a faulty ignition switch and related airbag malfunction, this case highlights the missteps that led to the crisis, the leadership’s delayed response, and the consequences for the company.
Going Global?
To date, most of the discussion on the corporate legal services market in emerging economies has focused on the growth of domestic, large commercial law firms and the resulting competition between these new entrants and the global giants that are also seeking to serve these markets. If the U.S. experience is any indication, however, the outcome of this competition and the shape of corporate legal services market in emerging economies will vary.
High Expectations for General Counsel; The Resurgence of Convergence
NYSE Governance Services recently released a report forecasting continued growth for the role of general counsel within corporate governance structures.
The Inside Counsel Revolution
Over the past 30-plus years, there has been an inside counsel revolution of increasing scope and power. General counsel and corporate law departments in top global companies have become far more sophisticated, capable, and influential, transforming both business and law in two important ways.
The Evolution of Compliance
Henry Moniz is the global head of legal/regulatory compliance, internal audit, and strategic business practices for Viacom. Moniz recently sat down with David B. Wilkins, faculty director of the Center on the Legal Profession, for a one-on-one conversation on the evolution of compliance.
The Chief Compliance Officer
Regardless of the organizational structure and title, who should oversee compliance? What expertise and skills should these compliance officers have? Should they have legal, management, or other training like psychology, sociology, or organizational motivation?
The Emergence of Compliance
Since its emergence in the early 1990s, compliance work has grown from a set of tasks into a full-blown specialty, replete with specific training programs, professional associations and organizations, conferences, codes of conduct, academic research, and even lobbying. Indeed, compliance is now considered a critical component of how companies, organizations, and institutions function. Nevertheless, questions remain about who should manage this.
The Future of Risk
In his article, “Legal & Compliance Risk in a Global World,” from the Compliance Elliance Journal, Peter Kurer, the former general counsel and chairman of UBS, examines a paradox and offers some solutions for how the problem of compliance and legal risk can be better managed.
Compliance Becomes Personal
This is the moment for compliance professionals to benefit from Washington’s expectations and translate their needs to their C-suites and boards. Many companies only become motivated to build best-in-class compliance programs after a major crisis. Compliance officers need to take the initiative and articulate their resource needs, and inform executives or board members of the need for cyberinsurance, more audits on the ground, or otherwise.
Six Keys to Compliance
We interviewed four experienced compliance professionals—Henry Moniz of Viacom; Judy Perry Martinez, formerly of Northrop Grumman; Charles Senatore of Fidelity Investments; and Colin Owyang of Vermont Electric Power Company—to learn more about what they have learned and what it takes to succeed in this important field.
The Rise of Big Law in China
Why and how did some Chinese law firms grow into Big Law with a global presence in a decade? Our research documents a critical period in the rise of Big Law in China in which corporate law firms experienced both rapid structural differentiation and intense market competition in the context of globalization.
Revenues Up for Chinese Firms; Cracking Down on Rights Lawyers
A hostility toward rights lawyers is troubling to many observers, particularly those who view the profession as integral to the development of Chinese rule of law. Teng Biao, a Chinese lawyer and prominent activist, has decried the current crackdown, describing it as “the worst human rights crackdown since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.”
Charting a New Path
While the American legal market was reeling from the effects of the economic crisis, China and its legal profession were beginning to identify new areas of opportunity. Rapid economic growth in Shenzhen and Hong Kong, as well as the expanding influence of Chinese businesses in global developing markets, signaled new opportunities for Chinese lawyers to work outside of the once hegemonic Anglo-American legal system.
Foreign Firms in China
To understand the position of international law firms in mainland China, one has to first appreciate the relative infancy of the modern Chinese legal profession. While there is no question that China now has a robust and growing community of lawyers one of the most distinctive markings of this community is its relative youth. The Chinese government now often takes a protective stance toward its lawyers.
Turning the Tables
To better understand this aspect of the Chinese legal profession—and its implications for U.S. firms working overseas—The Practice spoke with Mark Wu, an assistant professor of law at Harvard Law School, the former director for intellectual property at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), and a leading scholar on China and international trade law.
The Chinese Legal Profession
in the Age of Globalization
Fengming Liu is general counsel and vice president for government affairs and policy for GE (Greater China & Mongolia). Liu recently sat down with David B. Wilkins, faculty director of the Center on the Legal Profession, for a one-on-one conversation on the evolution of the Chinese legal profession.
Building a Brand to Create Competitive Advantage
This article explores the role of brand in the legal industry, how the firm and individual lawyer brands interact, and ways in which clients distinguish firms from one another, thereby forming the basis on which firms can build differentiation. It also looks at the competitive landscape and the challenges of building a stand-out brand in such a crowded industry—and how this differs around the world.
The Past, Present, and Future
We review the past, present, and future of marketing and business development for law firms, both how it has changed over time and the increasing role that business professionals play in the increasingly competitive legal market.
Coffee-stained Communication
Sitting together with clients, chatting informally, openly, with vulnerability; not feeling the need to have all the answers; a back and forth—a conversation. A couple of pages, perhaps, are passed around. Damp ring marks from cups and glasses pepper the pages. This is coffee-stained communication.
Building Loyalty
Das Narayandas is the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration and senior associate dean for External Relations at Harvard Business School (HBS). He is also the senior associate dean for Harvard Business Publishing. Narayandas recently sat down with David B. Wilkins, faculty director of the Center on the Legal Profession, for a one-on-one conversation on marketing in the legal profession.
Innovating to Grow
A recent Harvard Law School case study, “Vieira de Almeida (VdA): Legal Innovation Pioneers in Portugal,” examines how a Lisbon-based law firm came of out nowhere to win the Financial Times’s 2013 Most Innovative Law Firm in Continental Europe award. Given the focus of this issue is marketing and business development, of particular interest in this story is VdA’s shift toward what the case study calls “systematized business development efforts."
Thought Leadership as Marketing
Scott Westfahl, the director of HLS Executive Education, argues that “there’s a real market need” for partner-client integrated programming and notes that Am Law 100 and 200 firms regularly “spend a tremendous amount of marketing,” including on typical marketing and business development expenses like sports tickets and restaurant meals.
Nudges to Increase Diversity
This article presents examples of nudging techniques in action successfully applied in attracting and recruiting more women, especially lateral hires. Firms that have used these approaches have made real gains in the recruitment of women lawyers at various levels—including double-digit increases in the number of women hired.
Diversity in Practice
When looking at hiring criteria for what they call “very significant matters”—matters that are above being routine, in which cost would likely be the predominate factor, but below “bet the company” matters, David B. Wilkins and Young-Kyu Kim find that results in similar cases, reputation, and prior relations are the most critical considerations.
Managing Effectively Across Difference
What are law firms doing to combat problems like implicit bias, particularly when it comes to midlevel managers? To answer that question, we interviewed Amran Hussein, a partner in the major international law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, LLP, who is also the co-chair of the firm’s Diversity Committee, about an innovative program recently rolled out at the firm called Managing Effectively Across Difference, or MEAD.
The Allocation of Work
In developing relationships with partners, most of it, certainly, comes down to your skills as a lawyer—of knowing your craft. However, we would be kidding ourselves if we thought that’s all that is at play in how relationships are developed—and therein how work is allocated. Golfing. Watching sports. Creating personal connections over shared interests. These mattered, too.
Diversity in Corporate Law Firms
Valerie Radwaner is a partner and deputy chair of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, LLP. Radwaner recently sat down with David B. Wilkins, faculty director of the Center on the Legal Profession, for a one-on-one conversation on diversity and inclusion in the legal profession.
King & Wood Mallesons’s Expansive Struggles
When Chinese law firm King & Wood merged with Australian law firm Mallesons Stephen Jacques in 2012, they became what is now known as King & Wood Mallesons (KWM), one of the first truly Asia-based global law firms. The following year, KWM merged again with U.K. law firm SJ Berwin, which then became the European arm of the King & Wood Mallesons brand.
Killed by Kindness?
The Harvard Law School case study, “Heenan Blaikie: The Glue Dissolves,” examines how Canada’s seventh largest law firm went from having its strongest year financially in 2010 to dissolving in 2014. The case explores the challenges of alignment between offices of a major Canadian firm, the tension between accountability and collegiality, the factors that contribute to the success or failure of a leadership transition, and firm governance.
Why Law Firms Collapse
The force with which law firms shatter is amazing because it has no parallel in other kinds of businesses. Amazon lost money for more than 20 years. Chrysler filed for bankruptcy seven years ago. Yet both companies—like countless others that suffered financial problems before them—are still shipping goods and churning out cars. Law firms show no such resilience. No large law firm has ever managed to reorganize its debts in bankruptcy and survive.
Bank on More Failures
Dan DiPietro is the chairman of Citi Private Bank’s Law Firm Group. DiPietro sat down with David B. Wilkins, faculty director of the Center on the Legal Profession, for a one-on-one conversation on the health of the current law firm marketplace.
Caught in the Collapse
Shifting the story to the human side of law firm failures, this article profiles two lawyers who went through law firm failures and breakups. The first, Gordon J. Davis, offers the perspective of a partner during not one, but two firm failures. The second, Charles Blackburn, offers insights into what it is like to go through a firm breakup as an associate.
Navigating Uncertain Waters
Clients are increasingly going to have to get used to their lawyers moving between firms, whether due to something as drastic as a law firm failure or as relatively routine as a lateral move or firm merger. The trend to watch will be how and when clients decide to stick with the firm or move with the lawyers.
Postrecession Strategies
One of the core elements of building a good strategy is a clear understanding of the playing field—a difficult task in such a fragmented legal market. Mapping revenue per lawyer against lawyer headcount gives us one analytic for examining the market for legal services.
Steering Law Firm Strategy
Strategy as an explicit concept and worthwhile consideration is rather new to law firms. “For a long time, law firms didn’t need to have a strategy. Or to be very fair, the implicit strategy was: do excellent work,” says David B. Wilkins, a professor of law at Harvard Law School and the faculty director of the school’s Center on the Legal Profession.
What Else Should We Do?
Between in-house legal departments and law firms, the legal market is demanding greater leaps of innovation to keep up. British Telecom, looking to reduce costs in its darkest hour, turned one of its internal strengths into a profitable legal service provider for external clients.
Selling a Strategy
The Linklaters: Seeking Clear Blue Water case study illustrates the important role that strategy can play in defining a law firm’s vision, improving its market position, and ensuring coordination between numerous global offices. It also highlights the challenges faced by management in attempting to secure buy-in from line partners, many of whom perceived Clear Blue Water as an unwelcome disruption.
Cutting Through the Headwinds
Mehrdad Baghai, the managing director of Alchemy Growth Partners, a boutique advisory firm, speaks with David B. Wilkins, faculty director of the Center on the Legal Profession, for a one-on-one conversation on strategy in the legal profession.
The 2017 Am Law 100
With law firm strategy taking center stage in this issue of The Practice, the serendipitous release of the latest 2017 Am Law 100 offers a chance for us to take a deeper dive into some of the numbers that major firms will be pouring over as they formulate their strategies moving forward.
Intersectionality and the Careers of Black Women Lawyers
To investigate the significance of race in the careers of black lawyers, and to document the achievements of Harvard Law School’s black graduates, in 2016–2017 the Center on the Legal Profession (CLP) surveyed virtually all living black HLS alumni about their careers since graduating from law school. The survey, which was officially launched in the fall of 2016, covered a wide range of issues.
The Education of Black Lawyers
This story takes a step back and hones in on the very early years of any lawyer’s career—their law school experiences. Among the innumerable challenges facing law schools today, perhaps none of them are more challenging to the advancement of the black bar than the pipeline problem facing black law students. Coinciding with the dip in overall student enrollment, law schools find themselves competing for the same small group of black applicants.
We Have Been Here Before
"At times like these, we need to be reminded of the journey, because, though so much of what we are experiencing today is 'not normal,' it is also not new. Our situation may feel unprecedented and our course may feel uncharted, but we have been here before."
A Celebration of the History of Black Lawyers
On June 5, 2017, the Center on the Legal Profession hosted its third annual awards dinner. This year, held at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), the awards dinner had a rich theme that provided for yet another special night: “A Celebration of the History of Black Lawyers.”
Minority Leaders
Noticing a gap in research on the underrepresentation of minorities in law firms, Fiona Kay and Elizabeth Gorman set out to answer the eponymous question: Which kinds of law firms have the most minority lawyers?
The Legal Profession in the Age of Obama
In this article, we will consider this data, but also contextualize it with the perspectives and reflections of three lawyers from across different generations, bringing with them different experiences involving race within and outside of the profession. In some cases, their perspectives confirm the results of the survey as it applies to their lives and careers; in other cases, they offer counterpoints to more-generalized findings.
Lessons from the Poverty Action Lab
Rachel Glennerster, the executive director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT, recently sat down with Jim Greiner, faculty director of the Access to Justice Lab, for a one-on-one conversation on the application of rigorous empirical research methods to help answer policy questions.
A Syllabus for Empirical Methods in Law
The application of rigorous empirical research methods in the law is increasingly moving from the journals and into the classrooms, and the Access to Justice Lab (A2J Lab) is at the forefront of facilitating this process. Most notably, the A2J Lab is in the process of designing a short course dedicated to randomized control trials (RCTs) for an audience of legal researchers.
Redesigning the User Experience in Legal Aid
Hackathons are becoming increasingly common, and those specializing in legal technology are far from unheard of. But while these hackathons tend to focus on potential disruptions in the legal marketplace—for instance, the use of AI and how that might disrupt traditional law firm models—the Seattle Social Justice Hackathon was primarily concerned with overcoming the barriers that vulnerable populations face in the justice system.
Judging from Empirical Research
While the A2J Lab uses a number of research methods, one of the most important (and often misunderstood) is the randomized control trial (RCT). Perhaps best known for its application in the medical field, the RCT is rarely associated with the law, let alone access to justice. The A2J Lab is working to change that. To demystify what risks being an overly technical concept, this article explores what goes into an RCT within the legal profession.
Drawn to Action
While using an RCT or similar rigorous methods to test an intervention is critical to assessing whether it actually works, designing an intervention is far from a passive undertaking. Indeed, designing an intervention is a complicated process involving ample research, collaboration among different disciplines, pretesting, and continuous tinkering.
The Access to Justice Lab
Did you do your client any good (not did your client have something good happen)? Did you do your client any good, meaning did your services make a difference in what the client experienced? If you worked hard and the client achieved a good result (and was happy and thankful), of course you did good. But what the last question asks is not whether a good thing happened, but whether you had anything to do with it.
Quiet Leadership
Susan Cain, best-selling author and cofounder of Quiet Revolution, and David B. Wilkins, faculty director of the Center on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School, discuss leadership, collaboration, and belonging in the legal profession.
Jazzing up the Classroom
Chief among the problem-solving approaches is the case study method — a method of teaching typically found in business schools based on real-world scenarios. In this article, we explore this emerging teaching method as it applies to the legal context — both in the J.D. and executive education classrooms.
The Impact of Executive Education Programs
We spoke with two leaders who attended Harvard Law School (HLS) Executive Education’s flagship programs, Leadership in Law Firms (LLF) and Leadership in Corporate Counsel (LCC). These lawyers’ experiences with executive education demonstrate the impact of these programs on an individual and organizational level.
Attention to Detail
How does Harvard Law School (HLS) Executive Education design and run programs? We begin where they often begin, considering the needs of lawyers and the market as well as what the best research reveals about the critical issues facing modern legal professionals.
Executive Education for Lawyers
In this article, we share what we have learned during the past 10 years at HLS Executive Education and consider the future of our core principle: law schools can and should support lawyers across the arc of their careers to become more effective leaders, not only in the private bar but across all practice settings where lawyers are struggling to affect change.
10 Thoughts on Law and Justice in India
Fali S. Nariman is a Senior Advocate of the Supreme Court of India and President Emeritus of the Bar Association of India. In this article, he shares some thoughts on the future of law in India.
The Future of the Indian Legal Profession
Adapted from Judge Chandrachud’s keynote address at the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession’s Delhi book launch of "The Indian Legal Profession in the Age of Globalization: The Rise of the Corporate Legal Sector and its Impact on Lawyers and Society" (Cambridge University Press, 2017) held on December 11, 2017. Transcript edited for style and length.
Modi in Davos; Wilkins in India
The tension between national development and globalization fits with the larger narrative of India that recent research depicts: a rising power moving to meet its aspirations, but with some inconsistencies still unresolved. As Modi noted, however, India has a solid foundation upon which to build. “It is a matter of satisfaction for us that the largest democracy on earth is also the fastest-growing major economy."
Indian Lawyers and the State
At first glance, one might not view a declining number of lawyers directly elected into the Indian government as a paramount concern. However, this decline is taking place against a backdrop of significant policy problems that lawyers are arguably among the best suited to solve. One example making headlines in recent years is the implementation of India’s Aadhaar program.
Foreign Firms Prepare for Landing?
The Advocates Act of 1961, which regulates the profession, permits only Indian citizens ages 21 and older who have obtained a law degree from a recognized university to be admitted as advocates. The Bar Council of India, the body established by the Advocates Act to regulate the profession on an ongoing basis, has been a staunch opponent to liberalization and has interpreted admission and practice rules in the most restrictive manners.
The Indian Legal Profession
in the Age of Globalization
In 2011 the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession launched the Globalization, Lawyers, and Emerging Economies (GLEE) research project. Then, in June 2017 the research underpinning GLEE’s research into the Indian legal profession was published by Cambridge University Press in a major volume entitled "The Indian Legal Profession in the Age of Globalization: The Rise of the Corporate Legal Sector and Its Impact on Lawyers and Society."
Against the Odds
Shon Hopwood, an associate professor of law at Georgetown Law School, recently sat down with David B. Wilkins, faculty director of the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession, for a one-on-one conversation on the character and fitness requirement in the legal profession.
A Matter of Justice
Judge Jonathan Lippman, former Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals, and David B. Wilkins, faculty director of the Center on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School, discuss honesty, justice, and responsibility in the legal profession.
Crime and Punishment and Admission to the Bar
What is the role of rehabilitation in determining character and fitness? Should these exceptional cases serve as the minimum requirement for a former felon to gain admission to the bar? Is redemption and rehabilitation impossible without a visibly elite level of personal accomplishment? These questions drive to how to operationalize a character and fitness requirement in the profession—and more broadly, the very purpose the requirement serves.
Teaching Ethics and Professionalism
Today, all state bars acknowledge law degrees from ABA-approved schools as proof of satisfactory legal education, and some even have an explicit requirement that in order to sit for the bar exam, one must earn a law degree from an ABA-approved school (as of 2018, there are 204 approved schools). This standardization across legal education has significant implications for how U.S. lawyers are trained in ethics and professional responsibility.
Character without Borders
Should nonlawyers have a role in the regulation of lawyers via membership on boards of examiners? Should there be a more formal national system of credential verification within law, such as the FCVS system? Should law schools be the gatekeepers for professional regulation, particularly when we know many law graduates never practice law?
A Higher Bar
This lead article examines the contexts behind the character and fitness qualification as it pertains to initial entry to the bar and also outlines a series of tensions that exist in the current system. The recent cases of Betts, Simmons, and Hopwood are only the most recent examples of the profession’s continued usage of, but also difficulties with, the character and fitness qualification.
Rethinking the First-Year Curriculum
Erwin Chemerinsky is the Dean of UC Berkeley School of Law and the Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law. He joined John Bliss, a fellow at the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession, for a conversation on professional identity formation and the role of law schools in preparing students for their careers as lawyers.
Journey through the Legal Profession
James J. Sandman is president of the Legal Services Corporation, the United States’ largest funder of civil legal aid programs. Sandman recently sat down with David B. Wilkins, Lester Kissel Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and faculty director of the Center on the Legal Profession, for a one-on-one conversation on professional-identity formation across a career and across the legal profession.
The Places You'll Go
There is no question that lawyers are increasingly moving between jobs, which takes them in and out of different practice settings. Beyond that, however, it is not clear whether all this movement is necessarily channeling lawyers from one specific setting to another—for instance, from large law firms to public-interest organizations or vice versa. One thing that is clear is that the majority of lawyers enter the industry through private practice.
Public Interest in the Private Sector
Some law students view a stark divide between careers in the private sector and careers in the public-interest sector—a dichotomization that often produces intense anxieties about law students’ own professional identities as lawyers. This article expands on how the professional identity of lawyers minds the purported gap between “private” and “public interest” careers by adding an institutional perspective.
Mosaics of Lawyer Identities
How do corporate lawyers view their professional identity a decade into their career? How do lawyers who went to law school intending to go into public interest but “zagged” into a large firm view their identity? Are the professional identities of seasoned public-interest lawyers as centralized and integrated with their personal identities as the law school research suggests?
Drifting Law Students
Many incoming law students express preferences for nonprofit and government jobs but then experience a “public-interest drift” during law school, whereby they instead decide to pursue positions in private law firms. This phenomenon has increasingly presented an empirical puzzle. This article presents a systematic qualitative look at the public-interest drift process examining the stories behind students' evolving career orientations.
Extending Access and Quality
Mary E. Klotman, MD, is the dean of Duke University School of Medicine and vice chancellor for health affairs at Duke University. Dean Klotman recently sat down with David B. Wilkins, Lester Kissel Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and faculty director of the Center on the Legal Profession, for a conversation on how medicine has changed over time, particularly with respect to the development of professional roles within it.
Approaching the Bar
Is it time to rethink the boundaries of the legal profession? The State of Washington is not the only jurisdiction experimenting with new models of legal professionals. Indeed, a range of efforts are under way across the country seeking to introduce paraprofessional legal technicians and other individuals without J.D.’s to improve access to justice and legal service delivery.
Framing the Paraprofessional Debate
The story of LLLTs and other legal paraprofessionals is about gaining access to a profession notorious for its exclusivity. Having approached the issue from the perspective of the paraprofessionals, it is also important to look at it from the vantage point of the profession. How are lawyers receiving these new models of legal professionals?
Waiting for the Golden Ticket to the Chocolate Factory
Drawing on the authors' expertise in leadership in law firms and focus on traditional and modern professional careers, Laura Empson and Stefanie Gustafsson interviewed more than 70 paralegals, lawyers, management professionals, and representatives of professional bodies in the United Kingdom to examine the experiences of recent law graduates who have taken on paralegal roles.
Addressing the Supply Problem
Beyond the broad regulatory parallels between law and medicine—for instance, their professional regulation takes place at the state level—the case of PAs in medicine offers lawyers and other observers of the legal profession a glimpse into how an LLLT-like model has been received and operationalized in the past.
Who Accesses Justice?
Across the United States, people in need of an attorney struggle to afford one. To close the access to justice gap, the state of Washington has piloted a new model called limited license legal technicians (LLLTs) which gives legal practitioners and scholars the chance to pause and ask why we regulate our profession the way we do—and whether we could regulate the profession so that one day there can be justice for all.
A Brief History of Brazil's Legal Profession
From the creation of law courses in Brazil in the early 19th century to today, Brazil’s legal profession has gone through several major phases. This has occurred, as is natural, as a result of the different political and economic phases that the country has gone through since independence.
Operation Car Wash
Any comprehensive view of the state of the Brazilian legal profession needs to address the elephant in the room: the now-five-year-long investigation, known as Operação Lava Jato (“Operation Car Wash”), that has left the country’s political elite reeling.
Investing in the Future
Founded in 1992, Mattos Filho, Veiga Filho, Marrey Jr. e Quiroga (“Mattos Filho”) was originally formed as a boutique tax firm by a small group of lawyers who departed the similarly named Mattos Filho & Suchodolski when their lopsided command of billings generated discontent among their former partners.
Calling All Corporate Lawyers
The Brazilian telecom sector in the first half of the twentieth century was fragmented. A cacophony of more than 900 distinct enterprises ran the country’s telecom services without the aid of strong sector-wide regulation or coordination to measure and maintain adequate service delivery. Starting from the late 1980s, this article chronicles key moments in which corporate lawyers engaged with the sector.
Bridges to Brazil
Foreign lawyers have been a fact of life in Brazil for more than a century. Before the 1960s, the regulation of foreign lawyers lacked focus and effect. By the close of the 20th century, both federal legislation and the Ordem dos Advogados do Brasil (OAB), which regulates the Brazilian legal profession, had enacted far stricter rules governing the activity on foreign lawyers.
The Brazilian Legal Profession
In the 1990s emerging economies went through major transformations. Closed economies were opened, foreign investment encouraged, and many state-owned enterprises privatized. This lead story offers a broad overview of the corporate legal sector’s evolution in Brazil.
Diagnosing the Issue
Dr. Sandra L. Wong, Chair of Surgery and the William N. and Bessie Allyn Professor of Surgery at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, recently sat down with Justice Goodwin Liu, Associate Justice of the California Supreme Court and senior research fellow at the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession, for a conversation on Asian Americans across the medical and legal professions.
The Model Minority Myth
The model minority argument has earned the labels of stereotype and myth as critics have taken aim at both its premises and conclusions. Many point to the purpose of the argument as disingenuous insofar as it is intended to drive a wedge between different disadvantaged groups. Others claim that it is misleading because performance metrics and even representation figures do not speak to many of the biases that persist today.
A Snapshot of the Asian American Community
As Yung-Yi Diana Pan explains in “Incidental Racialization,” panethnicity in the United States is more a construct that is prescribed than something innate to anyone’s sense of identity independent of how they are perceived. The Asian American population in the United States, which totaled roughly 20.4 million in 2015, is spread out among numerous countries of origin.
Incidental Racialization
Mainstream American discourse renders invisible the experiences and lives of Asian Americans and leaves them beleaguered by the “model minority” image. The book, "Incidental Racialization: Performative Assimilation in Law School," explores how professional socialization and racialization happen simultaneously during legal education.
Portrait Vignettes
While the collection of data regarding attrition in law schools and number of partners in law firms offers a profound narrative on the state of Asian Americans in the U.S. legal profession, it remains, to an extent, abstract. While the numbers offer a much-needed, broad, and systemic analysis of the major issues facing Asian Americans lawyers, it is easy to lose sight of the individual narratives behind the percentages and statistics
A Portrait of Asian Americans in the Law
Since 2000, the number of Asian American lawyers has grown from 20,000 to 53,000 today, comprising nearly 5 percent of all lawyers nationwide. Through wide-ranging data analysis, focus groups, and a national survey, we have assembled a comprehensive portrait documenting the rise of Asian Americans in the law, their distribution across practice settings, and the challenges they face in advancing to the top ranks of the profession.
Venturing into the Unknown
Dan Nova, a partner Highland Capital Partners, an early-stage venture capital fund, recently sat down with David B. Wilkins, faculty director of the Center on the Legal Profession, for a conversation on the future of work.
The Harvard Legal Technology Symposium
The Harvard Legal Technology Symposium—a collaboration between the Harvard Association of Law and Business, the Center on the Legal Profession, the Library Innovation Lab, the Journal of Law and Technology, the Harvard Law Entrepreneurship Project, and the Harvard Law and Technology Society—featured panels on technology in law firms, technology in corporate legal departments, new legal roles, and natural language processing, and AI in contracts.
The Law Firm Chief Innovation Officer
Building on years of wider research recently published in her book "Legal Upheaval: A Guide to Creativity, Collaboration, and Innovation in the Law," Michele DeStefano examines what the CINO role is intended to do, what it actually does, and what explains the gap between the two.
Designs on the Law
One form of innovation that has cut across legal issues and practice settings is design thinking. Perhaps more than any other approach to innovation in recent years, design thinking has taken the world by storm. At its core, design thinking aims to tap into creativity to solve problems with an end-user focus.
Marketplace of Ideas
The term “innovation” is often used without strict attention to its actual meaning; it’s more a buzzword meant to signal an embrace of change than a term rooted in what any given change entails. To help tackle this issue, this article brings the nebulous term of “innovation” down to earth by unpacking what it means on a conceptual level. We look at what innovation is—and isn’t—from two distinct vantage points.
Adaptive Innovation
As with most other sectors, lawyers have argued that Big Law is different. This article reviews some of the most cited factors predicting and denying the demise of Big Law. We argue that market-imposed values such as quality, efficiency, and return on investment (ROI) will very likely dominate over reputation and comprehensiveness, forcing a fundamental change in many common features of Big Law.
Leading Law Libraries
Michelle Wu, associate dean for library services and professor of law at Georgetown Law, recently sat down with Jocelyn Kennedy, executive director of the Harvard Law School Library, for a conversation on leading law libraries in the 21st century.
Bill to Eliminate PACER Fees Introduced in Congress
PACER is a web database of federal court documents provided by the federal judiciary and intended to facilitate public access to electronic court information. Currently, access to these documents is subject to fees depending on the user, the type of file, and the quantity of those files accessed.
Research on Research
Surveys of librarians and personal interviews would provide valuable information about the reasons for libraries’ choices, the full extent to which tools are promoted to users beyond mention on library websites, and the evidence of success or failures in experimenting with these tools.
Sketching the Future
We share brief commentaries on four of HLS' Library Innovation Lab's sketches written by people who were instrumental in making them happen. We asked each of them a set list of questions to examine what the sketch was originally intended to do, how it came into its current form, and where it is going next.
Pausing the Internet
What is Perma.cc? Why is this solution coming from a law school library? Who is using it, and what does this mean for legal research? In the end, we are left with a portrait of Perma.cc—the service, the technology, and the people behind it—that offers a new vision for libraries, legal and otherwise, in the age of the internet.
Making the Law Computable
The Practice spoke with Jack Cushman, a senior developer at Library Innovation Lab (LIL), to talk about the Caselaw Access Project (CAP), an initiative to digitize every precedential case ever published by a U.S. court throughout its entire history and make it all free on the internet
The Harvard Library Innovation Lab
This article shares Harvard Law School's Library Innovation Lab's mission, methods, and principles; highlights some of our present work; and tries to situate that work within the broader context of transformational change in law and libraries.
Checking the Balance
Sonya Branch is the general counsel of the Bank of England and executive director of its Legal Directorate. She joined Richard Moorhead and Steven Vaughan for a discussion around ethics and leadership of in-house counsel in large institutions.
General Counsel Pen Open Letter on Diversity
In January 2019, more than 150 general counsel signed an open letter to law firm partners expressing dissatisfaction at the lack of diversity in firms and applauding “those firms that have worked hard to hire, retain, and promote to partnership this year outstanding and highly accomplished lawyers who are diverse in race, color, age, gender, gender orientation, sexual orientation, national origin, religion, and without regard to disabilities."
From Brussels to Paris
The general counsel of a company occupies a curious spot in the legal profession where the laws of gravity are not always clear. In this case study, Jacqueline Paradis, the recently minted division general counsel of Energie Internationale (EI), leaves a successful negotiation to find a deluge of new-and-unread emails and a phone battery in the red. Paradis must decide how to divide her attention on the eponymous 80-minute train ride home.
The Inside Track
What are the types of skills demanded of in-house lawyers that effective training can help provide? Recognizing the in-house counsel revolution, law schools are beginning to adjust their curricula and approach to preparing students for careers as in-house lawyers.
The Lawyers' Lawyers
Beginning in the 1990s, the largely informal in-house roles within law firms—roles dealing with issues like conflicts, compliance, risk management, and ethics—crystallized into more formal ones. True to the narrative of the larger in-house counsel movement, many large law firms elevated the sophistication and importance of in-house legal functions as well as the lawyers overseeing them.
The Tournament of Influence
Tensions between influence and compromise, professionalism and misconduct, and reactivity and proactivity are at the heart of our book, In-House Lawyers’ Ethics: Institutional Logics, Legal Risk and the Tournament of Influence (published by Hart Publishing and cowritten with Cristina Godinho). In it, we pose the question: Can one be an insider and retain the mantle of professionalism?
The Changes Keep Coming
Brian Peccarelli, chief operating officer of Thomson Reuters, sat down with David B. Wilkins for a conversation on the growth of the alternative legal services industry.
Developments in the “Alternative” Legal Services Market
The sheer quantity of developments in the ALSP market—amid an already rapid pace of change—is breathtaking. And it is happening in real time. Thus, any aspirationally complete understanding of the ALSP ecosystem requires a close monitoring of what’s “in the news.”
The Evolving Global Supply Chain for Legal Services
Vikramaditya Khanna examines how the developing and increasingly global supply chain for legal services, including the emergence of legal process outsourcing (LPO) to countries like India, impacts the employment of lawyers in the United States.
Everyone’s a Law Company
While the trajectory of "alternative legal services providers" has been taken by some as the latest death knell for big law, their growth is rooted in a familiar force within the legal profession—client demands for cost-effectiveness and, increasingly, value-based legal services. ALSPs helping to transform the delivery of legal services—and rightly so—but it is likewise important to examine why clients are now willing to pay and trust them.
Managing to Deliver?
A host of ALSPs are now employing the term “managed” to describe their service offerings, whether those services focus on document review, e-discovery, analytics, or other areas. Yet, while “managed services” has clearly entered the ALSP lexicon, the term itself remains somewhat ambiguous. Put simply, what exactly are managed (legal) services?
Taking the “Alternative” Out of Alternative Legal Service Providers
The characterization of the range of new legal providers competing for a share of the global corporate legal services market is fundamentally flawed. This is not because we are about to witness “the death of big law” or, even more dramatically, “the end of lawyers.” But the ecosystem in which both law firms and a wide range of other providers will compete is one that will require the integration of law into broader “business solutions."
Risky Business
Stephen D. Susman, a founding partner at the law firm Susman Godfrey and a member of litigation finance firm Bentham IMF’s advisory panel, sat down with David B. Wilkins, faculty director of the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession, for a conversation on litigation finance and its impacts on the wider legal profession.
Hidden in Plain Sight
The market for personal injury cases is not a free-for-all. Instead, it is a highly structured market. The channels by which cases flow in the plaintiffs’ bar are well-worn. Personal injury cases are not evenly or randomly distributed among personal injury lawyers.
Volatility in the Market
Litigation finance has found its way into the news a lot in recent months—and for a myriad of reasons. Indeed, hardly a day goes by when there is not a major development in the sector. There has been an increasing importance the litigation finance industry plays in the legal profession, and the speed with which change is occurring.
Investing in Legal Futures
With the rise of litigation finance has come the rise of so-called litigation finance firms. At their core, litigation finance firms invest capital in legal risk the same way other financiers might approach business risk.
A Brief History of Litigation Finance
Despite its relative novelty in the U.S. context, the practice of litigation finance as it is understood today goes back at least a few decades elsewhere in the world. For lawyers, investors, and jurists trying to make sense of the rise of litigation funding in the U.S., looking to history in the U.K. and Australia is insightful.
Follow the Money?
The quest for a disclosure rule in litigation finance has set policymakers on a wild goose chase that has led some to avoid or punt on the issue all together, while leading others to propose disclosure regimes that are either over- or underprotective of the multiple stakeholders in this regulatory debate—namely, plaintiffs, defendants, funders, the public, and the courts—and their varying complex and shifting interests.
Making an Executive Decision
Joost Maes, founder and head of Egon Zehnder’s legal, regulatory, and compliance practice, spoke with David B. Wilkins, faculty director of the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession, for a conversation on identifying the right lawyer leaders for companies’ needs.
Shopping for Law Firms on Amazon
The IP Accelerator is designed to connect sellers who use Amazon’s marketplace with designated IP law firms that can help them apply for U.S. trademarks for their brand and products. The goal is to encourage sellers to bolster their intellectual property and brand rights; however, this also represents a potentially significant foray into the legal services market for the massive company.
From Budget to Best Match
In the HBS case study “Catalant: The Future of Work?,” Thomas Eisenmann, Jeffrey F. Rayport, and Christine Snively examine the rise of Catalant, a platform that connects business clients with skilled freelance talent to help execute their projects. What might a Catalant Legal look like? What holes in the market for legal services could such a platform help address?
Taking Care of Small Business
There are good reasons to focus on clients with the largest budgets and the most sophisticated in-house legal capacities. At the same time, the market for legal services is filled with a myriad of actors, including millions of small and midsize businesses (SMBs), who also rely on high-quality legal work, albeit not at the scale of large corporate actors, and need to find lawyers.
Updated Terms of Service
It is no secret that clients are changing the ways they do business with law firms. Perhaps less attention, however, has been paid to how law firms are responding to these new demands. To help bring these perspectives to the fore, we interviewed two leading law firms to learn more about their approach and how they conceptualize these issues from an organizational standpoint.
Smarter Law
A Smarter approach to legal services uses the broadest possible range of proven processes to improve personal, professional, and business performance. This range inevitably spans left-brain thinking (logic, analysis, math, and data) and right-brain thinking (creativity, emotions, diagrams, and pictures). This is modern behavioral economics applied to law; its successes comprise intricate behavioral insights and detailed econometric processes.
Surveying Clinical Education
Robert Kuehn, associate dean for clinical education and a professor of law at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, sat down with David B. Wilkins, faculty director of the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession, for a conversation on the past, present, and future of clinical legal education.
The Standardization of Law School Clinics
In 2008 the ABA announced it was undertaking a review of its accreditation standards “to think comprehensively about whether the Standards are appropriate and accomplishing their objective of assuring a sound program of legal education that will prepare law school graduates to become effective members of the legal profession.” The eventual result was the ABA’s revised Standards and Rules of Procedure for Approval of Law Schools, 2014–2015.
What’s in a Clinic?
Clinical offerings across law schools have exploded in recent years to include a wide range of subject areas and practice settings. In addition to traditional law school clinics in legal aid, family law, and housing, we now also see offerings in areas like media law, animal rights, and entrepreneurship.
First Impressions
Law clinics are intended to help cultivate “practice ready” lawyers. How closely does intention align with impact? To what extent do lawyers attribute their own practice readiness to their clinical experience? To what extent do legal employers factor such experience into their hiring decisions?
Teaching Hospitals and Teaching Teachers
The cases of Harvard Medical School (HMS) and the Boston Teacher Residency (BTR) program challenge the legal profession to consider: How might we approach clinical legal education differently?
Clinical Legal Education and the Replication of Hierarchy
This article explores two major unintended consequences—or, perhaps more accurately, aspects of collateral damage—resulting from the triumph of clinical education. The damage relates to the replication of hierarchy, in both the structure of the academy and the provision of legal services.
It is Time to Normalize Mental Health Check-Ups
Mental health has become a significant topic of discussion and study for legal professionals as of late, and for good reason. Mental health has a critical impact on the general population—in 2018 alone, 47.6 million adults in the United States experienced symptoms that met criteria for a diagnosable mental illness. This equates to 19.1 percent of the population, or one in five adults.
Mental Health and Well-Being Resources
A set of resources that provide helpful information and instructions on maintaining mental health and wellness in the legal community. These resources are not exhaustive but rather meant to provide easy-to-use reference points.
Grappling with COVID-19
Lawyers across the country and world are jointly trying to grapple with the new normal as it is reestablished again and again and again. Encouragingly, many throughout the profession are proactively recognizing and emphasizing the importance of maintaining mental health and well-being in the time of COVID-19.
Studies on Well-Being in the Profession
The 2016 ABA–Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation study examined alcohol and drug use as well as depression, anxiety, and stress in the legal profession on the basis of a representative sample of 12,825 practicing lawyers. Noting the profession’s reputation for higher-than-average substance use and mental health issues, the authors note that “few studies have been undertaken to validate these beliefs empirically or statistically.”
Operationalizing Well-Being
In 2018, the ABA published a well-being toolkit for lawyers and legal employers that recommends measuring easily quantifiable data like attendance and other tangible forms of engagement but also measures satisfaction with the firm’s well-being initiatives, the extent of learning and skill building, and even behavioral changes resulting from the initiatives. It remains to be seen whether firms will find effective ways to assess their efforts.
Piecing It Together
What does “well-being” and “wellness" really mean? We step back to consider the concept of well-being and its component parts by speaking with Isaac Prilleltensky,Erwin and Barbara Mautner chair in community well-being at the University of Miami, and Ron Goetzel, senior scientist and director of the Institute for Health and Productivity Studies at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Capitalizing on Healthy Lawyers
The legal profession has known for decades that its members suffer from mental illness and addiction in staggering numbers. Yet firms largely have been unmoved by the moral case for change. As the practice of law has become more of a business, firms can and will make changes to reduce costs, increase efficiencies, and improve profit margins. But what can be done to improve the well-being of firm lawyers?
The Broad-Gauged Adviser
We’re entering an era where it’s becoming increasingly difficult to separate your business life from your personal life, and the question is how to reconstruct that in a meaningful way and how to allow society to be a place that benefits all of us. In this Q&A, David Wilkins speaks with Ken Chenault, chairman and managing director at General Catalyst and former chairman and CEO of American Express.
A Flurry of Advice for Board Directors
As the global pandemic forces companies to adjust their business processes to the new (and ever-evolving) “normal,” boards of directors face a myriad of challenges that they have likely never seen before. As boards come together on Zoom and other videoconferencing software to perform their governance and oversight duties in the time of COVID-19, there has been no shortage of advice from professional service firms.
Getting Everyone on Board
The Harvard Law School case study, "A Difficult Decision with the Board,” follows Manny Vargas, general counsel for the publicly traded Fortune 1,000 aerospace firm Calero Corporation, as he tries to carry out a challenging assignment from the company’s new CEO, Lars Neilson. The study helps us examine more closely the general counsel’s relationship with the board.
What Boards Want
How do lawyer-directors fit into the bigger picture of a board’s needs and composition? What are companies looking for in prospective board members? What skills and approaches are particularly valuable in the boardroom? What bearing does professional background and training have on these factors?
Lawyer-Director or Director-Lawyer?
Data in “Banking on the Lawyers” and elsewhere shows an increasing trend of lawyers entering boardrooms. Within that broad finding are lived experiences exemplified by the stories of Maria Green, Peggy Heeg, and Peter Solmssen. Despite taking different paths to the boardroom, all three lawyers stress the importance of business acumen, operational perspective, and a deep understanding of the company as critical skill sets for directors.
Banking on the Lawyers
Banks are subject to a broader range of risks than most nonbanks, requiring their directors to possess special skills to effectively manage that risk. The challenge for regulation (and regulators) is to manage a bank’s risk-taking while being flexible enough for the bank’s directors to pursue risky projects that can enhance bank value.
What Carries Over?
Richard Susskind and Jonathan Zittrain sat down for a conversation on online courts, lessons from the COVID-19 crisis, and how we might move forward. The conversation was moderated by David B. Wilkins, faculty director of the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession.
Not Remotely the Same
Like the larger legal profession, and in particular the court system, consensus best practices for the remote operation of law school clinics have yet to be fully developed. Just as courts are struggling with how to safely and effectively re-create essential in-person tasks like sharing evidence and providing space for public viewing, clinics are similarly forced to reckon with previously face-to-face tasks.
Public Trials
To what extent will public-access livestreaming be maintained once courts begin to return to more normal operations?
Separating the People from the Problem
As a grade school student in 1980, Colin Rule first dabbled in the world of online dispute resolution (ODR) by running a bulletin board out of his bedroom in North Texas with the help of his Apple II Plus. This story shines a light on ODR and its evolution using Rule’s career as our guide.
The Doctor Will See You
The move from physical to online courts, spurred suddenly, unexpectedly, and largely out of necessity by the COVID-19 crisis, will undoubtedly come with growing pains. Like virtually every other corner of the economy and civic life, the legal profession must now adapt to the new reality of life during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. What can we learn from medicine?
The Future of Courts
In this article, Richard Susskind considers the impact of coronavirus on our courts, documenting challenges that our justice system faces. Ultimately, he suggests we need a new mindset if we are to tackle these successfully.
Radical Signs
Daniel Tarullo has been at the center thinking about macroeconomic policy for many years. In this interview, he gives us his take on these issues in our current context, and particularly what they mean for lawyers, for clients, and for advisers to those clients going forward.
Capital Ideas
Rebecca M. Henderson argues that the convergence crises can be viewed as an inflection point for lasting change to the economic systems that help preserve, and even perpetuate, many of the interrelated ills now cast in sharp relief by today’s challenges—among them, racial disparities in key indicators of wealth and health, deteriorating climate conditions, and a lack of trust and accountability in governing institutions.
Lawyers at Warp Speed
While doctors and scientists are understandably at the forefront of efforts to make a COVID-19 vaccine, the legal profession also has a critical role to play. Major U.S. law firms are working closely with pharmaceutical companies on the many regulatory and contract issues at play
Rallying Around Racial Justice
The ACLU of Louisiana’s Justice Lab is one example of how the legal profession is responding in real time to growing demands for justice and social change.
Playing Through the Pandemic
Looking at how Major League Soccer navigated the COVID-19 pandemic with the help of its lawyers helps us understand how sports and law found ways to play through the pandemic.
The Year So Far
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. Given the complexities of the moment, it is all the more necessary to continue to capture as much data and information as possible to learn what works and what doesn’t in the new normal as well as what should and what shouldn’t change going forward.
Portrait of an Artist
A conversation with Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Emily Hargroves Fisher Research Professor of Education at Harvard Graduate School of Education and the first African American woman in Harvard’s history to have an endowed professorship named in her honor.
Barriers Beyond the Bar
As Specia notes, per the Bar Standards Board, women make up just 38 percent of all U.K. barristers and 16 percent of the most senior barristers. For Black barristers, those figures are 3.2 percent and 1.1 percent, respectively.
Revealing the Invisible
Stephen L. Carter, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale Law School, chronicles the incredible career of his grandmother, Eunice Carter, a Black woman prosecutor in New York City at a time when very few lawyers in the country were either Black or women in his latest published book, "Invisible."
America’s Missing Stories
We spoke with Julieanna Richardson, the founder and president of The HistoryMakers, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, to discuss the power of narratives and oral histories—and how Richardson, a trained lawyer herself, brought it all to life.
John Robinson Wilkins and the Resources of the Law
As the first Black law professor in the history of Berkeley Law School, this article chronicles the life and career of my uncle - John Robinson Wilkins. Like this issue of The Practice more generally, the article paints a portrait of an amazing individual in the law as well as, hopefully, yields wider insights on the power of personal narratives—of what this issue’s “Speaker’s Corner” guest Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot dubs “portraiture.”
Following in Their Footsteps
Does having a lawyer as a parent impact individuals’ decisions to become lawyers themselves? What does empirical research reveal about the role of occupational inheritance in the legal profession? And, second, how is that occupational inheritance complicated by factors such as race, gender, and socioeconomic status?
Zooming Ahead
David B. Wilkins spoke with John Suh, former CEO of LegalZoom, to discuss the relationship between regulation and innovation in the legal profession.
Under New Management
A review of the cases of regulatory reform in the United Kingdom and Australia, highlighting Nick Robinson’s observations on their impact on access.
Quality Metrics for Regulatory Reform
In the News: The ABA Center for Innovation recently launched a new subcommittee to establish “uniform metrics that states could use to measure the effectiveness of new approaches they are taking to regulating the legal industry.”
Enter the Sandbox
An in-depth look at how Utah has perhaps gone further than any other state to introduce regulatory reforms that allow for new actors and structures in the market for legal services.
The Politics of Lawyer Regulation
Why do some states adopt lawyer regulation that protects the public while others do not? Using debates over lawyer insurance requirements and in-depth examinations of seven states with different regulatory outcomes, this article concludes that if the organized bar does not support lawyer regulation that protects the public, the public’s interests are unlikely to be represented in the regulatory process.
Developing an Ecosystem of Service Providers
David B. Wilkins, faculty director of the Center on the Legal Profession, speaks with Tracey Yurko, chief legal officer and corporate secretary of Bridgewater Associates, to discuss the client’s perspective on how law firms, the Big Four, and other providers fit into the legal ecosystem.
The Global 100
To research how the most elite law firms around the world are thinking about and responding to the Big Four’s expansion into legal services (see “The Global 100 Responds to the Big Four”), Robert Couture turned to a much larger group: ALM’s Global 100.
Law Firms Take Note—The Big Four Have Been Busy
In recent years all four of the Big Four have announced offerings focused on partnering with in-house legal teams, and in particular legal operations.
Emerging Responses to the Big Four
In this article, we aim to explore how another subset of firms is responding to the Big Four—elite law firms based in the emerging economies.
Expanding Their Scope
In this article, we take a closer look at what new organizational structures within law firms look like in their effort to compete with the Big Four.
The Global 100 Responds to the Big Four
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, which now places their law practices in more than 85 countries with a legal workforce of more than 10,000 attorneys.
Canary in a Coal Mine?
David B. Wilkins speaks with Leemore Dafny for a discussion around consolidation in the health care market and what lessons those in the market for legal services might draw from their experience.
Vertical and Horizontal Integration
Vertical integration is an organizational strategy that prioritizes the incorporation of more stages of a product or service’s supply chain into the organization’s own processes and management. Horizontal integration, by contrast, prioritizes the consolidation of direct competitors at a similar stage in the supply chain.
Developments in Legal Service Integration
While we have yet to see such integration develop wholesale, recent developments suggest that law firms and other legal service providers are attempting to integrate new services.
Experiments in Integration
Looking at several innovations with legal integration, we ask: What potential does integration and consolidation have to transform how the more individually oriented side of the bar reaches and serves its clients? What are the opportunities and challenges? What are we seeing develop in this space?
Knowing Is Half the Battle
What is knowledge management as a concept—in law—and outside of it? A case study of McKinsey’s legal department as it navigates a major knowledge management transformation offers insights and a possible path forward for the legal profession in a postpandemic knowledge landscape.
Vertically Integrated Legal Service
Disaggregation of legal work has not driven a degree of innovation in law firms and alternative providers that delivers clients the outcomes they want—not least, significant cost reduction and improved risk management. Instead, if legal expertise and experience are recognized as central to all legal service, this leads to a vertical view of legal work—wherein legal tasks of all types require a mix of legal expertise, process, and technology.
Working out the Meaning of Work
David B. Wilkins spoke with Katie Bailey, professor of work and employment and former head of the HRM & Employment Relations group at King's College, London, for a discussion on finding meaning in work.
High Performance and High Integrity
Drawing on Ben W. Heineman, Jr's book, High Performance with High Integrity, we explore money and meaning in business.
Upping the Ante (Again)
In the News: Highlighting key stories about the profession you may have missed.
The General Counsel Elevation Sensation
In this article, we take a first step toward exploring how and why in-house lawyers are taking on these novel positions within their organizations. What about legal training prepares lawyers for strategic leadership roles?
If You Take Their Meaning
We asked three recent law graduates how they're navigating the early part of their careers, and in particular, how they on finding meaning at law firms.
Money and Meaning in the Modern Law Firm
What do modern law firm partners value and how does it factor into their business decision making? In this article, Regan and Rohrer argue that modern firms responding effectively to business demands while credibly affirming the importance of nonfinancial professional values can create strong cultures that enhance their ability to weather the storms of the modern legal market.
Beyond the Comfort Zone
While lawyers are often well prepared to support clients experiencing crises, they tend to be far less well equipped to deal with situations where the ways in which they or their firms or organizations function are directly impacted by that crisis. How can the profession adapt?
Educating Crisis Lawyers
How are law school clinics, interdisciplinary simulations, and leadership training preparing students and professionals to tackle crisis situations?
Communicating Clearly
According to an academic and professional crisis communicators, crisis communications requires empathy, trust, and planning.
Mandate Holders
In the News: Highlighting key stories about the profession you may have missed.
Crisis Management at Law Firms
In Brief: In the last two decades, crisis management has emerged as a distinct practice area for many major law firms.
In the Situation Room
A conversation with Jeh Johnson.
Contracting Out
Evisort, a startup aiming to reform the contracting business, is using AI to transform the legal industry.
Tracking the Profession
Mary L. Witkowski, a fellow at Harvard Business School at the Institute for Strategy & Competitiveness, who studies value-based health care, looks at health informatics as a tool for better patient outcomes.
Legal Informatics at School
In Brief: Schools around the world provide new offerings at the intersection of law and technology, recognizing a need to modernize legal training.
Legal Informatics
A proper understanding of and training in legal informatics has the potential to modernize legal systems around the world, and more importanlty, help take the tediousness out of law.
Disciplining Data
A conversation with Eunice Santos, professor and dean of the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, about the intersection of information sciences and the legal profession.
Global Innovation
In the News: Highlighting key stories about the profession you may have missed.
Election Law as a Clinical Endeavor
Incubating novel election law theory and practice in law school.
Polling Election Lawyers
Who are election lawyers and why do they do what they do.
Sustainable Commitments?
Highlighting key stories about the profession you may have missed.
Academics After the Election
Law school deans consider the impact of the 2020 presidential election.
Fighting for Free and Fair Elections in Africa
A conversation with a scholar of international human rights law.
Speaking Out on Election Integrity
A general counsel and law firm chair weigh in.
Judges in the Lab
Analyzing judicial decision making across jurisdictions.
Data in the Court
Judicial analytics in practice.
Learning to Judge
Personal journeys inside and outside the courtroom.
The Cost of Judgment
A conversation about technology and decision making.
Judging Systems
A conversation with David F. Levi.
Supreme Decisions
Highlighting key stories about the profession you may have missed.
Law Firm Cultivates Expertise in Disability Rights
From founding to future.
The Challenges of Advancing Inclusive Education
Pursuing strategic goals that go beyond the interest of the client.
The Pieces of Disability Rights Advocacy in Kenya
A conversation with Elizabeth Kamundia.
Comparing Disability Cause Lawyering in India and the United States
India’s disability cause lawyering in its nascent state.
My Journey in Advancing the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in Chile
One advocate's personal story.
Shifting the Paradigm on Disability
A conversation with an international disability rights advocate.
Lawyers in Conflict and Transition
Understanding lawyers who challenge the system.
Economic Exits
Law firms leave Russian marketplace.
Adding Capacity in Conflict Zones
International human rights lawyers on collaboration.
Mental Health Struggles During Conflict
From the Journals: What the data says about burnout
Running a Law Firm During War in Ukraine
A conversation with a managing partner from Kyiv.
Introducing the January 2023 Issue
In this issue, we extend and expand on conversations that began at our September 2022 conference, "Reimagining the Role of Business in the Public Square: Multistakeholder Engagement on ESG Commitments, Metrics, and Accountability."
Critical Topics in ESG
A glance into seven concurrent thematic discussions that took place at the Harvard ESG conference in September 2022.
General Counsel Face ESG Headwinds
As we reimagine the role of business in the public square, so too are we reimagining the role of the general counsel in business.
Law Firms in the ESG Game
Responding to market pressures and client demands over the last few years, major global law firms have created practice areas focused on ESG.
Corporate Trade-Offs
Gillian Tett, chair of the editorial board and editor-at-large (US) of the Financial Times, gives insight into the ESG phenomenon.
The Implications of ChatGPT for Legal Services and Society
To demonstrate ChatGPT's remarkable sophistication and potential implications, for both legal services and society more generally, most of this paper was generated in about an hour through prompts within the chatbot. The disruptions from AI’s rapid development are no longer in the distant future. They have arrived, and this essay offers a small taste of what lies ahead.
Introducing the March 2023 Issue
New advances in generative AI are changing the conversation of what's possible every day. This issue takes stock of what the legal profession should be thinking about as we barrel forward into the future.
Generative Legal Minds
ChatGPT and other technologies can write an error-free paper or law school exam. How will they change (legal) writing? A writing teacher and a law professor weigh in.
Ethical Prompts
Do lawyers have a duty to be well-versed in the benefits and challenges of artificial intelligence? And if so, what does that mean as ChatGPT and other (generative) AI technologies emerge and capture our collective imagination—and collective anxiety?
Assisting Knowledge Workers
A conversation with Jason Boehmig, the CEO of Ironclad, a contract intelligence company, about how the legal profession should embrace technological possibility.
Introducing the May 2023 Issue
In this issue, we delve into the variety of ways that law firms and lawyers understand and execute on strategy.
Leading the Way
The movement of firms in the Am Law 100 during the past six years provokes the question: why did some far outpace the pack? What differences were present that allowed them to improve their strategic positioning vis-à-vis their competitors? From interviews with firm chairs, Robert Couture identifies a rather simple commonality that surpasses all the other elements of success: ownership and passion.
Animating Strategy for Lawyers
When law schools prepare students for the profession, they are often missing a key ingredient: strategy. Courtroom strategy is one thing, but lawyers who lead practice areas or firms require a solid understanding of business strategy. Executive education has stepped in to fill the gap.
The Chief Strategy Officer
Over the past decade, a number of major law firms have created new executive roles focused specifically on strategy. Who are these chief strategy officers? What experiences prepare them for the role? We talk to three law firm strategy officers to gain a better understanding of the emerging position.
Preparing to Steer the Ship
How does an upcoming law firm chair view strategy? In this conversation, Bob Couture speaks to Seyfarth Shaw Chair and Managing Partner-Elect Lorie Almon about how she sees strategy and plans for her upcoming leadership.
Strategy, Professionalism, and Passion
Pierre Gentin is chief legal officer and senior partner at the management consulting firm, McKinsey & Co. In this conversation, he talks about his background across consulting, government, law firms, and in-house and how each experience gave him new outlooks on strategy.
Pledging Action
The Leadership Council on Legal Diversity's initiative, Leaders at the Front, gives 400-plus general counsel and law firm leaders the opportunity to document and track their commitments to building a more diverse and inclusive profession.
Introducing the July 2023 Issue
A quick introduction to an issue about diversity initiatives across the corporate landscape.
Getting to Diversity
It is difficult to know which diversity and inclusion programs work and which do not. Drawing on data from 800 companies over four decades, as well as interviews with professionals, and comparing dozens of different features of career systems and diversity initiatives side by side, this article dives into which programs effectively impact diversity in the managerial ranks, and which do not.
Researching Diversity Discourse and Action
Jamillah Bowman Williams, a professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center and an expert in employment discrimination, seeks to understand the gaps between what people say they believe and they do when it comes to workplace diversity.
Investing in Economic Justice
Zeynep Ton, professor of the practice in the operations management group at MIT Sloan School of Management and president of the nonprofit Good Jobs Institute, says that if companies offer "good jobs"—jobs that provide employees with adequate pay, dignity, and respect—everyone benefits.
Tone at the Top
Lori George Billingsley, the former global chief diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) officer for The Coca-Cola Company, offers insights on the chief diversity officer role and what it takes to succeed in the position.
The Black-White Student Debt Gap Among Law School Graduates
The student debt crisis disproportionately impacts Black Americans, reflecting and perpetuating the Black-White wealth gap and reverberating over generations and the life course. Among law student populations, this disparity has spillover effects onto democratic processes and access to legal services, further creating and compounding inequality in the United States.
Rethinking Law School Financing
Student debt is a public problem, but can the private sector help? A pair of case studies—on patent lawyer training and income share agreements—offer ways of rethinking how we pay for law school.
Understanding the Law of Debt
Dalié Jiménez, professor of law at The University of California, Irvine School of Law and director of the Student Law Loan Initiative, offers her perspective on lawyering for justice, the problems with debt collection and bankruptcy law, and ways students and society might move forward in confronting debt.
Debt Takes a Toll
How does debt impact physical and mental health? In this story, we talk to one researcher who studies long-term health trajectories to understand how debt affects people's lives over time, trying to understand for whom debt is and remains a deep burden.
What We Owe Our Students
Senator Elizabeth Warren has been a fierce advocate for higher education reform and student debt cancellation for years. In this conversation with CLP faculty director David B. Wilkins, the senior senator from Massachusetts and former Harvard Law professor offers her thoughts on what is wrong with the current system and what should change if we want to bet on the next generation.
Introducing the September 2023 Issue
How is student debt impacting lives and careers—and the legal profession? A brief overview of our goals in this issue.