A couple of weeks ago, Austen Parrish posted a link to Joe Andrew’s recent Forbes piece, “What Law School Grads Need To Know Now: The Second To Last Generation?” Joe Andrew was the founding global chair of Dentons.

I’m coming back to that piece because I want to highlight a couple of things that Austen’s post did not touch on.

Most important:

Take these paragraphs from the piece, which have nothing specifically to do with the content of a student’s education, or with AI specifically:

Each spring, a new class of lawyers graduate into a profession that, until very recently, changed slowly enough that one could spend an entire career mastering its rhythms. That is no longer true. During my tenure the law changed quantitively, more than qualitatively—firms become global and more corporate and inhouse offices became more like big firms. That is over. The change you are entering is qualitative—the profession you are entering will not exist in its current form by the time you fully learn what is all about.

That is not a warning. It is an invitation.

First, the disclaimer before the evite. You all may be the second to last generation of lawyers—or at least lawyers as we know them today. If a generation of lawyers is the seven to ten years it takes to make partner, you can imagine a world where AI has changed things, but the big firms, big in-house corporate departments, and public law entities are all still remotely recognizable. However, if you think of how AI has changed the profession in the past one year and then imagine a world fourteen to twenty years from now, it is hard to imagine the current structures that define most law will still exist. There may be one more generation of lawyers after you, but it seems unlikely that many will end up in leadership, let alone “owners” or “partners” of organizations that look like those that exist today.

Anyone who has followed the career of Richard Susskind or, more recently Mark Cohen and Jordan Furlong, will recognize the harmonies between the points that Joe Andrew is making and the arguments and predictions for which Susskind originally earned a certain global celebrity and which keep Furlong’s contemporary consulting practice busy.

What makes Andrew’s points different, in a way, is his effort – indirect though it may be – to direct his argument to current students and to recent graduates. He is saying exactly the thing that I say to my own students, every year, in my leadership course, that I wrote about almost a decade ago in this unpublished paper, and that I have been yammering about on and off for a dozen years.

And Joe Andrew is not one-and-done. He continues patiently to push back on resistance to his diagnosis and to the concern that he is being unnecessarily alarmist. He re-states his point succinctly:

The argument was not that lawyers are disappearing. Nor that legal problems are disappearing. Human conflict, regulation, risk, negotiation, and the need for trusted advisors are not disappearing. The argument was that the assumptions that shaped legal education and legal careers for more than a century are beginning to change, and that today’s graduates may be among the last generations trained according to a model that emerged during the industrial age and survived largely intact through the information age.

Also important but perhaps secondarily so:

Joe Andrew is right that his argument is one that students and new graduates need to hear. Practicing lawyers, managing partners, and Chief Legal Officers and General Counsels are already well down the path that he is describing; they are not his audience. What about today’s actual law students (as opposed to the imaginary hearers of his “commencement address”)? Mostly, I suspect: not so much. I expect that few law students and recent grads read Forbes.

So my second note is to suggest that Joe Andrew is wrong to imagine that his argument should be framed as a hypothetical address at a law school commencement.

Instead, it should be the dean’s address at this Fall’s law school orientation.

It will certainly be added to my syllabus.

Even if the dean (and some students) think that Joe Andrew has overstated his case, early delivery of the message will offer students the benefit (I hope) of having their attention directed early on to the institutional structures of the profession that they are training to enter. And by institutional structures I don’t mean courts and legislatures and regulatory agencies; I mean the organizations through which lawyers deliver legal services and information to clients and otherwise serve as intermediaries between the specialized dimensions of “the legal profession” and communities of various scales and types. Where do those organizations come from, historically, and how have they been built and managed? How are they being operated today? Where does the money come from, and where does the money go, and how are the answers to those questions changing? How do the answers to those questions matter to students, in the here and now?

In my own career as a lawyer, I was very lucky as a first-year summer associate to have a junior partner at my firm take me aside one day, explain the business of his law firm, map it out on a legal pad with a hand-drawn visual or two, and tell me that I would manage my career much more effectively if I learned to understand the business of any organization that employed me. That’s still true today, and it is advice that I pass on to my students, using the economics of their law school as a mini-case study.