Miami in February. Sunhine. Mojitos. Superbowl Party. Contracts.

Yes. All of these things go together.

Registration is Now Open for Future Contracts Miami!

We’re thrilled to announce that the University of Miami School of Law will host the inaugural Future Contracts Miami conference on February 10-11, 2025!

Featured Topics

How AI is reshaping contracts for law firms and in-house

How UM Law is preparing future lawyers in the age of AI

The rise of contract standardization

Featured Speakers

Darryl Chiang, Director of Legal at Google
Juliet Astbury, Corporate Practice Leader, Dentons
Isabel Parker, Chief Innovation Officer, White & Case
Kyle Pankratz, VP Legal Operations, Mastercard
and so many more!

Event Details

February 10th-11th, 2025

University of Miami Shalala Student Center
1330 Miller Drive, Coral Gables, FL  33146

Featured Event Sponsors

Law Insider
HarveyAI
SimpleDocs

Exclusive Alumni Tickets

Thanks to our sponsors, we’re able to offer 40 FREE all-access passes* (including the Super Bowl Watch Party on Sunday, February 9th): 
 
Register here for your complimentary ticket

See you in Miami!

In my final post on the subject of “respectability” of lawyers (the first four can be found here, here, here and here), I’d like to tie my thoughts together, discussing what the various parties can do to make Bird and Orozco’s thesis of assimilation of lawyers into corporate business teams the “new normal”.  This should give lawyers more career opportunities in the future, slow the loss of influence of the legal profession in businesses, and make legal education a more attractive choice.  Much of the discussion in academia has ignored the in-house counsel approach as being a viable option for the woes of the legal industry.  Below the fold, this post will discuss the roles that academia, in-house counsel, and business firms each may play in increasing the potential for success of a new model for business lawyers.

In my first post of this series, I asked whether business leaders had unknowingly provided the legal industry with a long-term solution to declining interest in the legal profession and potential waning influence.  I suggested that business leaders may be the driving force that ends up saving the legal profession.  In my second and third posts, I discussed the current state of in-house attorneys and law firms.  Today is my birthday, so it is a great present to be able to share my view on the future of the legal profession, and how shifts may occur. 

Eventually, corporations can (and most probably will, in my view) evolve their thinking about “legal strategies” (as Professors Bird and Orozco suggest) to the point that lawyers are essential resources in developing sophisticated corporate planning. In order for this evolution to take place throughout the business world to any great degree, it will take time, experience, and success with the legal strategy concepts.  In other words, lawyers must become valuable not only for their legal skills, but also because they have inherent business talent resulting from advanced training. 

 

If this conversion is to occur, companies

In my first post of this series, I asked whether business leaders had unknowingly provided the legal industry with a long-term solution to declining interest in the legal profession and potential waning influence.  I suggested that business leaders may be the driving force that ends up saving the legal profession, and its "respectability".  In my second post, I discussed the current state of in-house attorneys.  In this post, I would like to look at the current state of private firms as it relates to the in-house attorney discussion.  My view is that the competitive marketplace reactions of a growing number of firms are partially contributing to the dimming of their own future prospects.  Firms will need to evolve rather quickly; how they can, I’ll discuss in a future post.  However, because of the firms’ relatively weaker position compared to corporations, many firms are in very precarious circumstances.

In this interim period between past firm dominance and the future corporate acceptance of Professors Bird and Orozco’s “corporate legal strategy” (in which attorneys are fully accepted and integrated as part of business teams in corporations, resulting in greater legal opportunities), firms are struggling.   From my discussions with attorneys, I have learned that

In my last post, I asked whether business leaders had unknowingly provided the legal industry with a long-term solution to declining interest in the legal profession (based on the drop in applications to law school) and potential waning influence.  I suggested that business leaders (inadvertently or otherwise) may be the driving force that ends up saving the legal profession.  I would like to take the discussion one step further.

There is no doubt in my mind that, historically, companies rarely did much legal training for the lawyers they hired.  They simply bought talent—usually by offering employment to attorneys with private practice experience that was valuable to the corporation.  Sometimes this worked extremely well, and sometimes it failed miserably.  Why? Business leaders sometimes possess only basic knowledge of what quality legal talent really looks like (after all, they usually are not lawyers themselves).  Moreover, they often have difficulty finding a lawyer who can operate in a corporate environment and have high-level legal skills.  The “a lawyer is a lawyer” mentality still prevails. 

Adding to the difficult situation is that private firm attorneys often view corporate attorneys as those who could not flourish in private practice (for whatever reason—lack of skill, drive

I sincerely appreciate the opportunity to post!  I have been following this blog for some time with great interest.  I hope to bring a third perspective—not as an academic, nor a private firm practitioner, but as an employee of a company who happens to be a lawyer. 

A few weeks back, Professor Heminway posted, and I commented, on the difficulty good law students have in finding jobs.  I made the point that the law is in a state of transition—firms are becoming smaller, but more opportunities are arising within corporate models.  Over the past 20 or so years, attorneys have gradually become more integrated in the corporate world, and we have seen the number of positions with firms gradually decline in comparison.  

As part of this mainstreaming of lawyers into the business model, lawyers are becoming more and more part of business teams, not walled-off in legal departments.*  By incorporating lawyers into operational divisions, have businesses “humanized” lawyers, making them more accepted and respected?  Will this growing engagement and familiarity, with lawyers as co-workers in the business environment, lead to greater opportunities for all lawyers, including those in private practice?  The answer is, maybe, possibly.  It’s complicated.  Allow me to