Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession

10/20/2026

In 2015, we asked whether lawyers and companies can do good while doing well. Here are a few recommendations we document in The Practice:

→ Counsel on what the law should be, not only on what is currently legal, and weigh prudential and moral factors alongside the technical answer.
→ Listen systematically to critics and stakeholders, and treat spending on ethics as a long-term investment.
→ Build a culture of integrity through compliance programs, evaluations that reward good citizenship, and leaders who model the values they expect.

Ben W. Heineman Jr.’s point remains salient: “the foundation of capitalism has to be high integrity.”

Read more in our issue on professionalism in the 21st century and check out more stories from The Practice archive:

It’s well known that in September 2008, AIG—the world’s biggest insurer—declared bankruptcy. Less remarked is that lawyers played a role in its downfall. The lumbering giant’s fall came as a result of selling investments, known as collateral debt obligations, or CDOs, that contained subpri...

10/19/2026

In 2021, Tracey Yurko, chief legal officer and corporate secretary of Bridgewater Associates, told Professor David B. Wilkins of Harvard Law School how her department brought law firms and PwC together into what she called “the virtual law firm.”

Five years on, with AI reshaping legal work, does that model still hold? Could the next version of an “ecosystem of service providers” be built very differently?

Read more in our issue on law firm responses to the Big Four:

David B. Wilkins, faculty director of the Center on the Legal Profession, spoke 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. David Wilk...

10/16/2026

What do lawyers do as democracies decline? Professor Kathryn Hendley of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who studies the Russian legal profession, offers a few answers in The Practice:

→ The belief that lawyers are essential to democracy is, in her words, “a very U.S centric view.” Elsewhere, lawyers’ roles look quite different.
→ Lawyers who see themselves as technicians, not counselors, may find it easier to let backsliding.
→ Resistance may persist even in countries where lawyers view themselves as technicians, but might look like small actions: as quiet as finding errors in investigators’ paperwork.

The takeaway: The profession doesn’t defend democracy automatically. It depends on what lawyers believe their role to be.

Read more in our issue on lawyers between democracy and authoritarianism:

The Lawyers and Declining Democracy (LADD) project brings together scholars studying the role of lawyers in resisting authoritarianism in countries with backsliding democracies. In 2024, the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession hosted many LADD researchers at Do Legal Professions Resist...

10/15/2026

What is lost when a community’s history goes unrecorded, and who takes on the work of recording it?

Julieanna Richardson, founder and president of The HistoryMakers, left the traditional law firm to build an archive of first-person oral histories of African American leaders. When it began, she tells The Practice, “nearly a century of African American achievements and struggles had gone undocumented.”

Read more in our issue on portraiture in the legal profession:

In “John Robinson Wilkins and the Resources of the Law,” David B. Wilkins explores the lives of the lawyers who came before him—his uncle, father, grandfather, and others. In “Following in Their Footsteps,” we used quantitative data to examine questions of intergenerational professional le...

10/15/2026

Join us TODAY at 12:20 pm in-person at Harvard Law School in WCC 1015 for a conversation with Jingzhou Tao on "Recent Changes in Foreign and Chinese Legal Practice in China." Lunch provided!

10/14/2026

In 2019, Trevor Faure, CEO of Smarter Law Solutions and former general counsel at EY Global, laid out a practical argument for how clients and law firms could work together better. A few points from his piece in The Practice still matter:

→ Price may not tell you much about quality. In one comparison of law firm costs against expertly graded advice, Faure found “the absence of any pattern.”
→ Using fewer firms can pay off. Moving work to a smaller group of firms produced “reductions of between 27 and 40 percent in overall costs with improved quality.”
→ Incentives can work for both sides. One client paid its law firm $4.75 million for work worth $350,000 in billable time, and it still saved a net $73 million over 18 months.

His bottom line is that “only results make one approach smarter than another.”

Read more in our issue on smarter relationships in legal services:

The future starts on Monday morning How many legal conferences and articles on “The Future of [Something]” or “The [Something] of the Future” can there be? The legal profession may indulge in buzzwords and shiny tech trends because they distract from the hard and relatively dull essentials o...

10/13/2026

When a law firm fails, is debt usually what sinks it? Not according to Dan DiPietro, then chairman of the Law Firm Group at Citi Private Bank. In conversation with Professor David B. Wilkins of Harvard Law School, DiPietro traces failing firms back to “some disconnect between leadership and the partners."

Read more from The Practice archive on why law firms collapse:

Dan DiPietro is the chairman of Citi Private Bank’s Law Firm Group. DiPietro recently 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. David B. Wilkins: We have both seen a numbe...

10/09/2026

How might AI reshape the structure of the legal profession—and whom will it serve?

The latest issue of The Practice takes up that question with Bjarne Philip Tellmann on AI-transformed clients, Richard Susskind in conversation with Professor David B. Wilkins on the future of law, and more.

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10/08/2026

How might AI reshape the legal profession? Our new issue of The Practice asks what structure and rules it needs, how it could better serve people who struggle to get legal help, and what history can teach us:

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 generative AI arrived in 2022, and it is also part of a larger conversation about technology and ch...

10/07/2026

Tech leaders have compared AI to electricity, fire, and the printing press. We asked historians what those analogies miss. A few things we document in The Practice:

→ Invention or innovation is not the same as diffusion. The electric dynamo was invented in the early 1800s, but it took until the beginning of World War I to reach even 50 percent use.
→ Not everything is speeding up. "Your toilet's not changing faster than ever," says Professor Lee Vinsel of Virginia Tech. Digital technology can move fast, but much of the world around us "is fundamentally old and has been relatively stable."
→ Inevitability is a rhetorical choice. It's "a sleight of hand to distract people from who is actually making the choice," says Professor Eric Schatzberg of the Georgia Institute of Technology. That means "governments and big tech companies."

As Professor Jo Guldi of Emory University puts it, "this is not the first time people have faced a technology crisis or an information crisis."

Read more in our issue on the AI restructuring:

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 same sort of graph: a relatively flat line for 200 years, then a sharp jolt up […]