David Wilkins

Law firms that poached attorneys from rivals at record levels in the past two years confront a challenge in preventing the high-priced talent from bolting…

Global law firms that announced plans to close Russia offices after the Ukraine invasion now face the challenge of carrying out their goal while complying with labor, immigration and sanctions laws. Employers that want to fire employees in a closure must navigate a Russia law that generally bars dismissing certain worker classes, such as single mothers, according to labor and employment law firm Littler Mendelson. ... Firms leaving Russia are likely calculating whether they can return there someday, said David Wilkins, director of Harvard Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession, in a written statement. Those decisions “will probably depend upon what—if any—peace deal is struck and whether the firms either can or want to go back to doing Russian work,” Wilkins said.

In a new survey, the majority of corporate legal departments say they are facing rising challenges over environmental, social and governance, or ESG, issues, but they are without clear guidance from regulators and lack the expertise, resources and support from the C-suite to handle the risks. As the range of ESG risks expands, a whopping 99% of general counsel respondents said they expect a sharp increase in volumes of work, according to a study released today by EY Law and the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession. ... Professor David Wilkins, vice dean for global initiatives on the legal profession and faculty director of the Harvard Center, said in a Law360 interview that he shares Grossman's view of the general counsel's predicament. "A lot of these issues are ending up on the general counsel's desk in the form of a crisis," Wilkins explained, such as an employee walkout at Disney World last month, or investor demands for leadership change, as happened at ExxonMobil last year when several directors were ousted.

The U.S. Senate will soon consider an antitrust bill aimed at restricting Big Tech's search practices, and the clash between Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Cooley LLP leads to ethical questions about when a law firm is duty-bound to ignore a big corporate client's wishes. These are some of the stories in corporate legal news you may have missed in the past week. ... Law professor David Wilkins, director of the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession, said based on the story's facts that such a request was "absolutely outrageous." Clients can ask to remove an attorney they don't like from working on the clients' matters, Wilkins told Law360 Pulse, but they have no right to ask a firm to fire the lawyer.

The widening revenue gap between a handful of legal titans that pull in billions each year and other law firms will only continue to grow, experts say, resulting in a market consolidation that will likely give them a competitive advantage even over their BigLaw peers. The 10 law firms with the highest gross revenue accounted for nearly 29% of the total $98.7 billion in revenue posted by the 129 firms that supplied or confirmed revenue data for Law360 Pulse's Prestige Leaders report. ... Firms that grow rapidly may not necessarily stay profitable or boost revenue if they acquire various assets that have different levels of profitability. "Just ask our old friends at Dewey & LeBoeuf," said David Wilkins, faculty director of the Center on the Legal Profession and the Center for Lawyers and the Professional Services Industry at Harvard Law School. ... "There are a lot of firms who embarked on an incredible acquisition spree to grow themselves and have grown themselves into unprofitability or failure because of it," Wilkins said.

Big Four accountancy firms have abandoned plans to ‘be like law firms only bigger’, instead focusing on work that traditional City firms turn down in a drive to disrupt the market, a report has found. ...‘The Big Four can offer a far higher integration of technology, project management and process management; they employ a huge number of people across a huge range of specialties and they are way more global than even the most global law firm,' said report author David Wilkins, professor of law at Harvard Law School. 'This is why, for many kinds of issues that companies face, it’s a very attractive offering'.  

CEOs are frustrated. They seek greater transparency from their legal departments to understand and control their risk management programs. General counsel are frustrated in turn: they say they do not have the technology or data to do so, according to an Ernst + Young report published earlier this month. Sixty-one percent of the CEOs interviewed for the report said they would like their legal departments to take a more data-driven approach to their legal department’s risk management practices. David Wilkins, professor of law and faculty director at the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said the number of risks CEOs have to worry about is growing. At the outset of the pandemic, for example, legal departments struggled to go through contracts to find force majeure clauses and pull out the necessary information that could prevent litigation flowing from business disruption. Those pandemic-related risks are coupled with cybersecurity and data privacy risks. On top of it all, comes a patchwork of state and international laws governing how consumer data can be used.

African innovators have shown creativity and ingenuity in finding solutions to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, but face legal barriers to safeguarding their intellectual property. There have been 192 innovations directed at COVID-19 from Nigeria alone, as well as more than 90 from South Africa, it was revealed during a webinar hosted by Harvard Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession, and digital platform Africa.com. “One of the things COVID-19 has done is to underscore the importance of innovation in societies that have been viewed as lacking the intellectual capacity to deploy innovation,” said Professor Ruth L. Okediji of Harvard Law School. “Many innovations in Africa lack the protection necessary to make business models scalable and meaningful.” The webinar brought together top legal minds to discuss Law and crisis management: Working with lawyers in business, government and society to manage the challenges of COVID-19...David Wilkins, Faculty Director at the Center on the Legal Profession, started off with a brief presentation on the role of lawyers in society, reminding participants that one of the continent’s greatest freedom fighters, Nelson Mandela, had been a lawyer. “We tend to think of lawyers as technical appliers of the law…Lawyers must also be counsellors to help clients make decisions that are not only legal but also right…Lawyers must also be leaders who play a critical role in leading key organizations,” Wilkins said.

2040. Sure, it sounds like a long way off, but in a quick two decades today's law students and fresh-faced associates will be the ones presiding over a legal industry that could be almost unrecognizable from the one we see today. Just consider the massive amount of change that has happened since the turn of the century. The iPhone has put lawyers on a shorter tether to clients and given associates and judges alike a legal library in the palm of their hands. The recession and globalization have given in-house counsel a higher standing in the legal hierarchy and driven BigLaw firms into a race to get bigger and cover more international ground, all while upending the traditional partnership track. “My own sense is that the change we have seen over the last 20 years is likely to look very small compared to the changes coming over the next 20 years,” said David Wilkins, director of Harvard University’s Center on the Legal Profession.

India has the potential to be one of the premier countries for legal practice and legal education, said Professor David B. Wilkins of Harvard Law School. The Indian bar, therefore, should not be afraid of competing with lawyers from around the world, both here in India and abroad, he said. Wilkins, Vice Dean, Harvard Law School, who was here to deliver the convocation address of O P Jindal Global University, said that while regulatory barriers might have been necessary at a certain point to allow India''s commercial legal profession to develop, it is a mistake to believe that such restrictions can exclude competition from foreign lawyers in the long run. "Foreign lawyers have already made significant inroads in the Indian legal market through ''fly-in-fly-out'' policies, and technology will only allow these existing inroads to grow. As a result, it is better for the Indian bar to meet the competition head on, especially given the significant increase in the capabilities of Indian law firms over the last several years," he said. Wilkins went on to say that the fears of many Indian lawyers about liberalising the legal market are likely to be exaggerated. "It is unlikely that many foreign law firms will want to set up offices in India," Wilkins noted, "and those that do will only practice commercial law".

Speaking to Adv. Avani Bansal (for Live Law), Professor David Wilkins shared his thoughts and opinion on Rule of Law, its challenges, Globalization and Legal Profession in India. He had recently published his book, 'India Legal Profession in the Age of Globalization' and pointed out that the book was as part of a larger project, Globalization Lawyers & Emerging Economies (GLEE) that he is associated with. He said that one of the reasons why he was attracted to study in India (working on the project) was that according to him, among the BRIC countries, India has the deepest and strongest commitment to Rule of Law and India is undergoing tremendous  transition. Therefore the study of evolution of Rule of Law in a rapidly developing country like India is interesting.

It is a question that thousands of lawyers have faced for decades: can you be a mother and still make partner? Last year, just over half of entrants to law school in the US were women; in Britain, it was two-thirds. Yet in 2018 women made up just 19 per cent of equity partners in British law firms, according to PwC, the consultancy, while a McKinsey study from 2017 showed the same figure. The generally accepted issue is the choice many women face between partnership — on call 24/7 and under pressure to generate business — or starting a family. At the same time, says David Wilkins, director of the Center on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School, there are limited equity partnership positions as many firms look to cut costs. These factors combine to have “a disproportionate impact on women because they still bear the majority burden of childcare and childraising, and the sole burden of childbearing,” he says.

Global law firms are turning the tables on the Big Four accounting firms’ incursions into the legal industry by setting up consultancies that assist clients with non-legal matters...“Every managing partner I know of is trying to figure out how they’re going to compete with the Big Four,” David Wilkins of Harvard Law School told Bloomberg Law. “They know they’re coming.”

...In a recent article written with Maria Jose Estaban, David Wilkins, director of the Center on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School, declared: “Reports of the death of the Big Four’s legal ambitions have been greatly exaggerated.” For one thing, as Prof Wilkins points out, we have been here before. In the 1990s, the then Big Five (today’s Big Four, plus Arthur Andersen) made a concerted effort to move into the legal market. That attempt foundered in the wake of the Enron scandal, in which Arthur Andersen was centrally implicated and which led to its disintegration in 2002. The so-called Magic Circle law firms grew rapidly as the remaining Big Four drew in their horns. “The legal profession thought they’d banished [the Big Four] to Middle Earth,” Prof Wilkins says. “But in fact they reformulated their strategy to take advantage of changing dynamics.”

“When you think about the legal profession, what is remarkable is how little it has fundamentally changed over such a long period of time,” says David Wilkins, faculty director of the Center on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School. Law has been resistant to some of the bigger changes sweeping the world economy. Globalisation, the rise and speed of new technology, including mobile technology — “all these things are transforming the economy, but they aren’t transforming us”, says Prof Wilkins. “Law is a lagging indicator.”

The 60-plus Harvard Law School professors who filed into an auditorium-style room on the first floor of Pound Hall on that February 1993 afternoon had a significant question to answer: Should they offer a job to Elizabeth Warren?...The Globe examined hundreds of documents, many of them never before available, and reached out to all 52 of the law professors who are still living and were eligible to be in that Pound Hall room at Harvard Law School...“By the unwritten rules that most schools played by at the time, none of this should have happened,” explained Bruce Mann, Warren’s husband of 38 years, who joined her for the interview with the Globe. “Law faculties hired in their own image. . . except for those rare occasions when someone came along that was just so stunningly good that they couldn’t ignore her.”...She dazzled Andrew Kaufman, a Harvard Law School professor who recalled meeting her at a conference she organized at the University of Wisconsin Law School in the mid-1980s. “I was blown away,” Kaufman said, recalling his first interaction with Warren. “I thought she was a real whiz.”...“The views had a lot to do with the methodology she was using,” recalled David Wilkins, a Harvard Law professor who voted to offer Warren a job. “Was it the right methodology?” ...“She was not on the radar screen at all in terms of a racial minority hire,” [Randall] Kennedy told the Globe. “It was just not an issue. I can’t remember anybody ever mentioning her in this context.”...“It had nothing to do with our consideration and deliberation,” said Charles Fried, the former solicitor general to president Ronald Reagan and a member of the Harvard Law School appointments committee at the time. “How many times do you have to have the same thing explained to you?”

Vice President Yemi Osinbajo is in the United States to deliver a lecture at the Harvard University, Boston, USA on “Africa Rising” course at Harvard Business School. Osinbajo, while at Harvard, would also engage in marathon meetings at the Ivy League School. Harvard described the lecture as ‘a historic moment’ as it would be the first time that an Africa-focused course would be offered at Harvard Business School...He also would have lunch with the Harvard Law School Students and Faculty at the Harvard Law School. Osinbajo would then hold meeting with Prof. David Wilkins and tour the Centre on the Legal Profession and Nitin Nohira, Dean, Harvard Business School at the university.

“The quality of Indian law firms and Indian lawyers at the top of the market is as good as anywhere in the world. That is an important point to emphasise,” said David Wilkins, professor of law at Harvard Law School. Wilkins was making the point that India’s legal sector is ready for the entry of foreign law firms, in a phased manner. A move that has been contemplated by a succession of Indian governments over the years and continues to be an imminent possibility. Indian law firms will have to fight their foreign counterparts harder over talent than clients, Wilkins added. The Harvard Law School - Center on the Legal Profession, of which Wilkins is the faculty director, has recently completed a six-year-long study on the impact of globalisation on India’s legal profession. The book tracks the rise of India’s corporate legal sector and its impact on the economy and society.

An interview with David Wilkins. ...Most recently, Professor Wilkins and his team have been working on studying the development of legal profession following the liberalisation of various economies, and will be visiting India this month. In this interview with Bar & Bench’s Varun Marwah, Professor Wilkins talks about how India’s legal profession, in its post-liberalisation development phase, while borrowing several practices from the West, has also retained several characteristics that are uniquely Indian.

As tough as it is for black lawyers to rise to the top in law firms, it’s even tougher for black female attorneys. Though black women have outnumbered black men in law schools for about two decades, they constitute only a fraction of the already tiny number of black partners at major firms: Less than two percent of Big Law partners are black, and 0.56 percent are female and black. Black women are the minority within the minority. Even the best-credentialed black female lawyers seem to fare poorly. According to a new Harvard Law School study of black alumni, male black alums were more likely to be partners than their female counterparts...“Black women have all the problems of black men plus what white women face,” says Harvard Law School professor David Wilkins, the author of the study about black alums.

An article by Nicholas Bruch, David Wilkins, and Maria J. Esteban Ferrer. Many falsely believe the Big Four were kicked out of the legal industry in the early 2000s. The Economist even went so far as to state, after the Enron scandal drove regulators to limit the range of legal services audit firms could provide, that "accountancy firms' drive in the legal arena is dead." Such reports—as Mark Twain once famously said when he was informed of a rumor of his own death—were greatly exaggerated. There is increasing evidence that law firms are finally waking up to this reality.

A program at the University of Baltimore School of Law recruits African-American undergraduates to confront the disproportionately small number of black lawyers in the U.S....David B. Wilkins, faculty director for the Center on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School, said the gap is especially pronounced when looking at the most prestigious and highly paid positions, such as law firm partners. What makes people think our legal system is fair, in part, is when they believe all views are represented, Wilkins said. “If an important demographic in our country feels less valued in the profession, this is going to make the system seem less legitimate, particularly to black Americans.”...A report by the Center on the Legal Profession about black graduates of Harvard’s law school took a deeper look at African-Americans working in the legal profession. Surveying virtually all of the law school’s living African-American graduates, the report looked at their current jobs, career trajectories, levels of satisfaction and attitudes on race relations.

We know the number of blacks in the profession is still abysmal, but what about those who graduate from tippy-top law schools? Do they enjoy an advantage? The short answer is yes—with qualifiers. That's the finding of Harvard Law School's 2016 study of its black alumni authored by Harvard law professor David Wilkins, the report takes an exhaustive look at the career patterns of black graduates from 2000-2016, painting a picture that's both hopeful and ominous...In fact, respondents to the survey rated HLS's prestige factor (the "H-Bomb") as "extremely important" to their career advancement, outranking all diversity initiatives. "It provides credential and network—and those things are way more important if you're black," says Wilkins.