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David Wilkins

  • Big Law Talent Poachers Wrestle to Keep Star Hires on Board

    August 29, 2022

    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…

  • An illustration of Lady Justice in white blindfolded with a mask to prevent COVID which is represented by red dots scattered around

    Practicing Law in the Wake of a Pandemic

    July 15, 2022

    ‘Everyone is struggling to understand what this new world is going to look like’

  • Russia Office Closures ‘Incredibly Difficult’ for Big Law Firms

    April 11, 2022

    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.

  • Survey Says New ESG Risks Add To Pressures On Law Depts.

    April 8, 2022

    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.

  • a vertical combined image of five HLS black lawyers

    ‘Lawyering and justice in a world that we know is riven by injustice’

    March 22, 2022

    “This is a unique moment, particularly to be a Black law student,” Harvard Law School Professor David B. Wilkins ’80, told an audience of students during a talk titled Black Lawyers Matter — Race, Obligation, and Professionalism from the Civil Rights Movement to BLM and Black Corporate Power.

  • GC Cheat Sheet: The Hottest Corporate News Of The Week

    January 24, 2022

    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.

  • BigLaw’s Big Guns Of Revenue Keep Growing

    December 15, 2021

    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.

  • Illustration of three business people wearing face masks and using a giant umbrella to shield themselves and a giant earth from a rain of viruses.

    ‘Don’t just be a lawyer. Be a strategist’

    November 10, 2021

    The Center on the Legal Profession convenes experts from public and private sectors for a day-long symposium on crisis lawyering.

  • One woman and two men speaking at a meeting (one of the men is President Obama)

    In the Situation Room

    October 5, 2021

    Professor David B. Wilkins, faculty director of the Center on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School, recently sat down with Jeh Charles Johnson, a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP who served as the secretary of Homeland Security from 2013 to 2017 during the Obama Administration.

  • Big Four muscle in on new type of City work

    September 3, 2021

    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 Want Data-Based Risk Management; GCs Lack the Tech to Do So.

    April 19, 2021

    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.

  • Collage of people working from home

    Going remote

    March 3, 2021

    Ten Harvard Law School faculty share a behind-the-scenes look at their Zoom studios and the innovative approaches they employed to connect with students.

  • Molly Brady wearing a bright red jacket sits in front of a computer and teaches her class in Zoom

    2020 in pictures

    January 5, 2021

    A look back at the year at HLS.

  • Judge Julie M. Lynch presides over a courtroom remotely

    Online courts: reimagining the future of justice

    December 4, 2020

    Even if there was no COVID-19, online courts would still be the wave of the future: This idea was the starting point for a recent webinar, “Online Courts: Perspectives from the Bench and the Bar,” a half-day event convened by the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession.

  • grid of headshots of speakers at Gantz tribute

    Remembering Justice Ralph D. Gants: ‘A living example of what lawyers can do to make our world better’

    October 29, 2020

    Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Chief Justice Ralph D. Gants ’80 wasn’t just a legal giant, a pride to Harvard Law School and a tireless advocate for social and racial justice. He was also, as former Governor Deval Patrick ’82 put it, “a mensch.”

  • Radhe Patel ’20 with family

    Pomp and Circumstance

    July 21, 2020

    On May 28, 2020, Harvard Law students gathered to celebrate their graduation. The gathering did not take place at the foot of Langdell Hall, but rather in living rooms and backyards worldwide, from Cambridge to California, from New Zealand to the Netherlands, at all hours of the day and night.

  • Lawyering In Crisis: African Countries Among Innovation Leaders Against COVID-19

    June 5, 2020

    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.

  • David Wilkins

    Sacks-Freund winner David Wilkins: “I have no doubt of the amazing things that you will achieve for yourselves and for our world.”

    May 28, 2020

    The Class of 2020 chose Professor David B. Wilkins ’80 to receive the Albert M. Sacks-Paul A. Freund Award for Teaching Excellence.

  • Four black men (Harvard Law's first black graduates)

    Celebrating Black History Month: A look back at historic firsts

    February 24, 2020

    Professors Annette Gordon-Reed, Kenneth Mack and David Wilkins discuss the Harvard Law School's first black graduates and the legacy of African Americans at HLS throughout the years.

  • BigLaw 2040: What Will Happen When Gen Z Is In Charge?

    February 10, 2020

    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.

  • Glenn Cohen with Chris Bavitz at Petrie-Flom Center General Counsel Roundtable

    Health care general counsels explore pressing health policy and legal issues at Harvard Law School

    December 11, 2019

    The General Counsels Roundtable helps influential health law attorneys stay on top of or even ahead of changes in health law and policy. The roundtable connects GC to experts at HLS and the broader university, while also strengthening ties between faculty and legal practice.