In this issue of The Practice, we look at how AI might reshape the structure of the legal profession and the delivery of legal services. It extends a conversation The Practice has been having since ge...

When you pull up the Google Books Ngram Viewer, which allows you to search for how often sequences of words appear in digitized books over time, and plug in “age of AI” or “era of AI,” you see the sam...

The following is an excerpt of the book, Law in the Era of AI: Clients, Firms, and the Future of the Legal Industry (pp. 1-2, 9-11). It is reprinted with permission from its publisher Wiley (2026). A ...

On Zoom, Gerald Abila turns his computer screen around, unblurs the background, and asks, “Do you see? There’s Winnie.” Abila sits in Kampala, Uganda, where he runs an NGO, BarefootLaw, trying to reim...

David B. Wilkins, faculty director of the Center on the Legal Profession, sat down with Richard Susskind, the profession’s leading scholar on AI and law, to talk about the future of the profession. David B. Wilkins: As we celebrate the 30th anniversary of your pioneering book, The Future of Law, and you rerelease it with additional reflection […]

Harvard Law School

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 Cente...

The year 2020 has been marked with no less than three acute crises: a public health crisis in the form of the global COVID-19 pandemic; a financial crisis linked to the economic fallout from the publi...

When Michelle Hanlon was 20 years into her career as an M&A attorney, her 11-year-old son came to her with a question: Could he, one day, legally mine asteroids in space? He had grand ambitions, and h...

In this conversation, Robert Couture, a senior research fellow at the Center on the Legal Profession, speaks to Seyfarth Shaw Chair and Managing Partner-Elect Lorie Almon about how she sees strategy a...

David B. Wilkins, faculty director of the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession, spoke with Lisa Pruitt, who has been writing about the intersection of rurality and the law for nearly two ...

This article is adapted from an article, “Enhancing the Validity and Fairness of Lawyer Licensing: Empirical Evidence Supporting Innovative Pathways,” in the Washington University Journal of Law & Pol...

Disability cause lawyers have long played an important role in the global disability rights movement. Some scholars have defined disability cause lawyers as lawyers who spend a significant amount of t...

This article was adapted from a longer paper originally published in the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics (Volume 33, Issue 4, Fall 2020). You can view that paper here. All citations can be found he...

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 Mos...

This article is adapted from the originally published article “The Power Five: The Making of Newsworthy Deal Teams,” found in Vanderbilt Law Review En Banc, volume 77, issue 1, article 6. See the full...

David B. Wilkins, faculty director of the Center on the Legal Profession, sat down with Scott L. Cummings, the Robert Henigson Professor of Legal Ethics at the UCLA School of Law, to talk about democr...

Gillian Tett, chair of the editorial board and editor-at-large (US) of the Financial Times (FT), joined David Wilkins, Center on the Legal Profession faculty director, to give her insights into the en...

The 2020 election was the most expensive the U.S. has ever hosted, costing $14.4 billion according to OpenSecrets’ analysis of Federal Election Commission data. Election spending ends up split between...

This piece is an adaption of a report of the same name available for download here. Asian Americans are not new to the legal profession. But as we were reminded in 2015 when the California Supreme Cou...

In the last two decades, crisis management has emerged as a distinct practice area for many major law firms. Today, a quick survey of their public websites reveals that over half of the top 50 AmLaw f...

Drawing on 50 interviews with chief legal officers (CLOs), law firm partners, legal operations professionals, and non-lawyer corporate executives around the world, this article posits that the lawyers...

In the United States, few decisions put the question of value under a brighter spotlight than higher education: a six-figure investment made at age seventeen whose returns may not arrive for decades. ...

Michele D. DeStefano, a professor of law at the University of Miami, spoke with Mark Smolik, the chief legal officer at DHL Supply Chain Americas, about how to add value in the age of AI. Michele D. D...

Zeynep Ton, professor of the practice in the operations management group at MIT Sloan School of Management, spoke with David B. Wilkins, faculty director of the Center on the Legal Profession, about h...

Sonya Branch is the general counsel of the Bank of England and executive director of its Legal Directorate. She joined Richard Moorhead, a professor of law and professional ethics at University Colleg...

Flavia Santos Lloyd, founder and managing attorney of Santos Lloyd Law Firm, P.C., approaches immigration law much like she approaches life: she has a plan A, B, C, and D. “I like when people say, ‘Oh...

Rakesh Khurana is one of the world’s leading thinkers on professions and their role in society and the author of From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools...

Roughly 90 percent of law students surveyed by the American Bar Association and the AccessLex Institute indicated they had borrowed money to complete their legal education. On average, students borrow...

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, justic...

David B. Wilkins, faculty director at the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession, spoke with Dr. Rochelle Walensky, who served as the 19th director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control a...

In the Harvard Law School case study “Slater & Gordon,” John C. Coates and Ashish Nanda, both professors at Harvard Law School, and Monet A. Brewerton look at the history of the world’s first publicly...

The following is derived from Heineman’s newly published book, The Inside Councel Revolution: Resolving the Partner-Guardian Tension (Ankerwycke 2016), available now on Amazon. Over the past 30-plus y...

In 1986 the Whitman-Walker Clinic, a medical practice focused on the needs of LGBTQ individuals in Washington, D.C., hired its first in-house lawyer to help “write wills, secure disability benefits, a...

Harvard Law School

In early February, the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program (HIRCP) issued a new report, documenting the more than 14,000 times that immigration detention facilities had placed migrants in...

A version of this article also appears in the UC Davis Law Review volume 51, issue 5 (June 2018), under the title “From Idealists to Hired Guns? An Empirical Analysis of ‘Public Interest Drift’ in Law...

In the United States, few decisions put the question of value under a brighter spotlight than higher education: a six-figure investment made at age seventeen whose returns may not arrive for decades. ...

Michele D. DeStefano, a professor of law at the University of Miami, spoke with Mark Smolik, the chief legal officer at DHL Supply Chain Americas, about how to add value in the age of AI. Michele D. D...

In June 2026, 60 leading general counsel and senior legal operations leaders from companies around the United States came together at Harvard Law School to tackle a common but difficult question: How ...

Drawing on 50 interviews with chief legal officers (CLOs), law firm partners, legal operations professionals, and non-lawyer corporate executives around the world, this article posits that the lawyers...

This article is derived from a more expansive work later published in The Business Lawyer, volume 75, issue 1 (Winter 2019/2020). The full paper is also available on the Social Science Research Networ...

How do judges learn to be judges—and what do they learn along the way? When they take the stand on day one, what type of preparation brought them to that point—and was it sufficient? How do experience...

In the last decade, a number of states have explored licensing paraprofessionals to provide legal advice in civil (and sometimes criminal) matters or adopting community justice worker models. But Nati...

This article is based on research and content published in our book, Big Law: Money and Meaning in the Modern Law Firm, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2021. What holds law firms toget...

What factors drive judicial decisions? The determinants of judicial decisions are of obvious interest, not only to attorneys but to a wider public. In recent years, for instance, there has been much d...

This article is adapted from my article “Cannabis Law Practice” in Tulsa Law Review 60 (forthcoming 2024). Cannabis law practice, a new field emerging following the legalization of medicinal and recre...

In March, Salesforce president and chief legal officer Sebastian Niles put out an open letter, How Law Firms Can Lead the Agentic AI Era — And What Clients Now Expect. He recently sat down with David ...