Meet our 2013 Legal Rebels
2013 Rebel, Michelle DeStefano, on a Miami beach. Photo by Jason Myers.
Excuse us for waving our own flag, but we are exceedingly proud of our fifth-year selections for the ABA Journal’s Legal Rebels.
Our annual honors program for the change leaders of the legal profession has again found, thanks to your nominations, 10 outstanding new members. They join the 81 free thinkers selected in the previous four years of Legal Rebels. And though this year’s program was open to anyone in the legal services business, an interesting pattern arose as the final selections were made: Seven of our 10 choices are directly connected to legal education. Well, with the disruptive innovations of technology remolding the practice of law, it’s only normal that those charged with training the next generations of legal service providers are reshaping the way those generations are taught and what they learn.
On our list is a law student making law visual. A professor bringing mock competition to transactional practice. Another linking students and mentors from around the world to solve legal problems. A pioneer in law firm incubators now creating an incubator for incubators. A provider of free learning tools for law students teaching students to create computer-based guides for pro se litigants. And two profs whose goal is no less than reinventing the law. Add in an attorney whose trademark search engine bests the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office system while his prices stay low, a general counsel taking outside law firms to school for not knowing their own software, and a lawyer/software engineer invoking the name of Hammurabi as he turns law into computer code. Individually and all together, they are planting their banners on the pinnacle of legal innovation. And they are our Legal Rebels, the class of 2013.
Click here to read the rest of the Legal Rebels cover story from the September issue of the ABA Journal. Visit the Legal Rebels project page here.
