2025 Legal Rebels: Rebels Without a Pause
(Photo illustration by Sara Wadford/ABA Journal)
For last year’s class of Legal Rebels, we did something unprecedented, highlighting a groundbreaking and industry-changing piece of technology and chronicling how it was already upending multiple areas of the law. (See “Game Changing,” February-March 2024, page 36.)
This year, it’s back to normal—or as normal as things can be for an annual feature honoring people who are changing the practice of law.
In many ways, this year’s group of inductees brings to mind our 2023 class (See “Charging Forward,” February-March 2023, page 36). Coming out of the pandemic, a lot of things in the legal industry had changed in a short amount of time. However, the rebels chosen that year were people who had been proactive and reform-minded for years—well before anyone had any concept of what havoc a pandemic could wreak.
For the 2025 class of Legal Rebels, the ABA Journal and the ABA Center for Innovation have chosen to honor seven individuals and one state licensing board. This year’s inductees include several reformers looking at alternatives to the bar exam and attorney licensing process; legal technologists looking to serve some of the most vulnerable people in the country; a pioneer in the field of legal research; and even a judge who is, perhaps, most famous for being in a viral video in which a lawyer assures him that he is not a cat.
Like that 2023 class, these rebels were not content with waiting for change to come to them. They were already hard at work trying to improve important aspects of the legal industry well before anyone knew what ChatGPT and generative artificial intelligence were.
Legal Rebels Class of 2025
Joan Howarth and Deborah Jones Merritt
Oregon State Board of Bar Examiners
This story was originally published in the February-March 2025 issue of the ABA Journal under the headline: “Rebels Without a Pause: The newest Legal Rebels have been longtime agents of innovation.”
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