Law Schools, Technology

'Teach, Lead, And Transform': The Future Of The Legal Profession

Joining an emerging trend in legal education, Penn Law launches an innovative and important new initiative.

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(courtesy of Penn Law)

What does the future hold for the legal profession? Nobody knows for sure, of course — but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be thinking about it. To the contrary, lawyers who want to succeed today should be thinking about what law and legal practice will look like tomorrow. And law schools, the institutions responsible for training the lawyers of the future, must be thinking about what the legal landscape will look like — and how they can best prepare their students for it.

It’s promising news, then, that more than 30 law schools have launched innovation centers. We have been covering this emerging (and encouraging) trend here at Above the Law for quite some time, and we expect (and hope) it will continue.

The latest entrant into the field has an especially impressive approach — and we’d expect nothing less from one of the nation’s top law schools (according to both Above the Law and U.S. News). It takes a holistic, interdisciplinary approach to innovation, not narrowly focused on legal tech (wonderful as legal tech might be), and it boasts involvement from some of the most innovative individuals in the entire legal profession.

Today, the University of Pennsylvania Law School announced the launch of its new Future of the Profession Initiative. As explained in Penn Law’s press release, “The Initiative will ‘Teach, Lead, and Transform,’ by examining new ways law schools can adopt a holistic vision for the formation of lawyers – both during law school and throughout their careers.”

What does the Initiative include? It’s an ambitious offering. Just at launch — expect it to grow and expand in the years ahead — the Initiative will feature a “Five-Year-Out Academy,” to support the career development of Penn Law graduates entering a pivotal stage of their careers; a Dean’s Innovation Prize competition, to reward and encourage exceptional ideas for innovating in legal service delivery; a “Future of the Profession” symposium, to bring together thought leaders from the legal sector and other industries; an entrepreneurs-in-residence program; and the launch of a podcast featuring conversations about change.

What prompted the launch of the Initiative? As Dean Ted Ruger explained, “Change in the legal field is accelerating as technology evolves, new entrants join the industry, the practice of law becomes more globalized, regulatory frameworks governing lawyers shift, and attorneys approach their careers differently. As a result, law school applicants, students, and graduates are thinking in new ways about how they imagine their careers, underscoring the need for a solution that promotes innovation, thought leadership, and enhanced interdisciplinary education and engagement.”

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The Initiative’s mission therefore includes, but is not limited to, legal tech. It will look at legal tech, and innovation in law more generally, with an eye towards advancing such crucial goals as bridging the justice gap and promoting lawyer well-being (which Penn Law, to its credit, already integrates into its Professional Responsibility curriculum).

To be sure, many other law school innovation centers take a similar approach. As Dan Linna, current Director of Law and Technology Initiatives at Northwestern Law and former Director of LegalRnD at Michigan State, explained to me last year in ATL’s Law2020 podcast, the potential for legal tech to address the justice gulf is vast.

So what makes Penn Law’s initiative stand out? To my mind, what generally fuels success in both law and tech: the talent.

The Initiative will be led by Jennifer Leonard, Penn Law’s new Chief Innovation Officer — how many law schools have CIOs? (answer: not enough) — and the first Executive Director of the Future of the Profession Initiative. Leonard has a background that seems tailor-made for her new role.

As a 2004 graduate of Penn Law who has been a faculty member and administrator at the school since 2013, Leonard knows the institution well and is intimately familiar with all of its existing work in the innovation space. Prior to returning to Penn Law, she clerked for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, worked as a litigation associate at Montgomery McCracken, and served as Chief of Staff in the City of Philadelphia’s Law Department — experience in government and private practice that gives her a firsthand understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing lawyers today.

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I interviewed Jen Leonard yesterday about the Initiative, and she couldn’t be more excited: “It’s fun, it’s collaborative, it’s new, and I can’t think of something I’d rather be doing than this.”

Leonard has been thinking about innovation in law and education for years now — certainly since she returned to Penn Law in 2013, but even before then, dating back to her time in practice. So when Dean Ruger asked her to lead a task force in innovation and entrepreneurship in the spring of 2018, she jumped at the opportunity, and the Initiative grew out of the task force’s work.

Leonard will be supported by a Board of Advisors that’s a veritable Murderers’ Row of legal leaders and innovators: Legal Services Corporation President Jim Sandman L’76, Dechert partner and former Philadelphia City Solicitor Sozi Tulante, ProBono Net’s Claudia Johnson L’97, LawVision Principal Susan Raridon Lambreth L’83, EY Managing Director Joe Borstein L’05, Hunton Andrews Kurth CFO Madhav Srinivasan WG ’89, Burford Capital Managing Director David Perla L’94, and award-winning legal innovator Aaron Katzel L’97.

All are Penn alumni themselves except for Sozi Tulante — a Harvard Law grad, and a longtime Lecturer in Law at Penn — and many of them should be familiar to Above the Law readers. Joe Borstein and David Perla are longtime contributors to ATL, and almost all of the others have been mentioned in these pages for their pioneering work in the innovation space.

I spoke yesterday about the Initiative with Joe Borstein, whom I’ve known for years — before his time as an ATL columnist and going all the way back to his days at Pangea3, when he and David Perla were revolutionizing ediscovery and legal managed services — and he couldn’t contain his excitement.

“Penn is the ultimate interdisciplinary school, with a world-class law school, business school, medical school, programs in economics and psychology — and when it comes to integrating innovation across disciplines, there’s no one equal to Penn,” he said. He described himself and his fellow board members as “like kids in a candy store, excited to have the backing of an institution like Penn as we use innovation to improve the practice and profession of law.”

Congratulations to Penn Law on the launch of the Future of the Profession Initiative. Predicting the future is notoriously difficult, but I’m willing to bet that the Initiative will be a smashing success.

Penn Law Announces New ‘Future of the Profession Initiative’ Focused on Legal Education Innovation, Profession-Wide Thought Leadership
[Penn Law (press release)]

DBL square headshotDavid Lat, the founding editor of Above the Law, is a writer, speaker, and legal recruiter at Lateral Link, where he is a managing director in the New York office. David’s book, Supreme Ambitions: A Novel (2014), was described by the New York Times as “the most buzzed-about novel of the year” among legal elites. David previously worked as a federal prosecutor, a litigation associate at Wachtell Lipton, and a law clerk to Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. You can connect with David on Twitter (@DavidLat), LinkedIn, and Facebook, and you can reach him by email at dlat@laterallink.com.

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