Following up my post, ABA Journal Launches Legal Rebels Project, which discussed the ABA Journal's plan to profile fifty of the legal profession's leading innovators over the next three months:  the ABA Journal has announced three new "legal rebels" (bringing the total thus far to ten).  Two of these rebels are friends and colleagues:

Tom Bruce, co-founder of the Cornell Legal Information Institute and my fellow member of the Board of Directors of CALI (the Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction):

To the legal community, Bruce and Peter Martin, co-directors of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School, are the premier providers of low-cost access to black-letter law, particularly U.S. Code and U.S. Supreme Court decisions, and creators of the most-linked-to Web resource in the field of law.

“The discovery we’ve made is that there is an enormous audience and appetite for legal information that goes well beyond lawyers and the population lawyers think of,” says Bruce, 55, who isn’t a lawyer, but rather describes himself as a computer guy who wandered into a law school one day and never left.

William D. Henderson, Professor of Law, Harry T. Ice Faculty Fellow, and Director of the Center on the Global Legal Profession at Indiana-Bloomington and my co-blogger (on the Law Professor Blog Network's Legal Profession Blog):

It was fall 2005, and Indiana University law professor Bill Henderson had a dilemma. He was gathering statistics, analyzing data and speaking at law firms across the country, but none of his IU Bloomington colleagues, all experts in established legal practices such as constitutional law and torts, could fathom exactly what he did.

In the world of academia, where tenure is won through peer recognition, that’s a problem. “I stumbled upon a research path I find particularly interesting,” the 46-year-old legal scholar says of his work analyzing the business side of the legal profession. He says lawyers and law students flooded his inbox with e-mails that praised what he was saying. “But traditional academia was left wondering, ‘What the heck is Henderson doing?’ ” he says.

In answer, Henderson pulled together a small group of legal researchers, including Southwestern Law School dean Bryant Garth and Marc Galanter, professor of law emeritus at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, to speak about the study of law firms as panelists at national law conferences. He became an editor of the Empirical Legal Studies blog. He also founded the Law Firms Working Group, which draws members from disciplines including business, economics, law, sociology, political science and psychology to study law firm management and private practice. It is sponsored by IU’s Maurer School of Law and the American Bar Foundation. …

Critics say the former firefighter, who once dropped out of college after a semester studying at the London School of Economics and Political Science, is preaching from an ivory tower. They point to his lack of practical legal experience.

But not following the prescribed path prompted a formative moment when, as a 36-year-old University of Chicago law student, Henderson participated in fall on-campus interviews with his much younger counterparts. He was shocked by the lack of decisive thinking in other students, “some of the smartest people I have been around in my life,” applied to their career choices.

“They behaved like absolute lemmings and didn’t think critically about how you assemble a legal career based upon facts,” he says. They had tunnel vision toward BigLaw as a career choice and didn’t distinguish differences between various firms.