Introducing the January 2025 Issue

From the Editors From The Practice January/February 2025
Exploring teams and power

All of lawyering requires teams. In 2015, we released an issue of The Practice focused on teamwork and collaboration and how working together benefits both the individual and the organization. In this issue, we return to teams, but this time looking at the relationship between teams and power.

In our lead story, “Law Firm Dal Teams,” professors Tracey E. George, Mitu Gulati, and Albert H. Yoon examine who has “power” in American law firms by drilling down on the dealmaking teams that law firms choose to publicize: Are women making the teams? Are they ascending the rankings of the teams and eventually leading them? Examining more than 10,000 deals from a 10-year period, George, Gulati, and Yoon organize their data by looking at the size of the deal and the practice area, as well as where the women on different deal teams went to law school. As of 2023, they write, “Women are making deal teams at a rate that is commensurate with their rate of partnership.” Dive into the story for more on the data.

We also explore teams from two other angles. In “Evolving Goals,” we profile Kim Miner, the inaugural general counsel and chief of staff for Boston Unity Soccer Partners, the group bringing a National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) team to Boston in 2026. Miner has spent her life in and around teams—as a star softball player, then as a lawyer for the Red Sox and in minor league baseball, and now for women’s soccer. In sports, Miner learned how to play well with “some people who were very much like me and a lot of people who weren’t at all like me,” something she has taken with her as she builds her legal teams, especially as a woman in the male-dominated field of sports law.

In “Counsel for the Collective,” we discuss multidistrict litigation (MDL), where mass tort lawsuits, such as the 3M earplugs case, are combined for pretrial discovery in order to share costs and maximize efficiency in the court system. In such situations, where dozens or even hundreds of lawsuits might have their own respective counsel, leadership slates are chosen to coordinate each side, meaning some lawyers are elevated and some are sidelined. For this story, we speak to Cari Dawson, a partner at Alston & Bird in Atlanta, who leads the class action and MDL practice group, and Nora Freeman Engstrom, a professor at Stanford Law, who studies complex civil litigation with a focus on plaintiff lawyering. Relating what it’s like to lead a team in such circumstances, Dawson, who regularly acts as national coordinating counsel for mass tort cases, says, “The hardest lesson I had to learn was [being a leader] means asking for help and showing your vulnerability. Because when you’re working with 90 people and you act like you got it all handled, guess what? Those people are less engaged, and they feel less connected and loyal to you.”

Finally, in our “Speaker’s Corner,” David B. Wilkins sits down with Tommy Amaker, coach of the Harvard men’s basketball team, whose message about how to celebrate the individuals with star power as well as the supporting players should resonate for anyone who has been on or led a team. Coach Amaker tells Professor Wilkins:

You would hope that there’s tremendous value assigned to every player, whether that’s a student manager or a player that sits on the bench. We’ll make sure to film our bench in games, because I want our players to recognize how enthusiastic your teammates are on the bench cheering for you and they didn’t get in the game. But they practice every day as hard as you do. I try to show that there is care and value in everyone’s role. Everyone’s role is important to the success of our group.