Lawyering & Professionalism: Leadership

In Lawyers as Leaders, eminent law professor Deborah Rhode crafts an essential manual for attorneys who need to develop better leadership skills.

This book prepares lawyers to assume the types of roles that our increasingly fast-paced world requires. Intersectional leadership challenges lawyer leaders to see the world through a different lens and expects a form of inclusion and respect for other perspectives and experiences that will prove critical to maneuvering in a complex environment.

Leadership is not about titles, status, and wielding power. A leader is anyone who takes responsibility for recognizing the potential in people and ideas, and has the courage to develop that potential.

In Women and Leadership, the eminent legal scholar Deborah L. Rhode focuses on women's underrepresentation in leadership roles and asks why it persists and what we can do about it. Although organizations generally stand to gain from increasing gender equity in leadership, women's underrepresentation is persistent and pervasive. Rhode explores the reasons, including women's family roles, unconscious gender bias, and exclusion from professional development networks.

The book describes and illustrates emerging integrative approaches such as earth jurisprudence, sharing law, conscious (values-based) contracts, purposeful estate planning, and many others. It provides a context for many other movements in law and explores the tools of systems change.

The Inclusive Leader provides a pathway for leaders to effect change through reflecting on and grappling with unconscious and implicit biases, encouraging honest discussions, and taking action to change organizational behavior for the better. It provides a practical framework for building the essential leadership competencies rooted in the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion.