The headline is not a typo. This post is first about the legal services industry (“legal”) and second about developments in legal that bear reflection among legal educators.
A new “General Manager” sounds a bit like “normal and not blog-worthy news in the business world,” but stay with me.
First, some context: Bridget McCormack‘s most recent position has been CEO and President of the American Arbitration Association, a premier and prestige leadership role in the legal profession if there ever was one. Before that, many readers will know or know of her decade of service as a Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court, including a term as the Chief Justice.
Before being elected to the court (aided in part by this genius TV commercial), for more than a dozen years she was a law professor at the University of Michigan School of Law.
Second, how I put some pieces together:
I know Bridget McCormack. She is a dynamo of a person and as a leader. Agree or disagree with her views on combinations of law and technology and their potential for improving justice systems and dispute resolution processes, (on the whole, she is a critical enthusiast), she has a big vision and a big appetite, and she gets things done. In my experience, she welcomes critical pushback and conversation.
By record, talent, and temperament, she is the type of human being who, in a different environment, might be motivated or encouraged to become dean of a law school and then (if she were to be appointed) to push aggressively for modernizing the institution’s (and the sector’s) institutional designs and systems.
Bridget McCormack is leaving the AAA to join Clio, a large and well-funded legaltech company that appears to have ambitions to orchestrate, lead, and build an AI-and-other-tech build-out of infrastructure, tools, and leadership across essentially the entire “legal” and legal profession ecosystem, globally. The company’s vision spans education (I wrote recently about Clio and its interventions relative to legal education, here) and practice and (now) the judiciary.
Money is money, but I will speculate that her move is motivated more by opportunity for herself and impact on the world than by compensation or status.
I do not assume that she would give much thought now to returning to the academy, at this stage in her career and in the evolution of legal education, even in a leadership role. So the question that follows has nothing to do with her, specifically, and everything to do, instead, with the structure of the relevant environments.
Third, then, a question, putting the pieces together in the form of opportunities to be developed rather than opportunities missed, or lost:
How might law schools, as individual organizations and as a community, position themselves to be analogously attractive to potential future leaders? Again, money aside (and money is never fully aside), and not intending that any law school turn itself into a global legaltech platform, I wonder: how might law schools become leadership opportunities that are compelling enough that a talented prospect might choose an academic career over a private sector one?
