Welcome to leading as lawyers

Greetings from The University of Tennessee College of Law Institute for Professional Leadership! 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

Latest posts

All of us at the Institute for Professional Leadership mourn the loss of our friend and colleague, Jack H. (Nick) McCall. Reflecting on his significant legacy, Professor Joan Heminway shares her thoughts in a new blog post dedicated to his memory. “You heard me right: “Ted Lasso” offers lawyers a good deal worth consideration. The series is highly quotable, not just from Ted’s own pearls of wisdom but also for its other characters’ insights.” "Law school taught me I can do anything I put my mind to, when my mind is confident. The difference between 1L year and 2L year for me was the fact that I learned to give myself grace, and I took the pressure off myself."