Professor David Wilkins
The following story appeared in the Fall 2006 Harvard Law Bulletin, “Managing the Profession”— an issue focused on HLS’s Program on the Legal Profession.
Thirty-five years ago, most lawyers were white men, few law firms counted more than 100 lawyers, attrition was low and clients were loyal. Attorneys didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about how to market themselves or manage large organizations, let alone how to compete with lawyers abroad.
Today, most lawyers practice in huge institutions—whether in private firms, corporate legal departments or government entities—for clients who demand a full range of sophisticated legal and related services. Technology has spawned the virtual law office, so that lawyers may work for clients they never meet and for whom they face aggressive worldwide competition. And, as women and people of color join the profession in record numbers, white men find themselves a shrinking—though still dominant—percentage.
“The legal profession is undergoing a profound transformation—most dramatically in the large-firm setting—and the jury’s still out on where it’s going to settle,” says Kirkland and Ellis Professor of Law David B. Wilkins ’80, director of Harvard Law School’s Program on the Legal Profession.
Survival in this new legal world means adapting fast. Yet there’s been little academic attention paid to these transformations, and a dearth of hard data or reliable guidance on what to do about them.
But that’s about to change. Understanding the new trends and what they mean for practitioners and the wider world is the goal of a new program, the Center on Lawyers and the Professional Services Industry, launched in 2004 as part of the Program on the Legal Profession. The center draws on faculty and practitioners affiliated with HLS, Harvard Business School and the American Bar Foundation, and is the first of its kind to study and provide guidance on the serious challenges facing the profession today.
“No other law school in the world is doing anything like it on this scale and with this commitment,” says Wilkins, director of the new center. “There hasn’t been a major effort by a law school to really examine the transformation of the global market for legal and other professional services.”
The center will focus on three areas: empirical research on what’s happening and why, new approaches to training law students so they can successfully navigate the changing environment, and a vigorous effort to bridge the long-standing divide between the academy and the profession by bringing in top practitioners as advisers and, in return, providing them with training and guidance on the problems they face in the real world.
“There is a crying demand for this,” says Ashish Nanda, a former associate professor at HBS who will be directing research at the center and teaching in a pilot program for executive education of managing partners and leaders of law firms. “Before, law firms were primarily small professional partnerships. They are now large organizations which face the challenge of being a high-quality professional service provider and running a large, complex business effectively.”
Practitioners, especially at large firms and other major professional service providers such as investment banks, confront new and daunting challenges. Many law firms face a breathtaking 25 percent turnover each year as the “old bargain” of the past—in which long-term loyalty to a firm was rewarded by partnership—is no longer the norm. At the same time, global clients demand extremely complex services at competitive prices.
“This is a profession with a lot of nervous breakdowns going on, especially in private practice,” says Ben W. Heineman Jr., General Electric’s former senior vice president for law and public affairs, who, as the program’s first Distinguished Senior Fellow, is writing on topics such as the changing role of corporate general counsel. “Diversity, globalization, how to run a law firm, how to run corporate legal departments, how to integrate foreign-based attorneys with domestic attorneys—there are innumerable issues the profession faces today. The purpose of the center is to study these because that has not been done well enough.”
Law schools have been remiss in providing much-needed resources to students and practitioners during this period of transformation, Wilkins believes. “These changes in the legal profession have a wide-sweeping effect on not just law students and practitioners but also the public, and we have an obligation to contribute to knowledge about the issues in a way we uniquely can do—through unbiased, systematic data—so we can give society the best-trained professionals we can,” he says. “There’s a real hunger on the part of practitioners for some disinterested, detached examination of the issues they face, which is something that only people in an academic setting, away from the day-to-day pressures of practice, can do.”.
New research
How do major corporations purchase legal services today? That’s the focus of a major research project under way at the center, led by Nanda, an international expert on professional service firms, and Coates, who, in addition to being a leading scholar in corporate law, was a partner at the New York firm of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen, Katz before joining the HLS faculty.
“There used to be long-term, enduring relationships between law firms and companies,” says Wilkins. Many firms were housed in the same building as their primary corporate client. “Over the past 30 years, we know those long-term relationships have broken down in many ways.”
Today, companies purchase services in a wide variety of innovative ways, many of them springing from new technologies. “There’s a range of things going on, from spot contracting and online auctions bidding out legal work to the creation of new kinds of relationships where some companies have a list of 50 law firms they use for everything, and it’s very hard to get on that list,” says Wilkins. “And once on it, companies make a lot of demands: that the law firms must be networked together, create virtual teams and so on. We know there’s a lot going on out there, but we don’t know the full extent of it or why it’s happening.”
The project is particularly focused on how companies measure the quality of legal services. “When they say, ‘We get the best,’ what do they mean?” Wilkins asks. “How much is driven by the relationship between a company’s general counsel and a law firm? Is it particular expertise they’re looking for, and how do they evaluate that?”
Michele Beardslee