Michele DeStefano

Founder Executive Director, Lawwithoutwalls

Professor, author, speaker, independent consultant, and facilitator to law firms, corporate legal departments, and legal startups on innovation and technology, culture creation, teaming, and cross-practice, cross-border initiatives.  

Recognized by the ABA as a Legal Rebel and by the Financial Times Innovative Lawyers (North America) as one of top 20 most innovative lawyers, Michele is a professor of law at the University of Miami, Affiliated Faculty at Harvard Law School, Executive Education, and the founder of LawWithoutWalls, a multi-disciplinary, international think-tank of over 1000 lawyers, business professionals, entrepreneurs, and law and business students that collaborate to hone new skillsets and mindsets and create innovations at the intersection of law, business, and technology. She is also the co-founder and co-editor of the Compliance Elliance Journal, an international an international e-journal of articles in compliance and ethics from around the world.

As a professor of law, Michele researches and writes about the growing intersections between law, business, and legal innovation. Her book  Legal Upheaval: A Guide to Creativity, Collaboration, and Innovation in Law leverages over 100 interviews of general counsels of large international corporations and heads of innovation at law firms. Her other book, New Suits: Appetite for Disruption in the Legal World (co-curated with Dr. Guenther Dobrauz) includes chapters by experts in law, innovation, and technology to provide a global perspective on the future of legal service delivery ecosystem. Other recent scholarship focuses on the changing role of the compliance officer and is based on interviews of over 70 general counsels and chief compliance officers of S&P 500 corporations (featured in Harvard Law School's The Practice click here). Additionally, she has written articles and chapters in books about innovation and entrepreneurship, collaboration and culture creation, diversity in the legal profession, millennial lawyers, compliance and ethics, litigation funding, the role of the general counsel and the court of public opinion, legal education, technology and law, the work product doctrine and the attorney client privilege.

Her work has been published in leading law journals and featured in a range of media including Time Magazine, the Financial Times (UK), Forbes Women, ABA Journal, National Law Journal, American Lawyer, Harvard Law Today, The National Jurist, Legal Futures (UK), Inside Counsel Magazine, Harvard Law The Practice, and Bloomberg News. 

Michele has been invited to speak about her areas of expertise at a number of law conferences, leading law firms, and law schools including Linklaters, Holland & Knight, Dentons, McDermott, Arnold Porter Kaye Scholer, Proskauer Rose, White & Case, Stanford, Harvard, Dartmouth, IE Business School, University of St. Gallen, and Fordham. And she has also delivered keynotes to legal departments within corporations and legal organizations such as Microsoft, DXC, Thomson Reuters, Blackstone, Spotify, ABA, AALS, and NAFSA.  (Click here for a recent review). Through MoveLaw, a company Michele founded to help fund LawWithoutWalls, she creates and facilitates bespoke experiential learning programs on innovation, teaming, problem solving, and technology for law firms and legal departments like Microsoft. Michele also regularly consults on ethics, attorney-client privilege and work product issues, and organizational strategy.

Finally, Michele is especially proud to be the mother of 3 wonderful teenagers.

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