Cannabis Lawyers

This article is adapted from my article “Cannabis Law Practice” in Tulsa Law Review 60 (forthcoming 2024).

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Cannabis law practice, a new field emerging following the legalization of medicinal and recreational marijuana in the early 21st century, is challenging what we know about the American legal profession. Over the years, law practice in the United States has clustered around two hemispheres: a corporate hemisphere, serving predominantly large-entity clients and their business needs, populated by graduates of elite law schools practicing in elite large law firms and prestigious in-house legal departments; and an individual hemisphere, serving mostly individual clients and their various legal needs, populated by graduates of nonelite law schools practicing in small law firms. (For more on the two hemispheres thesis, see the July/August 2024 issue of The Practice, “Building Lawyers’ Careers.”) Mobility between the hemispheres has been limited, implicitly but heavily guarded by Big Law, concerned with maintaining their elite professional status atop the profession. Dominated early on by individual-hemisphere lawyers—criminal defense lawyers and marijuana advocates—cannabis law practice has now become of interest to large law firms and their corporate-hemisphere lawyers, a move that has the potential to blur the traditional line between the hemispheres and disrupt the traditional demarcations of power and status in the legal profession.

Cannabis law, regulations, and an evolving industry

Before I dive into how cannabis law practice has evolved in the past decades, I first have to detail the complicated web of state and federal regulations that have contributed to that evolution.

While medical marijuana has been used for centuries, it was not until the mid-19th century that the United States Pharmacopeia endorsed marijuana for several medical conditions, including pain, convulsions, depression, and other mental illnesses. Consistent with the state of scientific knowledge at the time, federal regulation did not prohibit medicinal marijuana, instead focusing on accurate labeling for products sold in interstate commerce. Then, in the early 20th century, in response to waves of immigrants fleeing the Mexican Revolution, Southwest states began criminalizing marijuana. The campaign to demonize marijuana gained momentum, fueled by racial bias against Hispanics and Blacks, leading Congress to adopt the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, under which the importation, cultivation, possession, and distribution of marijuana was regulated and taxed.

Over the next 30 years, the reality was an inconsistent maze of 200 laws regulating legal and illegal substances, and newly adopted treaties requiring the scheduling of drugs for more uniform international regulation. In response to this confusion, in 1970, Congress enacted the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), designating marijuana as a Schedule I narcotic. Many states adopted frameworks like the CSA and cooperated with federal law enforcement.

Schedule I drugs, substances, and chemicals are defined as having no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse, and their cultivation, production, sale, and consumption are criminally prohibited. Accordingly, no lawful marijuana industry has existed in the United States since the passage of the CSA, and no cannabis law practice has existed, with the exception of advocates calling for a change in the regulatory approach to marijuana and criminal defense attorneys (and prosecutors) specializing in defending (and prosecuting) those accused of violating the provisions of the CSA and other related drug laws.

California was the first to open a small loophole. California voters approved the Compassionate Use Act of 1996, which included a provision pursuant to which a physician could recommend marijuana for any qualifying condition, an open-ended standard that subsequently became the norm for states legalizing medical marijuana. In 1998, Alaska, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington legalized medical marijuana, followed by Colorado, Hawaii, and Maine. As of January 1, 2024, 38 states as well as Washington, DC, Guam, and Puerto Rico have taken measures to legalize medical marijuana. In 2012, Colorado and Washington were the first to legalize the use of marijuana for adult recreation. As of January 1, 2024, 24 states and Washington, DC, have legalized recreational marijuana, with seven additional states decriminalizing recreational marijuana use, replacing criminal enforcement with civil penalties.

The federal government, however, responded to these state-led deregulatory efforts by attempting to strictly enforce the provisions of the CSA. The Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations all carried out raids on medical cannabis providers and dispensaries. But in 2009 the Obama administration began to reverse course when Deputy Attorney General David Ogden wrote to U.S. attorneys around the country, providing them with enforcement priority guidance in light of changing laws in the states: “As a general matter,” wrote Ogden, “pursuit of [federal] priorities should not focus federal resources in your States on individuals whose actions are in clear and unambiguous compliance with existing state laws providing for the medical use of marijuana.” The reaction on the ground to these statements was swift. In Colorado, for example, the number of marijuana dispensaries increased from a handful to as many as a thousand in the 2009 calendar year. In California, a largely unregulated medical marijuana industry expanded just as quickly. Yet, it quickly became apparent that the federal government was not comfortable with the rapid expansion of marijuana entrepreneurship in the states. In 2011 Deputy Attorney General James Cole sent a new memorandum to U.S. attorneys around the country, insisting that the 2009 Ogden memo was being adhered to, but clarifying that its protections applied only to individual patients and not commercial operations. Federal raids continued following the release of the Cole memo.

In August 2013, following the legalization of recreational marijuana in Colorado and Washington, the Justice Department issued a new Cole memo, setting forth eight conditions under which federal law would be enforced. The new Cole memo remained in effect until January 2018, when it was symbolically rescinded by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, but no federal crackdown followed. Since then, Congress has passed several measures protecting state-legal cannabis activities.

One might be tempted to understand the regulatory landscape as one of state-level legalization tolerated by the federal government’s decision not to prioritize enforcement of the CSA’s provisions, but the tenuous, complex nature of this status quo should not be understated. As the uncertainty surrounding Sessions’s announcement in 2018 revealed, a status quo that relies in part on the federal government’s self-imposed policy not to enforce federal laws is susceptible to the federal government unilaterally changing its mind and is thus unstable, even though massive state tax revenues render a course reversal increasingly unlikely.

More importantly, as long as marijuana continues to be a Schedule I narcotic, even in the absence of enforcement of the CSA, its criminal status leads to many federal-level restrictions and industry disruptions, including curtailed access to banking services, securities markets, tax treatment, bankruptcy protections, and intellectual property protections, not to mention the ability to sue and be sued in federal courts. Moreover, one should not understate the complexity and costs stemming from the wide variety between and among states’ regulatory regimes, as well as complications caused by varying regional regulations within states. The differences extend far beyond regulation of medical and recreational marijuana, and include vastly different approaches in terms of the number of licenses issued, conditions for and restrictions on licenses, tax regimes, policies distinguishing personal cultivation and commercial use, as well as restrictions on out-of-state players.

Most recently, the Biden administration has announced its intention to reclassify marijuana as a Schedule III narcotic. (See “What will happen if marijuana is reclassified?” below.) Notably, at the same time as the federal government is taking steps toward legalizing marijuana, some states are rethinking their more liberal drug policies, such as Oregon—which decriminalized most drugs in 2020 for personal consumption and is now considering reversing course by reinstating light criminal penalties for personal drug possession, following a spike in public drug use and overdoses.

Notwithstanding the complex regulatory landscape, marijuana has become a significant big business. According to Statista, a global data and business intelligence platform, cannabis revenue in the United States will reach $43 billion in 2024, more than doubling since 2019. It is projected to hit $50 billion by 2029. Correspondingly, marijuana taxation has become a significant source of revenue for states.

The evolution of cannabis law practice

The state-driven legalization of medicinal and recreational marijuana and the business growth of the industry created demand for legal advice and services. Understanding and mapping the rise and evolution of cannabis law practice is hindered by the piecemeal nature of the state-based legalization movement. Assessing the national state of affairs—for example, aggregating the number of marijuana lawyers and surveying their respective practices—is near impossible because one ends up comparing apples to oranges: experienced lawyers in maturing and mature marijuana legal markets to newcomers in new and emerging cannabis markets. Indeed, even describing growth patterns in cannabis law practice is complicated by the fact that newer legal markets do not necessarily follow in the footsteps of first-mover markets because in these newer markets lawyers can learn and benefit from the experience of first-generation lawyers in mature legal markets. Nonetheless, with these caveats in mind, here we go.

First-generation marijuana lawyers, 1996–2015

As states began to relax their statutes and legalize marijuana, demand for marijuana law legal services soared, ranging from understanding the dynamic between the CSA and other federal laws and changing state laws, and the relationship between state laws and municipal laws. Clients needed legal services related to permitting and licensing, commercial real estate law, business formation and corporate law, tax law, labor and employment law, contract and commercial law, and compliance with a fast-changing state-based regulatory apparatus.

In this nascent era, criminal defense attorneys and marijuana law advocates were among the first to provide legal advice to clients in the emerging industry. Criminal defense lawyers and marijuana law advocates  “crossing over” to marijuana business law practice was an organic response to growing client demand. Advising clients about the applicability of the CSA, criminal defense counsel and marijuana law advocates were increasingly fielding questions about other aspects of marijuana state regulation and business law.

Criminal defense lawyers, with the exception of Big Law white-collar defense attorneys, have typically practiced in solo or small-firm settings because of issues like client identity, the localized nature of the work, high caseload volume, managing conflicts of interest, and minimizing costs. Thus, the emerging cohort of first-generation marijuana lawyers hailed predominantly from solo and small-firm settings.

Crossing over from criminal law, the CSA, and other related drug law offenses to cannabis law practice was especially attractive to less established defense counsel with the capacity to handle the demand, as well as other new and less established lawyers who were not especially troubled by upsetting existing clients and experiencing a reputational backlash among prospective clients concerned with the perception of marijuana being associated with criminal conduct. 

Finally, these first-generation marijuana lawyers were, on average, less experienced, less credentialed, and younger members of the bar. Although criminal defense attorneys generally lacked training and experience in business law, tax, commercial real estate, labor, and employment law, many of the matters, for example, LLC formation, were relatively straightforward, and the lawyers were able to adequately prepare and study the relevant areas. Moreover, with the area of law being new and fast-changing, there were no experts in the field to whom the matters could be referred. Over time and as a growing number of states legalized medicinal marijuana and soon, recreational marijuana, marijuana lawyers gained experience and expertise, increasingly specializing in the evolving area of law.

Second-generation marijuana lawyers, 2016–current

The emerging cannabis industry gave more-established business lawyers, including those at Big Law, pause for several related reasons. To begin with, notwithstanding the legalization of medical and recreational marijuana in a growing number of states, federal law, namely the CSA, continued to define marijuana as a Schedule I narcotic. Thus, as a matter of the law in the books, the cannabis industry was a criminal enterprise. Early on, before the Justice Department circulated the Ogden and Cole memos, significant uncertainty surrounded the industry and the risk of federal law enforcement, with consequences for lawyers advising and assisting—arguably aiding and abetting—clients’ criminal conduct.

Next, separate and distinct from federal law enforcement, early on lawyers faced the threat of discipline for violating state law rules of professional conduct. While some risks remain, for lawyers who practice before federal courts and for lawyers with a practice that cuts across state lines, the threat of discipline has diminished significantly. Combined, the reduced threat of liability for aiding and abetting clients’ criminal conduct and the diminished exposure for discipline for violating the rules of professional conduct created an opportunity for attorneys willing to enter cannabis law practice.

Finally, in its nascent era, the regulation and practice of cannabis was in a state of flux. In this fast-changing complex regulatory landscape, the sea of new prospective clients were often first-time individual and small-business owners—not the usual clientele of established business law firms and Big Law. Over time, the industry stabilized and grew, the pace of new regulations decreased, experience increased, and the number of applications and dispensaries stabilized, with some larger-entity clients emerging in some jurisdictions.

The reduced threat of criminal law enforcement and discipline against marijuana lawyers combined with growing stability and maturation of the industry reduced stigma and stereotypes about the kinds of clients and the types of lawyers representing them. As a growing number of states moved to legalize medicinal and recreational marijuana, American public opinion shifted with a majority of Americans favoring legalization. New marijuana law bar associations, national and local, were established, further reducing negative stigma for practitioners in the field, new industry publications emerged, and law schools began offering coursework in marijuana law.

These developments ushered in more experienced, more risk-averse business lawyers. In particular, the second-generation marijuana lawyers included two types of lawyers mostly absent from the first generation: in-house counsel and Big Law attorneys. First, as cannabis entity clients grew and stabilized, some needed in-house counsel, drawn from the ranks of first-generation experienced cannabis lawyers as well as from the ranks of second-generation relatively less experienced and more affordable lawyers.

Second, Big Law formed cannabis practice groups and departments, quickly rising to the top of rankings by Chambers and the Legal500. “Gone are the days when small, boutique law offices were the only attorneys willing to represent marijuana clients. Today, some of the country’s largest and most respected law firms are venturing into the world of weed,” wrote Gina Tincher for an ABA feature in 2017. Capturing and reflecting the changing public and legal perceptions of the industry, these new practice groups were often called cannabis as opposed to marijuana law groups, shedding the negative associations with the latter term.

Cannabis law practice and the legal profession in the 21st century

At first glance, the rise of in-house legal departments in marijuana businesses and the entry of large law firms into cannabis law practice seem like unremarkable phenomena, mere supply side adjustments to increased demand for legal services by a growing industry. The same reasons that have led to the return of in-house counsel and the growing popularity of in-house legal departments—cutting or at least curtailing legal spend, providing specialized proactive as opposed to reactive legal expertise, and advising on compliance matters—apply with the same force in the marijuana industry as they do outside of it, so their spread into marijuana law practice appears like obvious, organic growth.

Similarly, Big Law’s move into cannabis law practice seems like an obvious development. Beginning in the second half of the 20th century, Big Law’s dominant culture gradually changed, increasingly emphasizing the financial bottom line over other traditional aspects of status and professionalism. In an “eat what you kill” day and age, it appears like hardly a surprise that as the cannabis industry has matured to offer significant financial rewards for lawyers, Big Law would follow the big money.

Follow what money? Big Law on a holding pattern

Upon further scrutiny, however, Big Law’s venture into cannabis law practice appears less intuitive for four related reasons.

First, Big Law tend to represent large-entity clients with complex business needs, shying away from individuals and small businesses. Large-entity clients tend to supply a steady diet of legal business work, some of which is complex in nature, and they pay well for the services they consume. In contrast, many clients, and perhaps still the typical cannabis client is a small business, may not be able to afford Big Law rates, not to mention a bank account from which to conveniently pay the fees due to restrictions on banking services. Consequently, Big Law partners specializing in cannabis law may need to have a larger client base of smaller clients with a higher rate of nonpayment compared with the paradigmatic Big Law client case, practice realities large law firms are not well suited to deal with.  

Moreover, although large law firms are well situated to monitor and address conflict of interests, their experience is with large, sophisticated clients. Expanding their client base to include many more, smaller clients would increase the probability of running into conflicts of interests with a lower probability of getting informed consent and resolving the conflicts, because smaller, relatively unsophisticated clients tend to expect a thicker notion of loyalty and are less likely to waive it. Moreover, cannabis law partners are more likely to find themselves facing intra-firm pressures vis-à-vis partners frustrated with the prospect of more unresolvable conflicts and, as newer partners with smaller books of business, less likely to prevail in these struggles of power.

Second, the highly localized nature of cannabis law practice, varying across and within states, makes it harder to practice it on a national basis, taking advantage of the economies of scale that gives Big Law some of their traditional advantages in the corporate market for legal services. Large law firms are not well organized and well designed to flourish in highly segmented and localized markets.

Third and relatedly, Big Law’s structure and organization builds on and lends itself on internal referrals. Large law firms’ business grows when existing clients’ needs expand, calling for relationship partners—finders—to introduce clients to subject-matter experts who can help grind the existing relationship or to split credit with equity partners in other departments—minders—who can manage legal needs and grow the relationship in new directions. This internal referral mechanism is less likely to be effective in an area of law that is state- and regional-based, and is still criminal at the federal level, raising the probability that cannabis law practice groups would be siloed within firms.

Fourth and most telling, notwithstanding its evolution and growth, the cannabis industry, in great part because of the restrictions imposed by the CSA, is not yet big money, at least in ways Big Law can easily tap into.

A revised explanation for Big Law’s entry into cannabis law practice is thus that large law firms have made an early entry into the field before it made economic sense for them to do so and are essentially in a holding pattern, awaiting federal decriminalization. Once marijuana is federally legalized and the big money is there for the taking, Big Law would be well positioned, have a suitable infrastructure, and have the lawyers at hand to take immediate advantage of the situation.

Status and power in the legal profession: the two hemispheres

Explaining large law firms’ move into cannabis law practice in terms of being proactive, agile, innovative, early-mover institutions makes ample sense except for one thing: it contradicts everything we know about how Big Law operate and their culture. Large law firms are well known as traditional, change-resisting, bureaucratic organizations, slow to adopt and adapt their business model even in the face of compelling incentives to do so. Historically, Big Law’s very concept of merit, excellence, and professional success depended on their resisting change, upholding their traditional culture, excluding newcomers to the legal profession and refusing to expand into new practice areas. (For more on this, see my 2008 article, “The Rise and Fall of the WASP and Jewish Law Firms,” in Stanford Law Review.)

Big Law’s position atop the corporate hemisphere has long been more than a reflection of the identity of their large-entity clients, the credentials and expertise of their elite lawyers, the areas of law practice and nature of the work, and the inherent internal synergies leading to increased profits. Maintaining the line between high-prestige corporate-hemisphere practice and low-prestige individual-hemisphere practice has been a reliable source of status generation for Big Law.

In the past, Big Law have minded the line, for example, by predominantly hiring graduates of elite law schools and subsequently recruiting laterally from other large law firms, as opposed to from small law firms. Lateral hires not available within the ranks of other Big Law—for example, when large law firms wanted to boost the ranks of their litigation departments with experienced trial attorneys—were sought from within the ranks of experienced government lawyers, hailing from large public law firms, not plaintiffs’ lawyers practicing in traditionally smaller firms.

Similarly, even when Big Law expanded their subject-matter expertise, first from business law to litigation and commercial real estate, and later to traditional individual-hemisphere areas such as criminal law, trust and estates, and even immigration, they have done so judiciously. Large law firms represent defendants in white-collar crime cases, not the full gamut of criminal law matters. They help corporate executives and well-to-do individuals manage wealth, and they help entity clients with the immigration matters of their executives, as opposed to offering a full range of trust and estate and immigration law services to typical clients in the individual hemisphere.

Against this backdrop, recruiting first-generation cannabis lawyers—paradigmatic individual-hemisphere lawyers—with relatively nontransferable books of business featuring small business clients is not at all intuitive.

The traditional hemispheres or a more integrated, inclusive profession

The embrace of cannabis law practice may reveal that large law firms are entering a new era. Big Law’s willingness to recruit and embrace first-generation marijuana practitioners hailing from the individual hemisphere, and to move swiftly into a “less dignified” area of law practice—marijuana law—may indicate that large law firms are increasingly ready to embrace a culture and values grounded in merit and excellence measured in terms of revenue and profits with less regard to other traditional facets and indicia of professional status. 

In this sense, the welcoming of cannabis law practice and cannabis lawyers into Big Law is qualitatively different from the welcoming of Jewish and Catholics lawyers into the elite club half a century ago. WASP law firms stubbornly resisted change, allowing Jewish and Catholic law firms to rise, compete with them, cross over to their respectable areas of business law practice, and force a change. In contrast, Big Law are welcoming individual-hemisphere cannabis lawyers seemingly with relatively little resistance and with open arms.

To be sure, this blurring of the line between the corporate and individual hemispheres is not in and of itself a new phenomenon. Nonetheless, Big Law’s move into cannabis law practice is significant because it reflects a willingness by some large law firms to undermine the perception of their own elite professional status in pursuit of new markets and revenue streams, as opposed to being caught up in external forces or responding to conduct by competitors outside of the corporate hemisphere.

Three important caveats, however, are in order. First, while the recruitment of cannabis lawyers into large law firms may represent and reflect an inflection point in the life of the profession, a voluntary blurring of the traditional line between the corporate and individual hemispheres initiated willingly by Big Law and perhaps a sign of things to come—perhaps the recruitment of family law attorneys beyond those representing wealthy litigants, the representation of plaintiffs beyond corporate entities suing other corporate entities, or the incorporation of individual-hemisphere fee arrangements traditionally foreign to the corporate hemisphere such as contingency fees—the extent of Big Law’s objectives and intentions is unclear and may not be set in stone.

For example, the degree of Big Law’s reform may be quite limited. Wishing to put in place an infrastructure and build their capacity to hit the ground running and serve large cannabis entity clients when federal law is revised and marijuana is legalized, large law firms may have been willing to pay the prestige price and recruit the only experienced marijuana lawyers in town as a temporary gap filler, with the expectation that once provided with Big Law’s platform, people power and internal expertise and referral mechanisms, these transplants will adjust, gradually decrease the number and types of clients they serve, and follow the traditional large law firm mold. Embracing first-generation cannabis lawyers, in other words, may not be about a general willingness to hire individual-hemisphere lawyers or about a shift toward serving typical individual-hemisphere clients, but rather about trying to pick off the best and largest cannabis clients and transactions, akin to the limited manner in which Big Law offer criminal law defense, wealth management, and immigration law services.

Second, even if Big Law are now or will be in the future willing to embrace new types of lawyers, clients, and areas of law practice, they face significant hurdles for doing so successfully. Large law firms are organized around the service of large, sophisticated, rich entity clients. Although in the aggregate Big Law serve many clients and many matters, their lawyers have relatively small caseloads, lending itself to complex and yet manageable conflict-checking and conflict-management policies. Revising these structures and policies to enable the representation of a larger client base of different characteristics may prove to be impractical and unmanageable.

Third, the desirable demise of exclusionary and discriminatory WASP values and white-shoe culture has left large law firms and the legal profession with a vacuum of sorts. Liberal values, including justice, equality, fairness, access to law and lawyers, and a commitment to the rule of law, as opposed to a particular conception of justice, equality, or fairness, are a promising alternative to WASP values, and a culture of excellence, merit, equity, and inclusivity is an alluring alternative to white-shoe culture. To the extent that Big Law’s openness to and embrace of first-generation cannabis lawyers is part of such a gradual shift to inclusive meritocracy, it would constitute a notable step in the right direction.

Yet, liberal values and a meritorious inclusive culture are not the only alternative to WASP values and white-shoe culture. Serving entity clients’ interests constrained only loosely by the law, complete with a client-centered, around-the-clock service ethos in a “eat what you kill” culture, is another. To the extent that Big Law’s embrace of cannabis lawyers is driven predominantly by entity client service and profit maximization, the move may not reflect a greater shift toward a more inclusive culture committed to combating implicit bias, institutionalized barriers, stereotypes, unequal social and cultural capital endowments, and inhospitable professional ideologies.

Conclusion

Reflecting the legalization and growth of the marijuana industry, cannabis law practice has been growing in size, breadth, and status. Initially the practice attracted criminal defense counsel and marijuana advocates who were well positioned to cross over to provide full-range legal services to clients in the field, as well as junior lawyers and underemployed attorneys practicing predominantly in the individual hemisphere. Subsequently, cannabis lawyers included not only these types of lawyers but also first-generation experienced cannabis lawyers and, notably, newcomers hailing from the corporate hemisphere, Big Law lawyers, and in-house counsel.

To an extent, the entry of corporate-hemisphere lawyers into cannabis law practice is unremarkable. As the industry has grown, matured, and stabilized, as negative stereotypes surrounding it have declined and general acceptance of it in American society has increased, and as the risk of criminal and disciplinary enforcements has declined, it seemed intuitive that the supply of Big Law and in-house lawyers would follow increased demand and the expectation of even greater demand for their legal services once cannabis is decriminalized at the federal level. 

Yet, the willingness of large law firms to enter the practice of cannabis law even ahead of robust demand for their services should not be taken for granted. Big Law thrive not only on the quality of their lawyers—recruiting, promoting, and retaining the best lawyers money can buy—but also on sustaining their reputation as the elite atop the legal profession. Large law firms’ reputation in part derives from their ability to credibly portray themselves as engaged in the most respectable, complex, and challenging areas of law in the corporate hemisphere, as distinguished from the less elite bar populating the individual hemisphere. In today’s legal world, holding on to the perception of elite status has become harder. It increasingly depends on sustaining a reality and a facade of merit, sophistication, complexity, service, and expertise, to be distinguished from mass-produced, standardized, fungible legal services produced by ambulance chasers in the individual hemisphere and more recently by AI.

Against this background, the eagerness of Big Law to enter the field, before the appearance of big money, is notable. We see Big Law willingly laterally recruiting experienced first-generation marijuana lawyers at the risk of blurring the line between the hemispheres, revealing a possible sea change in the profession, one in which competitive forces, client service, and maximization of profits-per-equity-partner drive out old traditional notions of professionalism and respectability. Such a market-driven change can be a desirable development to the extent it replaces the discriminatory and exclusionary foundations of legal professionalism. Yet the promising move can quickly end up reconstituting and legitimizing familiar Big Law power structures and trajectories, hiding the impact and realities of implicit bias, stereotypes, and unequal endowments of social, cultural, economic, and identity capital behind a thin pretense of market-driven merit, competitiveness, and client service. The key to understanding, responding to, and getting ahead of changing practice realities is nuanced contextual research, which closely tracks evolving client needs, regulatory landscapes, and law firms’ organizational models and cultural frameworks.

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Eli Wald is the Charles W. Delaney Jr. Professor of Law, University of Denver Sturm College of Law.