Through a jointly organized series of panel discussions, Fordham Law’s Corporate Law Center and Stein Center for Law and Ethics are addressing the challenges and opportunities these changes are presenting to law students and practitioners.

“The Business and Ethics of Managing a 21st Century Law Firm” kicked off a three-part series on Jan. 28, with a panel featuring James Bernard, LAW ’95, partner with Stroock & Stroock & Lavan LLP, Scott Green, CEO of Pepper Hamilton LLP, and Bruce MacEwen, president of Adam Smith, Esq.

The series will continue with “New, Smart & Ethical Business Models” on Feb. 25 and “The Impact of Technology on the Future of Law Firms,” on March 18.

Sean J. Griffith, the T.J. Maloney Chair and Professor of Law and director of the Corporate Law Center, said the idea for the series was born partly out of conversations with John F.X. Peloso, LAW ’60, senior counsel of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP and an adjunct professor of law.

“The individual firms that had merged to form Dewey & LeBoeuf were both large and old traditional New York law firms. They were very distinguished, and the combined firm was one of the top earners of law firms in the country,” Griffith said. “When it fell apart, people started asking, ‘Did they do something we’re doing? Do we have to think differently about law firm management?’”

Among the changes buffeting the law field right now are technological advances that have made it less important to be physically present when working with a client.

“It wasn’t that long ago when I was in practice in a mergers and acquisitions law firm. We would do a transaction, and junior lawyers like me would go to some place and comb through piles and piles and boxes and boxes of documents, and review all these low-level details concerning the transaction,” Griffith said.

“Nowadays, all that can be done via computer, sitting in your office, or alternatively, you can outsource the whole thing to highly trained individuals on other continents.”

Bruce Green, the Louis Stein Chair in Law and director of the Stein Center for Law and Ethics, emphasized that for lawyers with an entrepreneurial streak, changes like the outsourcing of document review—which clients are now demanding as a way to lower costs—can present an opportunity.

“Somebody who has legal expertise has to design the computer programs. If the work is outsourced to lawyers in lower-cost jurisdictions, somebody has to supervise the lawyers who are doing the document review. Somebody has to create the institutions and oversee and market [the institutions]that are doing this work,” he said.

“Law school doesn’t conventionally recruit for entrepreneurs; they go to business school. But you need a little bit of that business school sense of entrepreneurship in today’s environment.”

There are also potential pitfalls too, which is why ethics is a major component of the series. Green noted, for instance, that in Australia, nonlawyers can invest in law firms, and in England, nonlawyers are allowed to partner with lawyers to provide legal services. Neither practice is permitted in the United States.

“There are things that challenge our conventional norms nowadays in a way that wouldn’t really have come up in a period of greater stability and less technological change,” he said.

“So it’s an interesting time to ask the ethics question. We see some internal debate within the legal profession about whether we ought to rethink some of our traditional norms.”

Silvia Hodges, Ph.D., director of research services at TyMetrix Legal Analytics and an adjunct professor at Fordham Law, moderated the Jan. 28 session. In her classes “Law Firm as a Business” and “Law Firm Marketing,” Hodges emphasizes that practicing law is more than just mastering the technical aspects of the field.

“Clients . . . really want value and efficiency from law firms. There are now more and more small firms embracing knowledge management and project management. The challenge is to really deliver things the way clients want them, and not pretend to do business as usual,” she said.

“Lots of law firms struggle with having to deliver value at a lower cost than what their cost structure is because they’re not organized and managed that way. That’s the biggest struggle.”

Olson served as the 42nd Solicitor General of the United States from 2001 to 2004. He was nominated by and served in the administration of President George W. Bush. Currently, he is a partner in Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher’s Washington, D.C. office and is a member of the firm’s Executive Committee and Co-Chair of the Appellate and Constitutional Law Group and the firm’s Crisis Management Team.

“Ted Olson is a champion for the basic American principles outlined in our Constitution,” said Michael M. Martin, interim dean of Fordham Law School. “He has demonstrated this throughout his career in his representation of various clients, including our country. He is a superb honoree.”

Before his service as Solicitor General, Olson served as Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel from 1981 to 1984.  Except for those two intervals, he has been a lawyer with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. since 1965.  Throughout his career, Olson has argued numerous cases before the Supreme Court of the United States.  He is a Fellow of both the American College of Trial Lawyers and the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers. He has written and lectured extensively on appellate advocacy, oral advocacy in the courtroom and constitutional law.

In July 2010, President Barack Obama appointed Olson to serve as a member of the Council of the Administrative Conference of the United States, a public-private partnership charged with providing nonpartisan, practical assessments and recommendations to improve agency procedures and operations.

Olson received his bachelor’s degree cum laude from the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, where he received awards as the outstanding graduating student in both journalism and forensics, and his law degree from the University of California at Berkeley, where he was a member of the California Law Review and Order of the Coif.

Named after prominent Fordham Law alumnus Louis Stein, Class of  ’26, the Stein Prize recognizes the positive contributions of the legal profession to American society.

“The Stein Center, which sponsors the prize, has become synonymous with the thoughtful discussion of law and ethics in the scholarly community and among members of the bar,” said Interim Dean Martin. “We are forever grateful to the members of the Stein family for their commitment to upholding this important tradition.”

Olson joins a list of recipients that includes seven members of the U.S. Supreme Court, including Chief Justices William H. Rehnquist and Warren E. Burger, as well as three lawyers who have served as Secretary of State. Past recipients have included Robert B. Fiske, Jr., former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York; William T. Coleman, Jr., fourth U.S. Secretary of Transportation; Griffin Bell, 72nd U.S. Attorney General; and Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund.

“Justice Breyer has devoted his life to the public good,” said William Michael Treanor, dean of Fordham Law. “He was a brilliant, influential, and path-breaking scholar. His government service before taking the bench was of the highest quality. As a jurist, his opinions have been marked by thoughtfulness, balance, rigor, and a commitment to justice and liberty. He has been an eloquent and forceful champion of judicial integrity, as we saw this spring when he participated in a forum on judicial independence at Fordham Law together with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. In every facet of his extraordinary career, he has embodied the great ideals of the Fordham-Stein Prize, and he is a superb honoree.”

Appointed to the Court by President Bill Clinton in 1994, Justice Breyer had previously served as an assistant to the United States assistant attorney general for antitrust, an assistant special prosecutor on the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, and a special counsel of the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary.

Following government service, Breyer taught at Harvard Law School and was also a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. A leading expert on administrative law, he wrote a number of influential books and articles on issues ranging from deregulation to copyrights. He left teaching to join the bench, initially as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. In 2005, in his book Active Liberty, Justice Breyer presented his views on how the judiciary can best encourage citizen participation in the government’s decision making process.

“In every phase of his professional life, as a lawyer in government service, as a scholar, as a judge and justice, Stephen Breyer has exemplified the values that the Fordham-Stein Prize honors,” said Bruce Green, co-director of Fordham Law’s Stein Center. “Justice Breyer is clearly an attorney whose career has been unwaveringly committed both to excellence and to upholding the integrity of the profession.”

Named after prominent Fordham Law alumnus Louis Stein ’26, the award recognizes the positive contributions of the legal profession to American society. Justice Breyer will accept the prize at a dinner in New York on October 29.

“The Stein Center, which sponsors the prize, has become synonymous with the thoughtful discussion of law and ethics in the scholarly community and among members of the bar. We are forever grateful to the members of the Stein family for their commitment to upholding this important tradition,” Dean Treanor said.

Justice Breyer joins a list of recipients that includes six other members of the U.S. Supreme Court, including two Chief Justices, and three lawyers who have served as Secretary of State. Recent recipients have included John Feerick ’61, professor and former dean of Fordham Law; Hon. Patricia M. Wald, former chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit; Hon. Joseph M. McLaughlin; Attorney General Griffin Bell; Robert Fiske; and Chief Judge Judith Kaye.

“My reason has a lot to do with the kind of doctor I’ve been. I believe a physician’s loyalty to patients is supreme,” she said. “The situation today with health care insurance and HMOs makes it increasingly difficult for physicians to treat and for families to access health care. I hope a career in law might give me the opportunity to make some changes that help doctors help their patients.” “Supermom” isn’t a word in Mann’s vocabulary, but it’s a close description of what she does every day. As if being a beeper-carrying neurosurgeon and an evening law student isn’t enough, she holds down a third job that is of primary importance to her: wife (her husband is an orthopedic surgeon) and mom to two daughters. “For many years now I’ve averaged about four hours of sleep each night during the week. I could never do it without the support of my husband. For us, family is worth the effort,” she said. Mann applied and was accepted to five prominent law schools in the New York area.

At Fordham, she was selected as a Stein Scholar in the Law’s School’s Center for Law and Ethics. She said her decision to choose a law career and to pursue it at Fordham had a lot to do with the values and principles that the University epitomizes. “There’s a unique sense of spirit, even family, with Fordham,” she said. “I sensed it from the first orientation day to later classes with faculty and classmates and even alumni, who share this love and respect for what the school instilled in them. You don’t get that at every law school.” Mann says she’ll take the service lessons she learned at Fordham with her in her career as a lawyer. “I’m applying for clerkships and keeping my fingers crossed that the law opportunities I’m afforded will be a good match for me, both as far as the kind of issues I care about, and in terms of the message Fordham has taught me about service to others,” she said.