Go to any average law firm or legal practice and you will likely come across a list of tried-and-true practice offerings: corporate, intellectual property, criminal, family, immigration, labor, cybersecurity, and the list goes on. The exact names and particular offerings might vary a bit, but these areas are well-established, traditional areas in the legal profession and you’ll find them at many well-rounded law firms. In this issue, we look outside these well-established practice areas and investigate the niche—cannabis, art, space, and fashion—and ask, What does it mean for a legal practice to go from emerging to mainstream or a small community of lawyers to grow or become more high-profile? What makes operating in a niche practice area difficult—but also interesting?
Our lead story, “Cannabis Lawyers: Money, perception, and competition in the legal profession,” by Eli Wald, Charles W. Delaney Jr. Professor of Law, University of Denver Sturm College of Law, explores how and why Big Law took up the practice of cannabis law even as the cannabis business operated in uncertain legal terrain. Wald tracks the rise of cannabis law from mainly solo practitioners and criminal defense lawyers in a time when the terrain was open and no one held expertise to Big Law’s embrace of cannabis law as a potentially profitable arena. Wald emphasizes the “potential” of the money, for as cannabis remains federally criminalized, the practice area still remains in limbo. Still, as more and more states legalized medicinal and then recreational marijuana, Big Law saw opportunity. Wald writes:
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.
To complement Wald’s documentation of the emerging field of cannabis law, we take deep dives into art law and space law, and the lawyers who make up those fields. In the former, we speak with three lawyers involved in antiquities repatriation and Nazi-era art restitution cases. The work is interdisciplinary, international, and often deals with collectors or museums that resist allegations that the work is stolen. But as the three lawyers in this story—Apsara Iyer, former editor of Harvard Law Review and a former investigative analyst with the antiquities trafficking unit at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office; Bradley Gordon, a corporate lawyer who found himself tracking down priceless Cambodian antiquities on behalf of the Cambodian Ministry of Culture and the U.S. Department of Justice; and Nicholas O’Donnell, a partner at Sullivan & Worcester who founded an art law practice at his firm—make clear: it is difficult, but for all three, it also produces a strong moral calling. As Ayer says:
Like environmental law, [art law] is a field that is shaped by a finite and scarce resource. We’re not going to get another Parthenon marble or ancient city of Palmyra. When cultural heritage is destroyed, it’s gone forever. Figuring out how to preserve and protect those resources through legal work and the tools brought to bear by the law is incredibly valuable.
In “Cosmic Counsel,” we explore space law, speaking to Michelle Hanlon, assistant professor of practice and executive director of the Center for Air and Space Law at the University of Mississippi, and Paul Weber, general counsel of Blue Origin, to understand what it’s like to work in an area that is rapidly changing and expanding the definition of what’s possible. How to prepare for a legal arena that depends on and hopes for a world that might currently exist only in the imagination? Weber says he is constantly asking his team to predict what the challenges of tomorrow will be. He says: “[We’re] looking forward and saying, ‘OK, once we get a permanent presence in the moon … what do we need to be thinking about now? … so that we can set the precedent so that we’re not only solving today’s problem, but we’re building a precedent that’s sustainable and consistent with the regulations and treaties, but also allows us then to scale as we expect we will rapidly be scaling,” he says.
Finally, our Speaker’s Corner interview is with Anthony Lupo, the “father of fashion law” and the chairman of ArentFox Schiff, who describes what it means to build a firm interested in industry over practice. Lupo describes ArentFox’s market strategy as building industry groups with lawyers who can provide 360 services within different industry groups, over specific practice areas. “This makes it easier to hire too,” Lupo says. “They know you’re the place to come. You could be practicing in trade, you could be IP, you could be L&E, you could be FDA, but if you want to work in retail or fashion, we’re the shop for you. That’s what we’ve done with a bunch of different industry areas.”
