The Advisory Board
Industry Studies
The Center’s Research
The Center on Lawyers and the Professional Services Industry is the only academic enterprise of its kind in the country devoted to the empirical study of legal practice and the delivery of other professional services.
Harvard Law School established the Center in 2004 to help both scholars and practicing lawyers better understand the transformation of legal practice from a profession traditionally made up of small independent firms to a multi-billion dollar global business. The Center has three primary objectives: conducting and sponsoring empirical research on the central questions facing the legal industry; training the next generation of lawyers and leaders in thoughtful consideration of these questions; and fostering closer ties between academic researchers and professionals in the field.
Globalization has shifted priorities in many industries, including legal practice. Once dominated by specialized independent firms, the industry is becoming increasingly characterized by global firms that compete for business around the world. These firms go beyond litigation and offer a wide range of corporate consulting and advisory services – often through joint ventures. At the same time, “non-legal” professional services firms now offer quasi-legal services, creating increased global competition. These trends will increase over time as international agreements on trade in services take root and the traditional barriers to the delivery of legal and professional services on a global scale continue to fall.
The Center investigates the effects of such market changes on legal practice and conducts cutting-edge empirical research in this rapidly changing field. It also develops academic and professional curricula aimed at enabling the next generation to succeed in the global marketplace and fosters closer ties between academic researchers and professionals in the field.
The Center’s faculty and Executive Director work collaboratively with Harvard Business School, the American Bar Foundation and practicing lawyers to bring relevant insights to the field. A blue chip advisory board comprised of twenty top business leaders, managing partners, general counsels, bankers and consultants is integrally involved in the Center’s activities, helping to establish a results-focused research agenda and advising on the development of future projects.
The Center is guided by a blue chip advisory board comprised of twenty top business leaders, managing partners, general counsel, and leading bankers and consultants from key sectors of the legal and professional services industry. The board offers significant judgment, experience, and ideas that are essential to the Center’s success.
The advisory board is a key aspect of one of the Center’s primary goals of forging a strong, interactive connection between the academy and the profession. The multidisciplinary nature of the group also represents the Center’s commitment to match the self-understanding of professional service firms with new global realities and to dispel traditionally-held notions that professions such as law, accounting, investment banking, and consulting are distinct endeavors with little or no relationship to each other.
The present composition of the board includes:
- Ralph Baxter, Chairman and CEO, Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP;
- Anthony Chase, Chairman and CEO, ChaseSource;
- Kenneth Chenault, Chairman and CEO, American Express Co.;
- John F. Cogan, Jr., Of Counsel, Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr;
- John R. Ettinger, Managing Partner, Davis, Polk & Wardwell;
- Stephen Gates, former Senior VP and General Counsel, ConocoPhillips, currently Senior Counsel, Mayer Brown LLP;
- Lena Goldberg, Executive VP - Strategic Corporate Inititives, Fidelity Investments;
- Sean M. Healey, President and CEO, Affiliated Managers Group;
- Benjamin W. Heineman, Jr., former Senior Vice President, General Counsel, and Secretary of the General Electric Company, currently Distinguished Senior Practitioner Fellow, Harvard Law School Program on the Legal Profession;
- Robert D. Joffe, Partner, Cravath, Swaine & Moore;
- Lewis Kaden, Vice Chairman, Citigroup;
- Robert Katz, Senior Director, Goldman Sachs & Co.;
- William Lewis, Jr., Managing Director and Co-Chairman of Investment Banking, Lazard & Co.;
- Vincent Maffeo, Senior VP and General Counsel, ITT Corporation;
- Raymond J. McGuire, Co-head of Investment Banking, Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.
- Adebayo O. Ogunlesi, Chairman and Managing Partner, Global Infrastructure Partners
- Paul N. Roth, Senior Partner, Schulte Roth & Zabel LLP;
- Cyril Shroff, Managing Partner, Amarchand & Mangaldas, Mumbai, India;
- Robert Shuftan, Managing Partner, Wildman, Harrold, Allen & Dixon LLP; and
- Avy Stein, Co-founder and Managing Partner, Willis Stein & Partners
The Center contributes to the understanding of the role of lawyers and other professionals within the wider setting of the United States and global economy as a Sloan Industry Center. “Since 1990, the Sloan Foundation’s Industry Studies program has been founded on the belief that industries are sufficiently different from one another that they individually deserve rigorous and deep academic study. The industry studies community is composed of scholars who deeply understand industries by taking a direct approach to the companies and people of each industry for data and observations.”
The Center’s most recent contribution as a Sloan Industry Center was a detailed written analysis of the professional services industry and the legal profession. Our Sloan Industry Report forms part of Sloan’s larger effort to develop a clearinghouse of industry resources that will assist the media in accurately addressing the modern challenges of the U.S. economy.
The Center has several major research initiatives underway:
Corporate Purchasing
The Center’s Corporate Purchasing Project explores the ways in which legal departments assess, purchase, and manage outside legal services. The purpose of this research is to develop fair and unbiased information about how large corporations make these important decisions in order to improve how legal services are provided in the future and to educate law students and legal professionals.
Through literature review, focus groups with corporate counsel, qualitative interviews, and quantitative surveys, the research aims to identify and quantify the decision-making process by which companies monitor, assess, and measure the quality of the legal services they receive, as well as how those efforts impact their choices of which law firms to retain and dismiss.
Click here for more information on the Corporate Purchasing Project.
After the JD
This longitudinal study tracks the professional development of more than 4,500 lawyers during the first ten years after law school. Center researchers and their colleagues at the National Association of Law Placement and the American Bar Foundation seek to understand how legal careers are launched, the environmental and skill-related factors that help lawyers succeed, and the ways in which characteristics such as race, ethnicity and gender affect a lawyer’s professional experiences.
Click here for more information on the After the JD Project. |
