"The Future of Large Law Firms
In The Global Age of More For Less"

David B. Wilkins
Harvard Law School
Lester Kissel Professor of Law
Faculty Director, Program on the Legal Profession
Vice Dean, Global Initiatives on the Legal Profession

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MCLE Offered

In this lecture, Professor Wilkins will examine the large-scale forces reshaping the global market for corporate legal services, and how these changes are likely to reshape law firms and legal careers in the coming decades.  

Professor Wilkins is the Lester Kissel Professor of Law, Vice Dean for Global Initiatives on the Legal Profession, and Faculty Director of the Program on the Legal Profession and the Center for Lawyers and the Professional Services Industry at Harvard Law School. He is also a Senior Research Fellow of the American Bar Foundation and a member of the Faculty Committee of the Harvard University Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics.

Professor Wilkins has written over 60 articles on the legal profession in leading scholarly journals and the popular press and is the co-author (along with his Harvard Law School colleague Andrew Kaufman) of one of the leading casebooks in the field.  His current scholarly projects on the profession include Globalization, Lawyers, and Emerging Economies (an empirical examination of the effect of globalization on the market for legal services in rapidly developing countries such as China, India, and Brazil); Putting “India” Back into the Debate over Offshoring Legal Services to India (examining the growth of the Indian LPO sector between 2006 and 2009); After the JD (a ten-year nationwide longitudinal study of lawyers' careers), How Corporations Purchase Legal Services (a quantitative and qualitative examination of the legal purchasing decisions of S&P 500 companies), The Harvard Law School Career Study (a panel study of HLS classes of 1975, 1985, 1995, and 2000), Cause Lawyers for the Disabled (a qualitative examination of lawyers who pursue access to justice and equal treatment for Americans with disabilities), and over 200 in-depth interviews in connection with a forthcoming Oxford University Press book on the development of the black corporate bar. 

Professor Wilkins teaches several courses on lawyers and other related professionals, including the country's only four credit course on the Legal Profession, and seminars on  "Legal Education for the Twenty-First Century: Global Perspectives on Preparing Lawyers for Global Careers” and “The Future(s) of the Large Law Firm.”  He is also one of the core faculty members teaching Harvard Law School’s new Problem Solving Workshop, an intensive three-week mandatory introduction to lawyering taken by all first year students.  Professor Wilkins also helped to create (along with the Program’s Faculty Director Professor Ashish Nanda) Harvard Law School’s Executive Education Program, where he teaches courses on Leadership in Law Firms, Leadership in Corporate Counsel, and Emerging Leaders.  

Professor Wilkins has given numerous named academic lectures and is a frequent speaker at academic conferences and other public and private professional meetings in the United States and around the world.  His professional honors include the 2012 Distinguished Visiting Mentor Award from Australia National University, the 2012 Genest Fellowship from Osgoode Hall Law School, the 2010 American Bar Foundation Scholar of the Year Award, the 2009 J. Clay Smith Award from Howard University School of Law, the 2008 Order of the Coif Distinguished Visitor Fellowship, and the 1998 Albert M. Sachs – Paul Freund Award for Teaching Excellence at Harvard Law School.  In 2012, Professor Wilkins was elected as a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and also received an Honorary Doctorate of Laws from Stockholm University in Sweden.

UC Irvine School of Law's Mark P. Robinson, Jr. Lecture is an annual lecture series made possible by an anonymous donor in honor of Mark P. Robinson Jr., senior partner at Robinson Calcagnie Robinson Shapiro and Davis Inc, and his generous support of the UC Irvine School of Law. More information, including video and photos of past lectures, on UCI Law's Distinguished Lectures page.