Ep: 12?Daniel Rodriguez | Dean of Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law | Futurist | Law School Trends | His Reading List | Legal Tech

***Click here to read or download the transcript, listen to the Podcast Episode***

Here's some highlights of my interview with Daniel Rodriguez:

"...most of us in legal education, and for that matter in the legal profession, believe the changes are structural, not cyclical, which is to say that the glory days, as it were, of big law hiring of many, many, very large number of summer associates and full time associates are on the wane and may never come back."

"[the Innovation Lab] is a multi- broad university venture that involved... a few law students, a few students from the Kellogg School of Management, a few students from the medical school, and a few students from the engineering school." 

"[Regarding Non-Attorney Ownership of Law Firms] Well, for me, the bottom line is it’s a question of when rather than [ if ]."

"...why wouldn’t we want to experiment. What do we think that is so great about the [law firm] status quo that makes us think let’s not even mess with the current model because the current model is the greatest of all possible worlds?"

"...we are training, educating, the next generation of lawyers so that as we in the professoriate encourage our young students and would-be lawyers to think about destabilizing the profession, disrupting the profession, thinking more imaginatively, learning law and business skills, those young lawyers will go into the profession."

"I do fully believe that as a law professor and as an American citizen that it’s incumbent upon me to speak about issues of the day, about views about not only legal subjects, but policy subjects that are important to me."

Links referred to in this episode:

Daniel Rodriguez Bio

NuLawLab by Northwestern University School of Law

Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens - NWU Alum

Trump Pardon's Arizona Sheriff Arpaio

Trump Moves to End DACA

Richard Susskind - Legal Futurist, Author and Consultant

Rules for a Flat World: Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent It for a Complex Global Economy by Gillian Hadfield

Legal Evolution Blog by Bill Henderson, Professor of Law at Indiana University School of Law

Clay Christensen on Disruptive Innovation, Harvard Business School Professor

Alfred Chandler - Business History Professor at Harvard University

Prophets of Regulation by Thomas K. McCraw

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Excerpts from the Episode:

***Click here to read or download the transcript, listen to the Podcast Episode***

Legal Entrepreneurship and the Innovation Lab

Chris:     Tell me about the innovation lab at the law school.

Dan:         Sure. So we developed, really grown out of our entrepreneurship programs at the law school, an innovation lab. And what it basically is is a vehicle by which we can bring together students in our various programs, and I want to, in a moment I’ll mention what those programs are, but in our various programs to develop skills that will be extraordinarily important wherever they go because these are entrepreneurial skills. And I want to be clear in saying it’s not necessarily that these graduates will go out and be entrepreneurs, you know, go to Silicon Valley and create the next Google, although God bless them if they do. But wherever they go into in kind of the legal ecosystem, they will have developed the skills of working in teams, that’s a key part of it, working in teams with one another to develop an approach to solving a particular problem. Maybe the problem is access to justice, maybe the problem is in outreach to small businesses, whatever.

So the phrase de jour these days is design thinking, but I think it’s a key point, which is developing an approach to actually solving particular problems. It’s an iterative process, so they’re problem solving, they are mobilizing legal skills to do that, they are looking at a market, so there’s certain business skills and economic skills that go into that, they are maybe using legal techniques to penetrate into that market, like, for example, patents or intellectual property, all as a process of working together to innovate. I keep saying together in teams because that’s a big part of it.

Now I said in our various programs, and this is a point I really want to emphasize, we have at our law school, and, again, I think you’ve seen this in other law schools as well, we have, of course, the students who are training to become lawyers. These are the students in our JD program. We also have LLM students in our graduate program. These are foreign lawyers from around the world, who bring their own sets of skills and perspectives from there.

We also have a very, very unique program, if I can smuggle this point in, it’s a Master of Science and Law program for STEM professionals. These are folks with strong science backgrounds, technology backgrounds, engineering backgrounds, who are coming to the law school on a one-year program, not to become lawyers, but to have legal education that enables them to prosper in their own careers. They, this, back to the Innovation lab, this is the incubator, where all the students from these various programs working in teams together develop inventions, as it were, to enable them to really prosper.

And that is the future to me. I mean, if I can get on the soapbox. The future is a future where lawyers are working with non-lawyers, folks with other kind of skills, and folks from other countries, and folks with other backgrounds, who speak different languages and I mean that in both a literal and a figurative sense, to develop kinds of skills. We hear that so often from employers. We want young lawyers to hit the ground running and that means the ability to adapt to a marketplace in which multi-disciplinary skills, including skills that involve technology and business, the ability to work in teams, so called soft skills, which is often used as a pejorative, but that means leadership skills and all of that.

Futurist Thinking: Status Quo vs. Non-Attorney Ownership of Law Firms

Chris:      Yes, it would and what better place to have it than within a law school. I love it. I’m just so absolutely intrigued because I feel like there’s so much disruption that is yet to come but is still coming. And it kind of is a good segue into the next question I want to just address, which is just ABA Resolution 105, which is this prohibition against or the discussion, the framework regulation of non-lawyers and ownership interest in law firms. And I just have to mention because we talked earlier about this, I occasionally read Adam Smith, Esquire or Bruce MacEwen’s and his blog and his team, and this month he’s got a survey up. Question of the month, is the prohibition against non-lawyer having an ownership interest in the law firm still a good idea. And the results so far, there’s 96 votes, and 70% of those votes say it’s not a good idea, non-lawyers should invest or should be able to have ownership in law firms and only 20% are saying, no we need to keep it the way it is. What’s your thoughts? I’m fascinated.

Dan:         Well, for me, the bottom line is it’s a question of when rather than whether. I enthusiastically endorse what used to be the radical view, but the poll that you just quoted suggest that maybe it’s not nearly so radical, that we should move, the United States and the legal profession in the United States should move in the direction that you’re already seeing in the UK, in Australia, perhaps pretty soon in Canada and other places, toward what’s often called alternative business structures, but as you identified, it is basically non-lawyer ownership in law firms. I really do believe that.

Now, having said that, as a lawyer and as a certainly someone who is committed to integrity in the legal profession and the ethics, as we all are, there are some tricky issues that are entailed and involved. And I don’t minimize them.

I give credence to so many lawyers in the United States who say we have to adapt our model around the fundamental commitment to law as a profession and the issues that are unique to lawyers and legal ethics. But I think that should not and ought not to be a shield or a bulwark against a movement toward a model of legal practice and law firm practice that acknowledges that law firms are a business and that the engagement by folks outside of law firms in the corporate sector and in the business sector and their money and their involvement in law firms is absolute vital and essential.

I mean, the way I look at it is what’s the status quo. If we maintain the current infrastructure of law firms and the kind of the, I keep coming back to the work silos, this silo mentality, which is law firms are different, thinking like a lawyer is different. It’s an unusual island unto itself. Modern economy is saying that that’s not working out.

Chris:      Yeah, it’s like saying Blockbuster and Kodak is going to be here forever.

Dan:         Exactly. Exactly. I mean, good luck with that. I mean, so being a futurist, whatever that means, comes also with its risk. Is that, do you want to chase the next shiny object? And the answer is no. You have to be wary against trends and against things that are passing fancies, but this is not one of them. A non-lawyer financial engagement with law firms has been going on at around the world, in many parts of the world for a number of years. What do we know? What do we know in the United States in the regulations profession that is so profoundly magical that means that our lawyers in our law firms in the US should be resistant against those trends? I know that’s a rhetorical question, but to me that points clearly in the direction of reform.

I’ll just, just to put a punctuation mark on it, the resolution that you referred to, to be clear, if the ABA changed its regulatory regime with respect to that, it doesn’t require firms take non-lawyer ownership, right? All it does is provide the discretion, the prerogative of firms, so let the market decide. If the market decides that that’s bad for the firms, bad for the profession, bad for industry, then it will be full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

Chris:      You know, when we talk about this subject, I can’t help but think back to an article. It was the main piece in American Lawyer monthly magazine. I think it was 2011 or 2010. And the whole premise was what if a firm went public. And it actually walked you through the IPO process and evaluation process, generally speaking, but it literally had the feeling of, you know, the partner shares now went from X dollars and now has a factor of 10 – 20, whatever it might be because it went public, just the implications of Wall Street getting ahold of the valuation of a law firm is, again, in a whole other conversation that can be pretty wild.

Dan:         Yeah. Exactly right. It’s a complex conversation. It’s one, of course, that has a number of dimensions. I’ll simply say, and I don’t mean this at all glibly, is:

why wouldn’t we want to experiment. What do we think that is so great about the status quo that makes us think let’s not even mess with the current model because the current model is the greatest of all possible worlds?

***Click here to read or download the transcript, listen to the Podcast Episode***