Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession

Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession The leading research center on the evolving global legal profession

The Center on the Legal Profession (CLP) seeks to make a substantial contribution to the modern practice of law by increasing understanding of the structures, norms and dynamics of the global legal profession. To this end, we conduct, sponsor and publish world-class empirical research on the profession; innovate and implement new methods and content for teaching law students, practicing lawyers an

d related professionals about the profession; and foster broader and deeper connections bridging between the global universe of legal practitioners and the academy.

What happens to the rule of law when the people dismantling it are lawyers?Professor Scott L. Cummings, the Robert Henig...
09/04/2026

What happens to the rule of law when the people dismantling it are lawyers?

Professor Scott L. Cummings, the Robert Henigson Professor of Legal Ethics at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, tells The Practice that this generation of autocrats has learned to consolidate power through "ostensibly legal means"—and that the strategy doesn't work without lawyers to draft the laws and defend them in court.

Read more in our issue on lawyers between democracy and authoritarianism:

David B. Wilkins, faculty director of the Center on the Legal Profession, sat down with Scott L. Cummings, the Robert Henigson Professor of Legal Ethics at the UCLA School of Law, to talk about democratic backsliding in the United States and what the legal profession can do. David B. Wilkins: Why st...

Are lawyers a check on authoritarian power, or part of what holds it in place?Qin (Sky) Ma drew on 81 interviews to find...
09/03/2026

Are lawyers a check on authoritarian power, or part of what holds it in place?

Qin (Sky) Ma drew on 81 interviews to find that criminal defense lawyers in China fell into one of three buckets: reformists who push for judicial change, conservatives who work informal relationships with officials, and a passive majority whose compliance quietly steadies the system.

Read more in our issue on lawyers between democracy and authoritarianism:

Qin (Sky) Ma is a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute, where she studies comparative criminal procedure, law and tech, the legal profession, and evidence law. Sky was a Hauser Postdoctoral Global Fellow at NYU School of Law after she received her S.J.D. from UCLA and Ph.D. in Law f...

Is a single ESG score telling anyone anything useful?Gillian Tett — now Provost of King's College, Cambridge, and then c...
09/01/2026

Is a single ESG score telling anyone anything useful?

Gillian Tett — now Provost of King's College, Cambridge, and then chair of the editorial board and editor-at-large (US) at the Financial Times — told The Practice that the E, the S, and the G pull against each other more often than they align, and that blending them into one number hides the trade-off rather than resolving it.

Read more in our issue on ESG and lawyers:

Gillian Tett, chair of the editorial board and editor-at-large (US) of the Financial Times (FT), joined David Wilkins, Center on the Legal Profession faculty director, to give her insights into the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) phenomenon. Tett is also the cofounder of Moral Money, the...

What does it mean for a practice group when its busiest stretches are the ones where democracy is most strained?Election...
08/31/2026

What does it mean for a practice group when its busiest stretches are the ones where democracy is most strained?

Election law has become one of the profession's fastest-growing practice areas — in 2022 we documented a more than 1,700% increase in the six major party committees' spending on legal services since 2008 — and the lawyers in it are candid that the volume is not good news.

Read more in our issue on election lawyers:

The 2020 election was the most expensive the U.S. has ever hosted, costing $14.4 billion according to OpenSecrets’ analysis of Federal Election Commission data. Election spending ends up split between a variety of needs, including advertising, staffing, organizing, and more. A growing percentage o...

From our archive: Asian Americans are the largest minority group in major American law firms. They are also the least li...
08/28/2026

From our archive: Asian Americans are the largest minority group in major American law firms. They are also the least likely to become equity partners. What explains the gap?

When Eric Chung, Samuel D**g, Xiaonan April Hu, Christine Kwon, and Justice Goodwin Liu of the Supreme Court of California asked that in The Practice in 2018, Asian American lawyers made up 11.37% of associates and 3.08% of equity partners. NALP's 2025 report puts Asian lawyers at 11.70% of associates and 5.17% of partners — still the largest group of color, still concentrated below the top.

Read more in our issue on Asian Americans in the law:

This piece is an adaption of a report of the same name available for download here. Asian Americans are not new to the legal profession. But as we were reminded in 2015 when the California Supreme Court granted posthumous bar membership to a Chinese applicant denied admission in 1890, Asian American...

When is a client's crisis also the lawyer's crisis—and who has a playbook for it?Over half of the top 50 AmLaw firms now...
08/27/2026

When is a client's crisis also the lawyer's crisis—and who has a playbook for it?

Over half of the top 50 AmLaw firms now advertise a practice area with "crisis" in the title. We trace in The Practice how crisis management went from novel to expected.

Read more in our issue on crisis lawyering:

In the last two decades, crisis management has emerged as a distinct practice area for many major law firms. Today, a quick survey of their public websites reveals that over half of the top 50 AmLaw firms now boast practice areas with “crisis” in the title—some, like Sidley Austin and WilmerHa...

AI can already do much of what lawyers do. How do lawyers make themselves irreplaceable?Drawing on 50 interviews with ch...
08/25/2026

AI can already do much of what lawyers do. How do lawyers make themselves irreplaceable?

Drawing on 50 interviews with chief legal officers, law firm partners, legal operations professionals, and non-lawyer corporate executives, Professor Michele DeStefano of the University of Miami School of Law for three value-adds that humans bring over computers: character, client-centricity, and innovation.

Read more in our issue on adding value in the age of AI:

Drawing on 50 interviews with chief legal officers (CLOs), law firm partners, legal operations professionals, and non-lawyer corporate executives around the world, this article posits that the lawyers who will distinguish themselves are those who figure out how to create value-add in an era of AI. T...

In 2010, 75 percent of Americans rated a college education "very important." By 2025, Gallup put that number at 35 perce...
08/24/2026

In 2010, 75 percent of Americans rated a college education "very important." By 2025, Gallup put that number at 35 percent. What changed — the degree, or what we ask it to do? In , we look at how economic uncertainty, political polarization, and AI are rewriting how people are thinking about the value to a degree.

Read more in our issue on adding value in the age of AI:

In the United States, few decisions put the question of value under a brighter spotlight than higher education: a six-figure investment made at age seventeen whose returns may not arrive for decades. But economic uncertainty, political polarization, and advances in AI are rewriting how we think abou...

What has to be in place before a legal department can actually use AI?For Mark A. Smolik, chief legal officer at DHL Sup...
08/21/2026

What has to be in place before a legal department can actually use AI?

For Mark A. Smolik, chief legal officer at DHL Supply Chain Americas, the answer turned out to be years of unglamorous work building their data foundation. "We had the foresight to say we needed information at our fingertips, readily available," he tells Professor Michele DeStefano of the University of Miami School of Law — but "we had no idea" it would leave the department well positioned for AI.

Read more in our issue on adding value in the age of AI:

Michele D. DeStefano, a professor of law at the University of Miami, spoke with Mark Smolik, the chief legal officer at DHL Supply Chain Americas, about how to add value in the age of AI. Michele D. DeStefano: Mark, you’ve always taken an innovative approach to data and knowledge management. Can ...

A lot of DEI infrastructure has come down in the past year. Worth revisiting what much of it never measured in the first...
08/20/2026

A lot of DEI infrastructure has come down in the past year. Worth revisiting what much of it never measured in the first place: whether frontline workers earn enough to support a family.

Professor Zeynep Ton of the MIT Sloan School of Management, president of the Good Jobs Institute, tells The Practice that "DEI should include economic justice" — and proposes two metrics that outlast any program label: what share of frontline workers earn a living wage, and what share of managers were promoted from within, both by race and gender.

Read more and subscribe to The Practice for free:

Zeynep Ton, professor of the practice in the operations management group at MIT Sloan School of Management, spoke with David B. Wilkins, faculty director of the Center on the Legal Profession, about her proposition to businesses to employ the “good jobs strategy.” David B. Wilkins: Almost a deca...

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