When I advise law students about career directions, one of my long-standing go-to nuggets of information is this. It’s a piece of wisdom that a mentor shared with me 40 years ago, early in my 1L summer job:

Follow the money. For any sector of the legal industry and for any legal services organization, figure out who is paying whom, in what amounts, when, and for what.  Where does the money come from, and where does the money go? What’s the business model?  Power and opportunity often are paired with that information. That’s true for lawyers at all levels, and even for law professors trying to track the trends of academia.

Few of today’s students will connect the advice to Deep Throat and “All the President’s Men” (heck, I suspect that few of today’s faculty colleagues would make that connection) but of course that’s its origin story. Law students, new law graduates, faculty, and deans should be curious about things that they might not imagine being relevant in the here and now. They may become relevant very soon and in unexpected ways.

In that spirit, here are some bits and pieces of up-to-the-minute information about business and today’s legal services landscape. They may not appear to bear on legal education right now, but in my view the future of US law schools – and of any US law school – has a lot to do with figuring out how to operate strategically and productively in light of these and related developments:

• Private equity investments in law firm-adjacent operations.  I am nowhere near this activity myself, yet even in Pittsburgh I started hearing about these developments well over a year ago.  There is now so much rumbling about private equity in the law practice and legal services worlds, and what that might mean for lawyers themselves, that an overview of what’s happening would be incredibly useful.  Fortunately, Jordan Furlong recently put together this guide, titled “Private Equity at the Gate.”
• CLOC (pronounced “clock”), the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium, announced an expansion and restructuring of its board of directors.  Bob Ambrogi reports.  “Legal ops” isn’t quite the buzzword that it was 10 years ago, when CLOC was founded, but the functions and scale of operations undertaken by CLOC member organizations (which include legaltech companies, corporate law departments, and law firms) bear much more attention from law schools, law students, and new graduates than they have been getting, if for no other reason than the fact that there are jobs and careers there for JDs.  At least that’s my perception.  I’ve been asking colleagues and deans for a decade: what do you think about the role of CLOC as a potential partner for law schools?  Generally, I get blank looks. CLOC? What’s that? 
• This year’s TLTF Summit just concluded.  “TLTF” stands for “The Legal Tech Fund,” which is a venture fund that invests in legaltech companies.  The “Summit” is its annual by-invitation-but-must-attend gathering of movers and shakers in legaltech, including law firm leaders, legaltech companies, and a small handful of law school faculty.  Here is one summary report (Melia Russell, Business Insider); here is another (Bob Ambrogi).  The event follows the Chatham House rule, so the media reports are rather vague. But a couple of takeaways seem clear both from those reports and from what I could pick up on LinkedIn:  AI has become a standard feature of law practice, across all sectors and all sizes and types of service provider. And among its knock-on effects may be sector-wide revisions to the standard “pyramid” structure of law firm design, because firms may no longer  be able reliably to leverage the labor of large junior lawyer cohorts into profits for partners. The emerging default structure may egg-shaped, with more AI at the bottom, a plethora of human coordinators and orchestrators in the middle, and a relatively small cadre of leaders and managers at the top. IT infrastructure, including lawyers and lawyer/managers, ends up outside the hierarchy entirely, in firm-related MSOs (“Management Services Organizations”) or in third-party providers.  Which are increasingly drawing attention from … private equity.  Whether that “egg” structure makes sense in terms of the longer-term interests of the firm, its lawyers, or its clients, law faculty and deans should be on the lookout for it and should be on the lookout for its effects on job and career opportunities for new law graduates.