As Dean, I am often asked to provide remarks, share insight, or provide my vision for BC Law. This is always such an honor, but it might come as a surprise that most of my days are spent listening—what I consider the core part of my conversations with so many members of our community. Indeed, as I reflect on my first two years at BC Law, my key moments of learning and discernment have arisen from the conversations I’ve had with alumni, students, faculty, and staff.
Traveling throughout the country to meet with alumni, my conversations have helped me to understand more deeply the BC Law mission of excellence, collegiality, and service that imbues everything we do. I am inspired to learn how our alumni incorporate their legal education into their work and lives in so many different ways. And their experiences guide me in thinking through how practice is changing across multiple fields, and how it might develop going forward.
These conversations have helped me understand what it means to be a BC lawyer, and they will shape how we train the generations coming up behind us.
Back on campus, I delight in chatting with students, including during my monthly Coffees with the Dean. I began these casual get-togethers two years ago, intending them as a way to get to know the student community. But they were so well received—and I enjoyed them so much—that I have decided to make them permanent. They allow me to be in casual conversation with our students, listening to their perceptions of law school and the world, engaging with their hopes and concerns for the future, and hearing and supporting their interactions with each other. I find these conversations as gratifying as they are informative, and they give me hope for the legal profession and for our collective future.
“At a personal level, these conversations have helped me refine that balance between stability and nimbleness that is so central to leadership today.”
Dean Odette Lienau
I am also continuously in conversation with my faculty colleagues, and I am daily impressed with their creative and deeply considered scholarship and public engagement, as well as their palpable commitment to their students and clients. Their research, which informs both current legal approaches and the contours of future legal knowledge, impacts how attorneys, policymakers, and business leaders address key issues at the local, national, and global level. It also contributes significantly to the intellectual and pedagogical vibrancy of the school, ensuring that our students understand not just the law as it is, but also how the law may develop in the coming years.
At a personal level, these conversations have helped me refine that balance between stability and nimbleness that is so central to leadership today. They have shaped my understanding of the landscape in which our graduates will need to excel—and then informed my decisions to hire faculty, develop new programs, and consider campus improvements accordingly. Ultimately, I believe they make for a stronger, more productive, and more dynamic community.
Throughout all of these conversations, I am buoyed by our community’s ability to make space for difference and to start at a place of compassion. Engaging in this way, even when challenging, reminds us of our shared humanity and of the multiplicity of human experience. Heading into my third year at BC Law, I look to the future with hope for the many ways that our community can make a difference in the years ahead.