Law school launches new Center on the Global Legal Profession

IU Maurer School of Law Dean Lauren Robel announced the launch of the school’s new Center on the Global Legal Profession.

Professor William Henderson will be the center’s director and will work closely with fellow law professors Jayanth Krishnan, Ken Dau-Schmidt and Ethan Michelson, an IU sociologist and the first social scientist to conduct rigorous empirical research on the Chinese legal profession, according to an IU press release.

The Maurer School of Law and the Jindal Global Law School in New Delhi, India, co-sponsored a conference on how globalization affects law and legal education. The new center was announced during the     conference.

“A core competency of lawyers in the future will be their ability to understand the structure of legal professions across the globe and to access knowledge within those structures,” Robel said in a statement. “The center’s work in this area will, in turn, feed directly back into our legal professions curriculum, where we are training our students on legal ethics and professional responsibility.”

Henderson said researchers will examine data compiled by the Law Firms Working Group and other sources to identify distinctive patterns and trends across different legal systems and cultures.

“This is the first time we will have legal academics step back and look at the global legal industry as a whole and acknowledge patterns that have evolved over the last few decades,” Henderson said in a statement. “We will take broad data analysis from within the United States and compare it to trends and patterns that span other continents. We are reining in data that has recently become available to help explain those patterns, then essentially cracking the data open to see what we can expect in the future.”

The center will also use its data to ensure law students are prepared to practice law at the highest levels of the profession, whether in the United States or abroad, according to a press release.

“Our students can have a huge leg up if they understand how to effectively develop the trust and confidence of clients and other legal professionals,” Henderson said in a statement. “And they will, because IU will have a seat at the table. Everyone will know that Indiana Law graduates are synonymous with skill, integrity and judgment. They will know our graduates are committed to the core values of our profession.”