Have you ever thought about a career in academics? You’ve learned a lot from practicing law in the “real world,” but do these skills translate into the classroom? And without an academic pedigree, can a practicing lawyer even break into the ivory tower?

Dean Parrish believes that lawyers (especially in-house counsel) can be great teachers. Parrish says that legal skills are academic skills–writing, public speaking and the ability to distill complex topics make lawyers the best teachers.

In this episode, Parrish shares how he pivoted from a career in Big Law into academics, eventually landing leadership positions in top law schools including serving as dean of three different law schools.  He says that teaching can be a natural progression for practicing lawyers.

He believes this so strongly that he invited Stacy and other in-house lawyers to develop a certificate program for aspiring general counsel at UCI School of Law.  Learn more about the program called, “From Lawyer to Leader, the Road to the General Counsel Seat,” in this episode.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

 

Can You Pivot From Big Law To An Academic Career? Austen Parrish, Dean University Of California, Irvine School Of Law

My name is Austen Parrish. I’m the Dean and Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. A fun fact about me is I’m an identical twin.

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In this episode, I’m excited to welcome Dean Austen Parrish of the University of California at Irvine, School of Law. We have been working together on a program to help develop in-house counsel at UCI School of Law. We’re going to talk about his academic journey and careers in academia. How are you?

I’m doing great. It’s great to be here, Stacy. I’m a big admirer of your show and grateful that you invited me on. Thanks.

Thank you. I know you also have a show, so you know how this goes. I don’t usually do a career journey. I am interested in the transition from traditional legal roles into academia. I had worked in higher ed for a long time. I know you made a big career pivot that brought you from a national law firm into an academic role. I’m fascinated by that because it is such a big leap. I’m wondering if you could talk to us about that.

The Transition From Private Practice To Academia

I’d be happy to. I should say nobody wants to copy the route that I did. I was non-traditional and got lucky in a lot of different ways. I’d been in O’Melveny and Myers in Los Angeles for quite some time. I love the firm. I had some amazing colleagues. I had some rewarding work, but my wife and I were expecting my first daughter. I was doing a lot of travel and the hours were pretty big. It just wasn’t going to be conducive to starting our family in some ways. There was an opportunity to teach legal writing at Southwestern Law School. It was a one-year contract.

This was quite some time ago, but it was a very big pay cut and I got lucky. They originally were planning to hire one person and they hired an amazing teacher. Not me. They decided to hire somebody else. Also, not me. At the last moment, they decided to hire a third person as part of a cohort. I got lucky and started teaching legal writing in the start of 2002, which I started on July 1st. My daughter was born on July 9th, and away we went. I was very lucky. I made the transition from a one-year contract to another contract and then I moved to tenure track and was tenured.

From my academic background, I observed and I didn’t work with a lot of the law school faculty. My perception is that there’s a little bit of a cultural view of the professors of practice and the tenure track through academics. I don’t know if that was present in the law school. If it was like, how did you jump over from just being a lawyer who teaches to a legit faculty member?

Those hierarchies definitely exist. I should say, uniquely here at UC Irvine, it doesn’t. We think, to run a good law school, you need to have people with lots of different talents. We try to avoid those hierarchies. I was fortunate. I wrote quite a bit when I first started. Out of happenstance, they needed somebody to run a summer program at the University of British Columbia in a comparative and international law program, so I started running that.

Did you practice international law at O’Melveny or did you say, “I’m going to look into this?”

In undergraduate, I had been doing international relations, Political Science and Economics. It was right after the end of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union was collapsing. I had a number of faculty that were big scholars at the University of Washington at that time. I was into that. When I go to law school, I plan to do international work. When I started practicing, partly I met my wife at law school and we moved out to Los Angeles. I took a job that was more domestic focused.

When I entered academia, there was an opportunity to teach a course in international environmental law and I jumped at that. I’m from Vancouver, so I think that was part of the reason why they asked me to run that program. Anyway, I got lucky. I wrote a piece that was well placed in a law review article or law review article that was well placed. I had started taking over this summer program. They had tried to hire somebody for a ten-year position and it hadn’t worked out and I was there. I’m grateful for this, though I didn’t know it at the time. There were a number of students that were particularly kind.

They were fans.

They were petitioning the dean on strike but they needed to hire me. There was a bunch of things that happened. I got lucky and I moved over to the tenure track.

That’s impressive. As I said, my background is a little more segregated. Again, one person’s experience does not speak for the whole field. What I observed for folks that moved from a faculty position into academic leadership positions was that they were well-regarded in their fields. They had some success and prestige in their chosen field. They were visible to administration and then they were easy to work with. There’s a lot of smart, brilliant, and geniuses running around universities who are nightmares. The administration likes people that are perceived as easy to work with. Tell me. Did those three things show up in your profile to get you into the leadership track?

I’ve been working with a person by the name of Brian Garth, who used to be the Head of the American Bar Foundation and then became the Dean at Southwestern just a few years after I’d started. He was an amazing mentor. He offered me the opportunity to become the Vice Dean. Partly that was because I’d been directing the summer program and had gotten to know the staff. It may have been less than the good things.

It may have been that I had some administrative capacity to work with staff and do some operational things in addition to the traditional faculty role. I got into it that way. It was almost by happenstance and he was terrific and supportive. I do think you’re right, that you have to be able to carve out space because the administrative aspects are not the things that most faculty like doing.

Nobody likes doing them by the way. It’s not just the faculty. Do you feel your private practice experience had any impact? Did it help you? I hate to be so stereotypical but universities are not the real world. Faculties have a lot of ideas about how things work. The same with some government folks. Having spent six plus years in a national law firm working with business clients, I would guess that you had some experience. That was a little different from your academic colleagues.

Applying Legal Skills To Academic Problem Solving

That’s true. Certainly, broadly in university. Partly, it was a high-powered practice, so I have to write very quickly. I wrote long documents and briefs at appellate and trial levels in a pretty quick period of time. Being able to work fast was quite useful when I interned in academia, to be able to crank out some work. To be honest, a lot of the basics of being a good lawyer is the same as being a good professor with communication skills.

I remember when I went into my first class. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was thinking about the lessons I learned from trial work or arbitration work. Taking complicated ideas and being able to convey them in a clear way is what you expect of a good faculty member. That’s also what you expect of a good lawyer. Broadly, at least on the administrative side, mostly being a dean or vice dean is problem solving. That’s what you’re doing for your clients as a lawyer. You’re constantly trying to figure out within a set of parameters and set of ground rules. How do you solve a problem and how can you be creative in getting better results and doing it fairly quickly. To some extent, that’s what you’re doing as an administrator. You’re constantly responding to problems.

Taking complicated ideas and being able to convey them in a clear way is what you expect of a good faculty member. That's also what you expect of a good lawyer. Share on X

There’s no shortage and weird problems. It’s all manner. Is space a big deal at UCI? That was one of the biggest things. I noticed that the faculty cared less about title and money as opposed to where their space was or how much space they had.

The space is an issue here because we had planned initially to build a new building and we haven’t. We are tight, but I have to say, partly UC Irvine was built on a different ethos than other law schools. Most of the faculty here are deeply invested in the mission. People like to move offices when the new prime officer opens up.

Some of those things that are more cliché but traditional at some universities don’t happen here because of the commitment to the mission and why they came here. There’s very much a public service pro bono ethos here that was part of the intent, the founding mission. It doesn’t get rid of it, but it suppresses some of those. The broader space issue if you know somebody who has $50 or $100 or a million dollars that one wants to build, let me know.

I need them up here in Santa Barbara to help support our health system. I don’t know how to send people down to you. You’re making me feel a little better. I didn’t say this as we started, but it’s been in my mind, in my career, that maybe in the future, I would do some teaching. That’s why I was interested in partnering with you and others to develop this certificate program for In-House Counsels to dip my toe in to see if this is something I would like. I have to tell you. They always say like you know you know something if you can teach it and it’s been challenging. I get to sit here and pontificate in my show about how great of a GC I am. When you have to distill that into actual curriculum, it’s harder.

I teach courses like civil procedure. I talk about constitutional law and some civil pre-trial practice. I always thought that if I went back to practice, I would be a much better lawyer. I wouldn’t now but in the early days. It required me to both go back into the big forest rather than the trees. While I was in practice, I was putting on a fire constantly but this allowed me to think more strategically in the big picture. As you say, it required me to think more carefully about how I put the pieces together as I was explaining it.

We’re grateful that you’ve joined a group that’s willing to launch this new program, which I’m super excited about. Once you teach also, you’ll find it incredibly rewarding. I remember the first year I was teaching. It was such a great experience. It’s still a great experience. I get excited when I go into the classroom every year. Partly, it’s because in law practice, it can take a while. I had cases when I first arrived at the firm six years later, they were still going on.

There wasn’t closure, but you can tell if you’ve had a good class. An hour later or two hours later, you can tell if you made an impact or not. If you haven’t had a good class, you also know. There’s immediate reward there. It’s what lawyers do. Its performance at the grand scale of thinking about how you convey information and how you get people to learn in a way where you’ve got lots of different learning styles. It is interesting as you start dissecting it. It’s a little more complicated but it’s also like, “What a great job.” What an amazing opportunity to be able to teach other people things that you know something about and be able to convey that information.

Again, you’re making me feel better talking about how the skills that you already have as a lawyer translate into the classroom.

I have to say it doesn’t always happen that way. We have hundreds of people that will reach out and say, “I’d love to teach.” Sometimes, you get somebody who isn’t quite able to make the transition but it’s mostly the things that you do. When I think of In-House Counsel, you’re dealing with lots of different problems. Complicated things that you have to distill into simpler things and then be able to go more deep when you need to and be able to figure out when you have to explain it at a more simple level. Those basic communication skills, thinking about how you convey complicated legal issues in a simplified way and then explaining that complexity is what you’re doing as a faculty member and most classes.

Again, I’m feeling good. I’m going to sit up straighter in my chair. Back to the academic leadership experience. You’re very humble and everything’s luck. People are gracious and giving you opportunities, but you obviously did it well and had the skills, aptitude and personality for it. How did you prepare to become a dean? I have one experience. I would see these high potential faculty members who were very visible with the administration. I knew that they were being considered for roles.

There were a couple folks that said, “You have to be careful if you want to do the dean’s job because you’re going to hear a lot of problems. You’re like the peanuts sign with the $0.10 for a consultation. You’ve got budget pressure.” For certain folks, it can take them away from what they love, which is academic work, and then you become the department of problem solving. I’m curious about what you did to prepare and if that was your experience.

Experiences Preparing For Academic Leadership

First, I was a vice dean for about four years and a vice dean for academic affairs. At that time, that oversaw a broad academic program. Doing that role prepared me in a number of ways because I got to see the operations of the law school. At Southwestern, where I started, I was appointed interim dean for about eighteen months when they did a search. I decided that I would not be considered for the dean-ship there.

To be honest, there wasn’t much time to learn being dean there. You are thrown in the deep end and I was moving quickly as we were waiting for a new dean to come in. I started being an interim dean in around 2012. At the end of 2013, I stepped down. Maybe it was like September from the interim dean-ship. A month later, I was offered the permanent dean-ship in Indiana University, Bloomington. When I got that position, there’s all these wonderful national organizations such as the Association of American Law School and an organization called AccessLex. There’s the ABA counsel section that works.

They put on programs and I went to a so-called Baby Dean school which was a two-day program. The great thing about being a dean in which many people don’t know. You’ve only got about 200 nationwide from the ABA accredited schools and with very rare exceptions. It’s an amazing group. It’s so very collegial and always willing to pick up the phone. I had built-in mentors and people that I could talk to almost immediately. The preparation for the second time was that I did a few of these programs.

You’re right, it is a department of problem solving but it’s also an amazing job. You get to speak with alumni that tell you the impact that the law school had on them. You get to see the law school not just from the perspective of an individual faculty member who focused on their research or their classes. You get to see the school through the eyes of students, your colleagues, as faculty, through staff and through alumni. Some of those things are great. Part of my job is fundraising.

I remember when my daughters were young. I had to get to sell Girl Scout cookies and I hate asking for money. When you’re meeting with alumni for a law school, it’s great. You get to hear these amazing stories and transformative stories about how people build their careers. That’s a fun part of the job. There are some difficult things but there’s some stuff that requires you to be a cheerleader and make sure that you understand what’s happening and be able to tell stories about what’s happening with your faculty and stories about your students and alumni.

A lot of that is just listening. I do think there are different styles of deans and different styles of universities. You need to prepare for the job you’re taking. Generally, good deans are people that are willing to be the front face and be able to tell the stories of others and try to lift up others who are doing great things. That’s not that hard of a job. There’s a bunch of problem solving aspects too that are just great. The core part of the job is fabulous. You get to go and talk about amazing people with amazing people. You learn how long legal careers change people’s lives, which it does.

Generally, good deans are people that are willing to be the front face and be able to tell the stories of others and try to lift up others who are doing great things. Share on X

It does. As you were saying that, I was thinking. In my own life, there’s a couple things that have had a transformative impact and law school is absolutely that. The bang for the buck was there for me.

There’s a lot of concern about legal education because at least the sticker price is expensive, but the date is pretty clear. About 30% of our students are first-generation college students. It’s much higher for first generation law. Frankly, when I was at Indiana University, Bloomington, there was people who graduated back in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Law makes a difference. Lawyers are leaders in their communities. That’s true if you’re in a large city like Los Angeles or Orange County.

It’s also true in small towns throughout America. They’re not only practicing lawyers. They are often the heads of school boards or mayors or leaders. The data is clear on this. You can see that them having a professional career meant that their children were more stable and more likely to succeed. There’s a great American dream story behind higher education and certainly law schools in some ways.

I’m pumped up about that now. As you were talking about the alumni, I’m thinking about this because I’m working on my curriculum for my sessions. One of the sessions I’m going to talk about is managing different constituents, different clients in-house because you have many differences. It’s not just, “I work for the CEO. I support this business unit.” There are many. I was thinking about what that must be like for you as a law school dean because you have so many constituents and so many customers. Could you talk a little bit about how you balance those different stakeholders? How do you serve them?

You’re directly reporting. They’re a provost, a chancellor or president in the university structure, so you’ve got that. There’s lots of people connected to that as you’re higher ups. In the law school itself, you’ve got faculty, staff, students, and alumni. Part of the dean is being present to those different groups and making sure that they understand where the schools are going, the values and the mission of the school. This is true probably for all positions. It’s based on who you’ve got working with you. My job rises and falls on having great faculty. I rise and fall on having amazing staff.

If I have weaknesses in those departments, then it can be difficult for a dean. If I have wonderful people that are in my different parts working with alumni or students, then it makes my job much easier. Part of it is a dean is making sure you’ve got the right people and the right places to make sure that those parts of the school are moving forward. Some of it is just presents showing up. That takes time. It’s a busy job but it’s not particularly hard. Alumni are incredibly gracious.

This program you were telling me came out of alumni who were asking for something for in-house counsel. Do you want to talk about where that came from?

Developing Talent Pipelines For In-House Counsel

Partly, this was members of my advisory board who thought that this was something that Orange County needed. That we had a growing legal market. That number of Fortune 500 and other companies in Orange County were expanding dramatically. The whole idea of the law school as it was originally conceived was to create a talent pipeline into a burgeoning legal market. Not that there weren’t great schools in Los Angeles, but you think of the old orange curtian. There was this feeling going down to Orange County. How do you grow talent here?

This was the same idea. We’re founded in 2008 and opened the doors in 2009. The first class graduated in 2012. We’ve had a couple of grads that are in general counsel positions that are well known. A number of others are starting to get to that stage in their career where they want to make a transition from private practice or government practice or they’ve taken early junior in-house positions and want to take the next step.

The reality is universities these days and law schools these days are not a three-year program. It’s how you stay connected with your alumni over a lifetime. Ideally, you’re adding value there. Not for everybody but how you do value ads. Having this program allows us to say, “This is a way for us to connect the legal community, the business community, our alums and others, who are interested in taking that next step.”

I’m very grateful that Lisa and you and the others who are all part of us have come together. We’ll see how it goes. To be honest, even for people who are not interested in going in-house, lawyers need to know more about their clients, what their clients are thinking and what their what the general council of the companies are thinking and how their businesses are structured. Frankly, that information, even if you’re staying in the firm, is critical for your success as a lawyer.

I was only there a few years but I was getting into my 5th and 6th year understanding more about the dynamics, the business considerations and what was driving my clients. It was critical to be able to serve them well on the legal side. This is a great service and it fits into what the whole mission law school was. It was to serve the Orange County community in the broadest way.

Thanks for reading to those alums that the advisory board that was nudging you into this. I do think it’s a great opportunity for people to peek behind the curtain and learn about what an in-house job is. I interviewed a lot of different lawyers on this show. Some folks who went in-house in the early 2000s had a perception that an in-house job was a step down. If you couldn’t hack it at the law firm, you went in-house.

There was an evolution thinking, “In-house is more of a lifestyle. It’s more fun.” I’ll just say now and maybe this is one person’s perspective. It is a great job. It is such an amazing opportunity to have an impact. I got to tell you. I work harder than a lot of law firm lawyers. There’s control over your calendar to some extent, but it’s demanding. I’m excited to share the good, bad and ugly with the folks who enroll in our program.

You touch on something that’s true. The legal profession is changing and you’re seeing some of the work that was done by law firms being moved in-house. That’s expanding, which means there’s more lawyers that’s doing those positions. The margins cost centers for legal spend has become much tighter, which means that the pressures are increasing. That’s the nature of the profession. The margins are tied everywhere.

Most people are working hard. Broadly, it’s not a job where you can just do it on the side. Most people are pretty busy. You see this in the surveys of lawyers. Most people feel pretty fulfilled because they’re being challenged. It’s that trade-off between working hard, but also having something that challenges you every day. Certainly, people I know that are in-house, maybe more so than deans. They are problems solving all the time. It’s high pressure. There’s a lot on their plate.

I’ll give the contact information about the program at the end. It’s called From Lawyer to Leader: The Road to the GC Seat. It’s largely an online program and there’s a certificate. As Dean said, there’s a lot of cool faculty, including myself that are part of it. We’re excited to launch that. The last substantive question I wanted to ask and we talked about this a little bit as we were getting started. What is the impact of AI? What are you seeing in terms of legal education? As we talked, it’s evolving what’s going to happen in the job market. What are you all doing to prepare students to be more tech forward with AI?

The Impact Of Artificial Intelligence On Legal Education

There’s a lot going on. Partly, it’s how you are preparing students to use AI appropriately and not inappropriately AI in their daily life. That’s part of the broader idea about how you prepare students for the skills they need when they’re entering practice. Part of it is understanding how AI is changing particular substantive fields. You have data privacy, cybersecurity and other areas that are changing because of the underlying technology. You also have a third part and there’s probably more. Also, how AI and technology is changing the structure of the legal profession.

One of the things that’s unique about UC Irvine is when we were founded, we were founded on the idea that law schools were too focused on an old way of teaching. They were emphasizing how to think like a lawyer and doctrinal information, which is nothing wrong. That’s critical. Also, to be a good law school, you needed to talk about or you needed to teach skills and experiential learnings so that students understood what it was like to represent clients while they’re in school.

Also, professional identity formation. What’s the business of law? In most law schools, you do law review. Maybe you click for a judge. You work for a law firm and then nobody tells you after that. Yet, many students are only working for a large law firm for a couple of years. What about a broader view about how people make their careers over a lifetime? What does that look like? If you’re silly enough to read Reddit or web pages, there’s a feeling that it’s all linear. The reality is, it’s very zigzag these days.

There’s a lot of mobility. You’ve got to constantly reinvent yourself. You’ve got to be thinking about changes. Anyway, the school was founded on this idea that instead of just having one pillar. You needed three pillars. We did things that were unique. We required every student to have a clinic. They meet with a live client the very first year of law school as part of their learning skills program. We developed a lawyering skills program that was taught by people with significant practical experience but also things that students needed to do early on in their careers.

You've got to constantly reinvent yourself. You've got to be thinking about changes. Share on X

Instead of writing a supreme court brief that might go before the United States Supreme Court once every 50 years. We have them writing some judgment motions and memos and things that they would be seeing early in their career. We have a pro bono program. We have about 100 projects going at any given time. It’s all those things that are skills-based education. That fits well with AI and technology. What I mean by that is, these skills are changing but the idea that you need to understand what the skills are that lawyers need in order to succeed, to practice at the higher levels is part of our DNA.

Technology and AI is part of that. You’re seeing our librarians thinking about how to advise students on different platforms. Faculty are teaching legal writing and lawyering skills. They are doing it in their individual courses. Some of it is saying, “This is what you can’t do,” and making sure the students understand the limitations of AI. There’s a lot of people thinking it’s a Panacea. It’s not in many ways. You’ve got to know how to use it effectively.

Frankly, it’s a wait and see game because there’s a lot of volatility. I get outreach almost once a week from a vendor trying to sell me and the latest greatest thing. Some of it is going to settle down. We’re going to see firms gravitate to particular models. We’re going to see the legal profession get a little more used to what’s appropriate and what’s not appropriate. Where is it helpful? Where does it save money? Where doesn’t it save money?

That’s then going to ripple back and almost a feedback loop into the law schools. In some ways, it’s very fast. People are nervous about it because it’s new. In some ways, it’s not also that different from other technologies. The technology is different but the pattern where people predict that the world’s going to end. It turns out that it’s not. We’ve seen these before and the key for law schools is to make sure that the faculty are up to date on the leading changes or reading about it and then thinking thoughtfully and mindfully about how they integrated into their courses.

We’re all trying to keep up. There’s an episode with Professor Jonah Perlin at Georgetown law where he’s talking about how AI is going to affect or not affect the billable hour. Which is another whole fun topic. I am excited to keep working with you on this in-house program called From Lawyer to Leader: The Road to the General Council Seat. It launches in August 2026.

We’ll start in mid-August. Many thanks for being part of this project. I know it’s a great team of inaugural founding faculty. I’m looking forward to it because I know I’m going to learn a lot. It’ll be of interest to people throughout Southern California because as I said, people who want to make the transition. There’s not a lot of programs out there. This gives them some insight into how to change their mindset from a large firm or a private practice into what you need for the skills.

Things that you talk about on this show every episode. It’s all going to be great for people that want to have a better understanding of what their clients are thinking about. It should draw people there and you’ll get CL credit and everything. We’re excited about this and excited to be able to get back to the community in a slightly different way.

Thanks for giving me the opportunity to dip my toe into academics. The final question is and I know that it gave a little bit of research you had to do here to try to make sure you got all the current music. What is your pump-up song?

My daughter’s will ban me from music. I had Blinding Lights by The Weeknd in my head for a while, but that’s now been banned. When I was thinking about your question, I was thinking maybe an old classic Walking on Sunshine by Katrina and the Waves. That’s an earworm or whatever it is, once it gets stuck in your mind. I was listening to a little bit of that. I think that’s a great pump-up song.

Great. Thanks so much for being here. It’s super fun.

It was great to be on the show and thank you for having me.

 

Important Links

• Austen Parrish on LinkedIn
• O’Melveny and Myers Inc.
• From Lawyer to Leader: The Road to the General Counsel Seat
• Association of American Law School
• AccessLex
• Will AI Kill The Billable Hour? With Jonah Perlin Professor, Georgetown Law – Previous Episode

 

About Austen Parrish

Austen Parrish is the Dean and a Chancellor’s Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. Prior to joining UC Irvine in 2022, he served as the Dean and James H. Rudy Professor of Law at Indiana University Bloomington’s Maurer School of Law. He served as the 2025 President of the Association of American Law Schools and remains an officer and a member of their governing board. He also serves as a board member for AccessLex Institute, the nation’s largest nonprofit focused on issues of access and affordability in legal education. He is a board member of the Public Law Center in Orange County, an elected member of the American Law Institute, an editor of the Journal of Legal Education, and a fellow of the American Bar Foundation and the Association of American Law Schools. In January 2026, the National Jurist named Dean Parrish #4 in its list of the most influential people in legal education. Prior to joining academia, Dean Parrish was an attorney with O’Melveny & Myers in Los Angeles.