As Generative AI has marched through law practice since late 2022, law schools and legal educators around the world have scrambled to adapt: what new skills do law graduates need to thrive today and looking ahead?
And overall, they’ve gotten the answer wrong.
Online, in classrooms, and in faculty meetings, law professors have resolved to equip their students with basic facility with AI systems and related technology for gathering, analyzing, and deploying data. That’s easier said than done in practice; in practice, the transition is akin to retrofitting a semi-trailer truck with the nimbleness and speed of a Formula 1 racecar. But that’s the path that the academic profession seems to be set on: teaching lawyers to work the virtual steering wheels, throttles, and gearing of massively complex, fast moving, and opaque IT systems. Employers – a category that includes large corporate clients as well as private law firms – seem to be egging all of this on. To law schools, the message is: give us more well-behaved junior technocrats.
As those systems get better, faster, and much more useful than they are today, new lawyers trained to be good technocrats may find themselves not simply out of jobs but, more important, out of careers. The 20th century lawyers’ career path offered hands-on practical training to junior lawyers that led eventually, if not always directly, to status as a senior elder whose judgment and wisdom were the coin of the field. The 21st century lawyer who starts a career working with data will only get better … at working with data. Where will the new generation of wise seniors come from?
Here's my different vision.
For the last dozen years, I’ve been teaching leadership to my students. “Leadership” is, in my case, a broad label that includes introductions to a host of human skills – not simply so-called “soft skills,” but the range of critical connecting, communicating, collaborating, and judgment-generating skills that all professionals know are fundamental to professional success from day 1 to day last – not just lawyers.
I walk my students through an abbreviated history of the 20th century legal profession and changes wrought by 21st century demands (the broadening of client and social need, expansion and competition in modes of delivering legal services and information) and tools (data analytics and now Generative AI). Together, we explore the roles of creativity, imagination, and curiosity in understanding the roles of the contemporary and future professional. I introduce students to emotional intelligence concepts. We explore the critical importance of understanding collaboration and team-based projects. We talk about how “leadership” in practice means understanding and enabling others to thrive. Conflict resolution is a critical theme; so are systems and feedback loops; we spend little time on “problem solving” and focus instead on risk assessment.
Because contextual learning always drives the lessons home best, as a group my students and I explore our own experiences with each of these concepts (like any good teacher, I share some my own experiences), often recapturing practices that might previously have been dismissed as trivial or irrelevant and translating them as leadership lessons. I have leaders among my students – section leaders in the marching band, sales managers for small businesses – who learn to see themselves in a different, broader light.
Those are conversations and skills that law schools, like many professional education programs, have long given lip service to but rarely followed through on. Virtually every law school in the US claims that they train “leaders,” but only a handful put real faculty and curricular power behind the claim.
Even among that handful of law schools, “leadership” means different things, in the hands of different teachers and deans. To some, it calls to mind reviving an older, almost romantic view of lawyers as civic leaders, personifications of personal and community virtue and the rule of law. Leadership education in that spirit leans heavily on ethical norms, on codes of professional responsibility, and the call of the 2007 Carnegie Report on legal education to infuse legal education with training in “professional identity formation.” To others, leadership emphasizes that fact that some number of law graduates will end up in corner offices and managing partner roles, in small and large private law firms, in corporate law departments, and in public sector and nonprofit organizations. Leadership education in that spirit leads heavily not only on ethics but also on life at the top of the proverbial heap.
My vision for leadership aims instead helping all students succeed on their own terms. My goal is to help new lawyers build a suite of capabilities that will help them find their own ways in the world, whether as practicing lawyers or otherwise, and – importantly – will help them help others do the same. That’s the definition of leadership that I’ve adopted: find your voice, and help others find theirs. Training students to be “better at AI” trains them to steer eventually into career dead-ends – unless their career ambition bends toward tech, rather than law. Training students to be “the best humans they can be” trains them to steer toward opportunity. And even for the tech-motivated students, leadership skills are essential.
The great thing about separating “leadership” from “law” in that way and separating “leadership” from “life at the top” is that it opens the door to training everyone in the skills that all professionals should have: collaborating and communicating effectively; developing and using EQ; targeting and recognizing success; and understanding and adapting to failure and loss. In my world, there is nothing “special” or distinctive about lawyers as leaders, or about lawyer-leaders.
Technological and economic changes to the legal world are catalysts for that vision of leadership development. Look around the practice of law today, and you’ll see technology and economics rapidly and massively changing both the boundaries of what counts as “law” in the first place and what counts as “legal” – the shorthand for critical functions in business organizations – in the second place. “The legal profession” simply is not what it once was.
Training new lawyers in leadership skills equips new graduates not simply to accept the profession as it has existed to this point and not simply to accept the roles that they step into when they begin careers. Leadership skills help those new lawyers to see and understand the systems changes that are happening all around them, including how those changes pay off via changing expectations in specific workplaces. At best, leadership skills will, in time, help those same lawyers not simply respond or react to change (a key concept behind “resilience” training, part of many leadership curricula) but also to participate in planning and driving change. That practice and those skills are keys to building successful, productive, and useful careers – and lives.
In worlds increasingly defined and processed by technology, including new and evolving legal worlds, human presence and human contributions will matter more than ever, even if where and how they will matter is – presently – not always easy to see, and not always given simply by how they have mattered in the past.
I am fortunate to have had my own deep training and practice in the leadership skills that I now share with my students; few law professors have equivalent or even similar personal histories. So, what I teach and how I teach it is, in some ways, unique to me. But I take every opportunity I can to share my vision and my practice, and I am always eager to talk with anyone who is interested in picking up any portion of what I do and running with it however they think best.
To that end, my leadership curriculum is fully open and online and can be found here. That includes the content of readings and other assignments. A short law review essay that describes my motivation and personal history was published in the Tennessee Law Review in 2016 and can be found here.
I look forward to learning from you.
Professor Michael Madison is Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. He is a Senior Scholar with the University of Pittsburgh Institute for Cyber Law, Policy, and Security (Pitt Cyber). At Pitt Law, he is Faculty Director of the Future Law Project and a John E. Murray Faculty Scholar.
He is a principal investigator of the Workshop on Governing Knowledge Commons global research collaborative. He is a founder and leader of Future Law Works, an independent corps of volunteer leaders focused on re-institutionalizing legal education and the other institutions of the legal system. He is an affiliate faculty member with the University of Pittsburgh Center for Governance and Markets. From time to time, he publishes The Future Law Podcast, together with Dan Hunter, dean of the Dickson Poon School of Law at King’s College London.