As orientations loom for incoming JD students, Deans and others welcoming new cohorts are thinking of how to echo what they said to graduates last May and June:
Lawyers are leaders.
As almost all of us in legal education know, however, we talk the leadership talk but all too often fail to walk the leadership walk. Some law schools, but too few, have formal leadership development programs for their students. A few more (mine included) have a course or two that focuses on leadership, often because of initiative by individual faculty members rather than because of institutional strategy and investment. This post serves mostly to nod to the community of law faculty and Deans who have organized in recent years around shared efforts to address that leadership gap, primarily through the AALS Section on Leadership [AALS-sponsored link here; Section-maintained link here].
There is more, after the jump.
As most of us teaching leadership use the concept, “leadership” is not limited to “people on top of organizations or movements, or people in corner offices, or in visible public service.” “Leadership” means the agglomeration of human skills, capacities, and competencies that human beings need in many contexts to be seen and heard and to have the sorts of group, organizational, and community impacts that they would like to have – and to avoid many of the negatives that might come their way. These include everything from simplistic and hackneyed (but still important) concepts like “collaboration” and “teamwork,” sexy (but nevertheless important) new-ish themes like “emotional intelligence,” and more contemporary additions to the leadership canon like “vision” and “resilience.”
(An aside: the fact that our graduates might learn these things in practice (call them “human skills” or “soft skills,” if you wish) and so need not be systematically educated in them during their law school years (cf. Michael Paxton (University of Saskatchewan), with whom I agree on many other topics) is undercut by the simple fact that to a significant degree, that post-graduate training simply does not happen. The economic imperatives of law practice in all sectors have sharpened a focus on workload and productivity. Mentoring juniors to become seniors, once a hallmark of responsible law firms everywhere, is – I am told, and I saw it myself decades ago – more often the exception than the rule.
Post-graduate personal and professional development will happen, we hope, but law schools nevertheless can and should help our students build foundations for those processes, just as we try to help them build foundations for other things. As I was drafting this post, I came across a long-standing organization that I had never heard of before: the Association of Leadership Educators, whose conference took place in Philadelphia on July 26-29. I think that some law professors participated, but I’m not sure, and the fact that I’ve been teaching leadership to law students and others for 15 years and have been active in the AALS Section on Leadership – yet remained ignorant of the ALE until now – tells me something about how far removed U.S. legal education from some important features and capabilities of higher education full stop.
Notice in my brief account of the meanings of “leadership” that little to none of what I refer to under the “leadership” rubric depends specifically on anyone’s membership in the legal profession. We may say that “lawyers are leaders”; I say, borrowing generously from the Pixar movie “Ratatouille” (“Anyone can cook!“), that anyone may lead. And many of our students and graduates will be asked to lead in places where and at times when they might be ill-prepared to do so, or at least to do so … well. Is it our job as educators to prepare our students for those situations, or at least to help them anticipate those situations? My answer is “yes”; yours may differ.
One more thing: “leadership” and “management” are related but distinct concepts and practices. New lawyers would be well-served to learn more about management, too: decision-making, project design and execution, budgets and finance, compliance. That’s a different topic for a different day.
Why post this information now? Beyond the fact that I am committed to the view that leadership education may never have mattered to the profession more than it does now, and that it should be located centrally in the curriculum rather than marginalized as “one topic among many,” I noticed a forthcoming book that I want to commend to any and all and especially to anyone teaching leadership or interested in leadership education: Thomas A. (“Tom”) Kolditz and Mariana Khomitska, Against the Storm: How True Leaders Prevail When the World Shakes (Wiley 2026).
Tom Kolditz is a retired Brigadier General in the U.S. Army. He ran leadership development at West Point for a long time, then moved to Yale’s School of Management, and later became the founding director of the Doerr Institute for New Leaders at Rice University. He specializes in leadership development associated with “extreme” situations. Parachuting into a live fire zone? Tom Kolditz is the guy. I met him for lunch once, years ago, during his Yale career. I was helping to build a leadership development program for Yale graduates that we aimed not at the C-suite/McKinsey/BCG world but instead at the so-called “low” end, small orgs and non-profits, where money was tight but need was (and remains) extreme. We were exploring whether the broader world, beyond Yale’s ivy-covered walls, would respond positively to an “exported” version of what we were doing. The conversation didn’t lead to anything productive, other than an enduring respect for his record and his perspective, my being struck by the fact that he aligned his practice with the teachings of the legendary Girl Scout leader Frances Hesselbein (a Western Pennsylvanian!), and my then-newfound commitment to “export” a version of our Yale program to … my law students at Pitt.
In short, a lot of law school-based leadership programs lean heavily on the idea of “lawyer-leaders” through history, an idea that often invests more strenuously in virtue and values than in day-to-day skills. “Leadership” gets absorbed into a somewhat-expanded domain of “Professional Responsibility.” The late Deborah Rhode published what remains the key teaching text in that vein: Leadership for Lawyers. US law reviews are filled with symposia exploring and celebrating lawyer-leader themes.
I rely on little of that material in my own course. Some, yes: virtue and values matter, to be sure. Framing lawyers as possessing or aiming at special-embodiments-of-leadership-potential-and-obligation, not so much. I want to encourage those of who teach leadership to consider being similarly ecumenical. Kolditz’s book is likely to be a “banger,” to use contemporary jargon.
