Q&A - Geoffrey Shields: Vermont Law School

Vermont Business Magazine, Jul 01, 2005 by Smith, Robert

So we try to be a forum for coming up with actual hard suggestions for ways in which the behavior of companies can be better regulated from the inside - the composition of the board, the way in which outside advisers report, that sort of thing. Not just to the CEO, but also to the independent chairman of the board or an independent group of board members. We work at it from that perspective. We have some faculty members who are commentators. We have some professors who collaborate with other professors at Tuck Business School.

VBM: What do you see as the most important issues facing the legal field over the next decade?

Shields: One issue for the legal profession is the ability to efficiently grow with a greater complexity of legal regulations. Every day that goes by there are new regulations, there are new laws. How do you keep up with it effectively? A large part of that is becoming really well versed in the computer technology relating to technology and retrieval. We do a lot of work with our students in that regard.

A second challenge is the movement from the classic judicial litigation model for dispute resolution to the alternative, which does not involve a judge, does not involve a courtroom, but has an arbitrator or a mediator facilitating decisions. That trend is starting, and we're trying to, work with our students so that they definitely adapt well to that. We'll look back in a decade and see that as a fairly fast and dramatic shift.

A big challenge for certain lawyers, certainly many business lawyers, is the international basis of business and the ability to work with international contracts and international dispute resolution, the employment of laws across national borders and to be able to represent and advise businesses. That's also true for small businesses. If you're the Vermont Teddy Bear Co. and you're selling a fair amount of your product into the European Union and a fair amount is produced outside of the U. S., you have the same problems with regard to dispute resolutions and contracts and employment that very, very large companies have in this country. You need expertise, and for Vermont lawyers, or at least some Vermont lawyers, to have that expertise is highly desirable. As we all know, as far as manufacturing is concerned we're almost in a post-industrial age. There is less and less manufacturing here, even those things that we thought we really had a great hold on, like automobile manufacturing and computer manufacturing. Well, it's going fast. So what are we left with? A service kind of business, and a very heavy distribution capability and interest, but having to deal with the foreign manufacture of the products that we're distributing and that are consumed in the United States. Companies need lawyers here who can help them to coordinate all of the legal issues that come with that product stream. That is certainly a big issue.

Another big issue is, in certain places there are more lawyers than are needed. Sometimes when that happens, just through competition, they start doing things that are counterproductive. They may be going out and looking for lawsuits where there wouldn't have been any before. That is not good for our society, it's not good for the image of lawyers, and it's certainly not good for business. In a free society where people can go to business school, where they can go to medical school, or they can go to law school - as long as they can afford it there's not a fast correcting mechanism for the oversupply of people with certain trades. Eventually it self corrects to a certain extent, because there's not enough work. But with litigation, where there is the ability to make really big legal fees from lawsuits or negligence suits, there is a temptation among some lawyers to do what I consider is unethical, which is to try to foment litigation for their own gain. That's a problem for society, and it's a problem for law schools and lawyers in general.