Getting a job at a large firm and becoming a partner is vastly different than it was even in the 1990s. Wilkins, who asked in his writing in 1996 and then in 2016 why there are so few Black lawyers in law firms, and Baxter, former chairman and CEO of Orrick, talk about the lack of substantial progress yet sincere intentions on the part of law firm leaders to achieve diversity.
As a leading tech company, Google has, through its services and products, well earned its reputation as an innovator. But how does that extend beyond tech and into its legal department. Ralph Baxter sits down with Mary O’Carroll, Google’s director of Legal Operations, to discuss her work with Google, the factors leading to more corporations bringing on legal operations positions, and, through her presidency at CLOC, how Mary and her peers are working to develop and define the legal operations role throughout the industry.
Mary O’Carroll is the director of Legal Operations at Google and the president of the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (“CLOC”).
America has an access-to-justice crisis. At a time when law is more prominent in every facet of American life and commerce than ever before, most of our people and small businesses have no access to legal service. The consequences are dire.
America has ample resources to provide everyone the legal service they need. We have the lawyers, the technology, the know-how, and the capital. Our failure to enable those resources to meet the needs of our people is a disgrace.
This Essay addresses one of most obvious causes of the access-to-justice crisis: rules created and enforced by lawyer-led state bars that arbitrarily restrict who can help Americans with their legal issues and handcuff legal-service firms’ ability to draw on modern technology and business techniques to get Americans the service they need.
The Essay details how the rules have caused the crisis and lays out a common-sense approach state bars can pursue to assess and remedy it. State bars made the rules that caused the crisis. It is their duty to fix them. Failure to do so is a dereliction of duty.
Law Technology Now welcomes Gillian Hadfield to the show to talk with host Ralph Baxter about the idea of reinventing the law. She starts off by explaining how she became interested in changing the way law works through personal experience and then touches on access to our justice system and how it doesn’t give the ordinary person the legal resources they need.
