Welcome to leading as lawyers

Greetings from The University of Tennessee College of Law Institute for Professional Leadership! Ten years ago, Doug Blaze and Buck Lewis showed extraordinary vision when they founded the University of Tennessee College of Law’s Institute for Professional Leadership (IPL.)  In addition to founding the Institute, they created and co-taught for several years the Lawyers as Leaders course.  The Institute’s curriculum has grown to include that course as well as a course for IL’s and four upper-level courses.  The blog which they started remains popular and the Six PAC videos are well watched.  (We are always looking for new authors for the blog.)

   As we move into the second decade, I am honored to be involved in continuing Doug’s and Buck’s work and the work of Joan Heminway who served almost three years as the Interim Director.  The 10th anniversary of the IPL has been a time for reflection, and we are embarking on several months of thinking about our mission and vision and how the IPL can best serve the students, alums, faculty, and others in the community.

   Significant anniversaries are also a time for celebration, and we had a fabulous one at our Symposium and Gala on October 24-25, 2024.  Speakers from around the country led us in thought-provoking discussions, and we had a party to celebrate the past and the future. 

Beth Ford, Interim Director

Dean Emeritus Doug Blaze, a founder of the Institute for Professional Leadership, says it well below: lawyers lead.  The Institute’s curriculum offers a number of opportunities for law students to engage with leadership principles and explore leadership in action—through texts, videos, lectures, guest appearances, and exercises tailored to integrate with the traditional law school curriculum.  The required first-year course in Lawyering and Professionalism lays a foundation for elective upper division coursework in and outside the Institute’s curriculum.

This website is designed to create a user-friendly digital destination for the Institute—a way of (as Dean Blaze indicates below) connecting the nature of its work to students, faculty, staff, alumni, members of the bar, and the public at large.  We invite you to explore the website, including its flagship blog.  Together with the Institute’s social media presence (available through the icons at the bottom of this page), this website offers ongoing opportunities for broad-based interactions with the Institute’s mission and activities.  We hope you’ll return here often to check in on us.  Feedback and suggestions are welcomed.  We can be reached at leadershipinstitute@utk.edu and look forward to hearing from you.

Joan MacLeod Heminway
Interim Director
Institute for Professional Leadership

All lawyers are called upon to lead – by their firms, communities, charitable organizations, social groups, and friends. Legal education and the legal profession, however, have only recently started to recognize the need for leadership training and development. The Institute for Professional Leadership at The University of Tennessee College of Law was established to address that need by striving to develop law students and lawyers into successful leaders of positive impact and influence.

True leadership requires a lifetime commitment of purposeful attention.  We launched the Leading as Lawyers blog and this website to help all our alumni, supporters, friends – and anyone that is interested – maintain their commitment to purposeful leadership and lifelong learning.  We hope you will follow Leading as Lawyers and consider submitting posts by email to awrigh90@vols.utk.edu and scain3@vols.utk.edu.  And, of course, any comments or suggestions are encouraged.

Best Regards,

Doug Blaze
Dean Emeritus
The University of Tennessee College of Law

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