This chapter details the early phenomenon that was ReInvent Law—an aggressive injection of innovation and creativity into the legal profession and legal education. Propelled by the 2008 financial crisis and the slow-rolling legal industry and education crisis that followed, ReInvent Law brought together thought leaders from around the world for rapid lightning talks at well-produced convenings that were coupled with a savvy and successful viral social media campaign. With the early emergence of legal design coinciding with ReInvent Law’s run, the synergies and ongoing impact are revealed here by one of ReInvent Law’s founders.

This chapter argues that a better understanding of people–place relations and their role in the local reception – and frequent contestation – of today’s supra-national legal orders for biodiversity conservation requires considering the epistemic dimension. This means paying more attention to local knowledge and the epistemic bonds to place it weaves, recognising local cultural-worlds not just as meaning and identity-worlds, but also as knowledge-worlds. It illustrates these arguments with extracts from fishers and farmers governed by Natura 2000 biodiversity laws, showing how local knowledge provides a relevant lens for local assessment of such laws, a process sometimes leading to contestation, sometimes to acceptance, and a process always done together with others. This calls for the creation of these legal orders to not rely exclusively on expert views, instead incorporating local inputs. By adding the epistemic dimension, senses of place can become a more relational, dynamic and plural concept, encompassing the three processes of attachment, meaning-making and knowing.

Once characterised as a relatively stable profession, unfettered by the influence of modernity and strongly resistant to external forces, the legal services sector has in recent years exhibited marked change. Efforts to preserve profit margins increasingly eroded by the introduction of new fee models, the demand for increased billing transparency, rising client expectations, the adoption of technology and heightened market competition from high volume legal process outsourcers, have all contributed to the sector’s evolution. In what has been viewed as a clear shift towards corporatisation and commercialisation, the legal profession in a number of jurisdictions has moved away from the broader social mission on which it was founded and in which it existed as ‘a branch of the administration of justice and not a mere money-getting trade’. Free market ideologies have undermined ‘justice and rights in the discourse of law’, and in its place, the generation of profit has become the primary indicator of success.

The lawyer of the future will exist as a ‘polytechnic’ or ‘many-skilled’ professional, applying their legal expertise to a client’s changing world in an increasingly agile way and within a range of organisational settings. For legal educators, there is a need to consider how education can best prepare future lawyers for this reality. The long view suggests that we should be looking to build core skills in legal, design and logic principles rather than learning specific technologies that may be rapidly superseded. But how can we develop these skills, and how we can balance the need to understand core academic principles of law against the need for applied, workplace experience? This chapter looks at the balancing process, focusing on the impact of changing roles in law firms and the demands of the in-house legal and law-advisory-organisation dynamic. It examines how legal education can instil within lawyers, both an understanding of the principles of law alongside an appreciation of the application of those principles in the workplace. It presents a vision of the roles and specialisations that are likely to emerge within the profession, and considers how the future work of lawyers will sit alongside alternative paths into the legal industry.

The story of the fusion of law and equity often centres on the story of New York state, whence the Field Code went forth, or of England. This chapter shows the more varied experiences of fusion in colonial British North America, and the degree of experimentation pursued by colonial governments that differentiated the local arrangements – and means of administering equity – from the arrangements at ‘home’ in England, or those in New York state. Initially, equity was often administered only by the governor or colonial council – or by a court of concurrent legal and equitable jurisdiction. Specialist Courts of Chancery came later, and were criticised as the confederation movement grew. Later, the legal colonialism set in which saw the ways of administering equity in England mimicked in the colonies. Even then, local variation survived as in relation to the treatment of mortgages.