In the first few months of 2025, the United States has seen a near-ban on TikTok, a new presidential administration, a shifting geopolitical landscape, an uncertain economy, unprecedented changes to the federal bureaucracy, and legal challenges lurking around every corner.
Harvard Law Today asked David Wilkins ’80, Lester Kissel Professor of Law and faculty director of the Center on the Legal Profession to predict what the rest of 2025 might hold for the legal profession and how lawyers and law students can prepare to meet this increasingly complex world. This is Part I of a two-part interview.
Citing a series of rapidly evolving trends and issues including AI, the profession’s approach to diversity, tensions related to hybrid work, and a host of real-world problems that are increasingly being seen through the lens of the law, Wilkins says that we “are seeing a world of increased risk, instability, and uncertainty, but also one with new and exciting opportunities for lawyers.”
Harvard Law Today: We spoke at the beginning of last year and you predicted a number of changes for the global legal profession — around AI and its rise, hiring, geopolitical conflict, and more. We are only three months into 2025, but it already feels like lawyers, and others, are contending with a world and a profession in flux. Before we get into specifics, do you have any broad predictions for the legal profession as we confront the rest of the year?
David Wilkins: When we spoke in early 2024, I predicted the year would hold a lot of change, but as often is the case, these changes have exceeded even my own expectations. Over the course of the rest of 2025, I believe everything we were worried about in 2024 will only accelerate. But just as our worries grow, so will the opportunities. We are seeing a world of increased risk, instability, and uncertainty, but also one with new and exciting opportunities for lawyers.
Here’s some things to watch out for:
The first, of course, concerns AI — and technology generally. This past year saw even more activity in this space than I expected — both positive and negative. And we are likely to see even more activity in 2025, with significant increases in both the capabilities of these technologies and the corresponding challenges associated with their use.
Second, debates over diversity in the profession and what — if anything — can and should be done to achieve this goal are clearly going to intensify over the coming months. This is partly a function of the new administration, which has made its disdain for anything that might possibly be characterized as “DEI” abundantly clear. But as we head towards the nation’s sestercentennial, debates over how to build a legal profession that is capable of ensuring fundamental rights, driving economic progress, and protecting the rule of law for all citizens in a large, complex, and pluralistic democracy will — and should — extend far beyond reacting to any particular policy initiative or Supreme Court decision.
Third, the rest of the year will certainly see more — and even more bitter — fights about remote or hybrid work, and the future of the workplace generally. Since 2020, employers have been struggling to manage the tension between employee demands for the flexibility of remote work and the equally strong desire by many managers that workers be in the office. Although the weakening of the economy and the unexpected influx of federal workers coming into the market as a result the Trump administration’s layoffs and firings may now be giving employers the upper hand, it still seems unlikely that we will return to anything like the 2019 workplace and will therefore be in a hybrid environment for the foreseeable future.
Fourth, these changes are taking place against the backdrop of a host of new challenges — sustainability, cybersecurity, geopolitical risk, new technologies, inequality, migration, governance, and the rule of law — that are increasingly “legalized.” And yet, law is only part of addressing these critical issues.
Finally, as we speak, the Trump administration has issued several Executive Orders, Memorandums, and other edicts specifically targeting several individual lawyers, leading law firms, and the legal profession generally. These orders raise serious issues about the right to counsel, particularly in cases against the government, which is a bedrock principle of the rule of law that has consistently been endorsed by all lawyers throughout history and across the political spectrum. Given this widespread consensus, it is not surprising that the administration’s actions in this area have already generated considerable controversy, as well as ongoing litigation, about their intent, scope, and effect. It is too early to tell how these controversies will be resolved — and new orders are being issued every day. But it is already abundantly clear that debate over the legality of these and other similar executive actions, and their implications for core ideals of professional independence and the role of lawyers that have been central to our constitutional democracy since its founding, will be front and center for lawyers, law schools, and the legal profession in 2025. I will have much more to say about these critical issues in the near future.
HLT: So, what does this all mean for the legal profession and legal education?
Wilkins: The good news — at least for lawyers! — is that all these issues will increase the demand for lawyers with the skills, expertise, and judgment to help clients across the public and private sectors navigate these complex problems. The challenge will be that there are a growing range of providers from the Big Four [professional service companies] to legal tech companies to consulting and investigation firms to DIY platforms competing to fill this demand. In 2025, lawyers will face even more pressure to navigate this increasingly competitive ecosystem of providers and to learn to work collaboratively with a diverse range of professionals and stakeholders to craft “integrated solutions” to the problems their clients face.
This, in turn, will put growing pressure on law schools to equip graduates with the skills and dispositions they will need to operate in a world that will only become more “VUCA” — volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. Needless to say, I am not predicting that law schools will radically change in the coming years — nor should they. Indeed, the traditional analytic reasoning skills of “thinking like a lawyer” are going to be even more important in world where many basic legal tasks are done by ChatGPT. At the same time, it will become increasingly clear that, in addition to thinking like lawyers, graduates will need to learn to think like “multidisciplinary problem solvers.” In the coming year, we will see more law schools trying to prepare students for this new reality.
In other words, we’re in for another exciting year!
HLT: Last year, half of our conversation with you focused on AI. You talked about how it might transform the practice in both good and bad ways. Do you think we’ve begun to see those changes? Is AI living up to the hype or is it falling short?
Wilkins: Even last year, many organizations were very skeptical about whether they were going to embrace AI tools at all. There were still many organizations that were instructing their staff not to use them, and the focus was on the dangers, such as confidentiality, hallucinations, litigation around copyright, etc. Those challenges haven’t gone away, but I don’t know of a single organization in the legal space that is not actively embracing AI in one way or another.
Every day we see new tools and new customizations. In the next year, many people are predicting we are going to see dramatic increases in capability. Having said this, while AI agents and digital workers will undoubtedly replace some jobs in the legal ecosystem — it is far too early to tell exactly how many — the most important development in the next twelve months will be humans learning to work with these new technologies rather than being replaced by them.
HLT: How are you and your colleagues at Harvard Law preparing for AI-driven changes?
Wilkins: The Center on the Legal Profession is engaged in a number of projects to explore this critical dimension. For example, we have been working with Professor Anthea Roberts from Australia National University, who is also a frequent visitor at Harvard Law School, on how lawyers might use her model for complex decision making in an increasingly VUCA world. The framework moves beyond balancing risks and rewards to focus on “resilience” — the fact that even a good decision today can undermine the resilience of key institutional and human resources that can make it more difficult tomorrow. There is a constant danger of being overwhelmed by all the complexity and reverting to heuristics that we know are incomplete or flat out wrong. To guard against this tendency, Professor Roberts has developed an AI-assisted model that can help decision makers think through the interactions and tradeoffs among risk, rewards, and resilience. She developed this framework for government officials facing complex challenges in international relations, but when Professor Roberts explained what she was doing, I immediately thought that lawyers would benefit from what she has dubbed “Dragonfly Thinking” — the ability to incorporate multiple perspectives into a single coherent vision — particularly general counsels who are frequently called upon to make decisions at the intersection of law, business, politics, and a host of other factors.
In April, we put this hypothesis to the test and invited top general counsels and leading lawyers to come to Harvard Law for a workshop around Professor Roberts’ framework. We are now working with Professor Roberts and others to explore how new technologies can help lawyers navigate the increasingly complex challenges that they and their clients will confront in the coming year and beyond.
HLT: Speaking of complexities, let’s talk about that second point you made: the challenge to diversity, equity, and inclusion, often referred to as DEI, which crystallized with the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard but has become even more contentious in the first few months of the Trump administration. How are lawyers responding and what does it mean for the profession?
Wilkins: For the last 60 plus years, the legal profession has embarked on an effort to try to move beyond its exclusionary roots. Prior to the mid-1960s, with only a handful of exceptions — and virtually none in prestigious positions — law was the exclusive domain of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant men of means. We should be proud that we have made substantial progress in moving beyond this clearly exclusionary past. But we still have a long way to go. Continuing to strive to create a legal profession that is open to all people of talent is critical in a multiracial democracy that is committed to the rule of law.
I believe that most Americans — and certainly most lawyers — understand and endorse the effort to build a legal profession that is open to talented entrants from any background and that engenders a trust that our legal system will be administered fairly according to the principle carved above the entrance to the Supreme Court: “Equal Justice Under Law.” Unfortunately, the way we talk about this goal — and the means we have used to achieve it — have become increasingly controversial.
To transcend this impasse, it is critical that we move beyond rhetoric to examine the actual impact of the lawyers from previously excluded groups who have entered the legal profession in small but significant numbers in the seven decades since Brown v. Board of Education. We should justly celebrate that these lawyers — often against long odds and overcoming many obstacles — have achieved success at the pinnacle of private practice and public service and have transformed virtually every sector of our profession, our country, and the world. This success has important implications for how we define and evaluate “merit,” helping us to attract, develop, and retain outstanding law students and lawyers with the skills, judgment, and experience that we will need to confront the complex challenges of the coming decades. At the same time, we should use this moment to develop more effective solutions for protecting the millions of people who have no meaningful access to justice and the protection of the rule of law.
HLT: Can you share any examples of efforts that might be underway?
Wilkins: The center will be taking up both of these critical charges in the coming year. On September 12-14, 2025, we are working with the Alumni Office and other interested groups to host the 5th Celebration of Black Alumni (CBA). As has been true since the first CBA in 2000, the celebration will be open to all alumni and will highlight the role that the Law School’s Black graduates have played in advancing legal, economic, political, and social rights for all Americans — beginning with the greatest multiracial, multireligious, and multigenerational team of lawyers ever assembled who litigated Brown v. Board of Education, all the living members of which we honored in 2000, led by the great Charles Hamilton Houston J.D. ’22, S.J.D. ’23, whose 130th birthday we will celebrate when we gether in September. In addition to celebrating the past, this gathering will bring together thought leaders from the public and private sectors with connections to Harvard and from around the world to discuss and debate strategies for promoting excellence, democracy, and the rule of law in our increasingly pluralistic and interconnected world that move far beyond the programs and policies of the past. As in past years, in conjunction with the celebration, we will release the third edition of our Black Alumni Career Study, the most comprehensive empirical study of the Black graduates of single institution ever conducted.
In addition, on April 3-4, 2025, the center will also be hosting a conference with the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Equal Justice Works, and the American Academy of Law Schools on “Inequality, Access to Justice, and the Rule of Law,” to bring together leaders to develop new ways of addressing the widening inequality that threatens to undermine opportunity, access to justice, and the very social fabric that holds this country together.
HLT: How are you thinking about growth in the legal profession around the world, especially with so much uncertainty? What practice areas and types of lawyers will be in high demand?
Wilkins: Contrary to what some have suggested, globalization has not been repealed by the pandemic and its aftermath. To the contrary, tariffs, geopolitical tensions, advances in technology, immigration and migration generally, and the ever-present threat of another pandemic underscore that our world is more interconnected than ever, even as countries, companies, and individuals pursue a number of strategies to try to insulate themselves from the negative effects of this interdependence. By definition, AI will only accentuate this global connectivity, once again, even as nations enact laws purporting to regulate its use within their borders. Lawyers who know how to navigate all of this global complexity will therefore be even more in demand in the coming year.
All of this, of course, is going to generate disputes. AI may eliminate many legal jobs, but in the short and medium term, it’s a welfare act for lawyers, meaning everything will be litigated. That’s true also about many of the decisions and actions and orders of the new administration. AI may eventually be able to help with this, and already we see lawyers who are using AI advancing past lawyers who are not.
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