Diversity

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All law schools have what they need to achieve this important goal.

[Editor’s note:  Many law schools are doing innovative things these days, yet it’s hard to overcome the narrative that nothing in legal education ever changes.  I’m often reminded of this fact when I discover important and thoughtful innovations by my own colleagues at Maurer Law.   Legal Evolution is publishing this “how-to” piece on diversifying adjunct faculty to help scale a working solution to an important problem.  By the way, Legal Evolution will definitely consider essays on innovations at other law schools. wdh]

One continuing challenge for law schools is to improve faculty diversity, particularly for schools located in non-urban areas.  This short essay describes how a collaborative strategy at Indiana University Maurer School of Law, which is located in Bloomington, leverages alumni talents across the country to expand opportunities to hire a highly accomplished and diverse adjunct faculty.
Continue Reading Building and sustaining a diverse adjunct faculty (291)

How can we keep up with exponential increases in demand and complexity?  Invert the pyramid.

Bill Henderson once advised me not to use the term “industrialization” to describe changes in the legal profession to attorneys. It offends us, and we disengage. But I titled this field note “industrial evolution” because we must embrace industrialization as a necessary and valuable part of our transformation that will elevate the value of our profession in a digital age. Cf. Post 231 (Henderson breaking his own advice for the same reason, comparing legal to the early days of the auto industry).

This post is part of a series that reflects my legal industry learning journey, building upon my career journey (080), professional evolution (143), focus on knowledge work (159), and future practice design theory (210). This installment examines the changes happening now that require us to evolve to serve a civilization experiencing exponential change powered by the fourth industrial revolution, and how we might get there faster, together. See Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (2016) (cognitive automation will produce creative destruction).
Continue Reading Legal evolution is industrial evolution (277)

Diversity is indeed associated with higher law firm profits.  To accept this fact, the profession needs to understand why.

Figure 1 above reports expected changes in average partner compensation at different levels of racial diversity among attorneys in large law firms.  These results come from an “all else equal” model that accounts for differences in a multitude of other relevant factors, such as geography, leverage, and firm prestige.

The key takeaway? Within the large firm market, firms with higher shares of Asian, Black, Hispanic, and Multiracial attorneys (“diverse attorneys”) are paying their partners higher average levels of compensation—at about a $260K premium for the firms with the highest diverse representation.
Continue Reading Nothing not to like: diversity and law firm profitability (238)

bio card for Elmer Thoreson

[Editor’s note: The IFLP archives include several student profiles that document the impact of the program on students’ lives.  With the students’ permission, the IFLP leadership team wanted to share these with a broader audience. Regarding Elmer Thoreson, after three weeks at the IFLP Boot Camp at Northwestern Law in the spring of 2018, he …

Without effective communication principles, advanced statistics are useless. Some of my key lessons from the field.

The graphic above provides a breakdown of 2018 law school graduates with diverse race/ethnicity backgrounds. Each hand represents 100 JDs. The colors represent four different categories in the U.S. News law school rankings. Thus, the Tier 3/4 schools have the largest number of diverse race/ethnicity graduates—4,500 JDs, or about 45% of all diverse 2018 JD grads. Likewise, only 1,300, or 13%, attended elite T-14 schools, which is clear, useful information for legal employers who have urgency regarding diversity.
Continue Reading How to talk data and influence people, including lawyers (137)

Seven steps to create a first-tier tech team

Three years ago this month, the law firm I work for was founded. See 35 Lawyers and Staff Spin Off to Launch Litigation Boutique Tanenbaum Keale LLP, BusinessWire, January 25, 2017.  To get Tanenbaum Keale (TK) off the ground, there were a ton of moving parts to manage.  But one of the most important was development of a technology support team that could fully support the firm’s strategy for being one of the nation’s premier mass tort litigation firms.
Continue Reading A roadmap to build a tech team to support legal operations (135)

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The legal profession’s commitment to diversity has a credibility problem.

Since the early 2000s, law departments and law firms have advanced ambitious public initiatives to diversify the legal profession. In law firm power centers, however, the disconnect between public proclamations and empirical reality is staggering.
Continue Reading Credible commitments to legal diversity (114)