As the new dean of the University of Chicago Law School, Adam Chilton faces a web of challenges.

He’s tackling a leadership role during a turbulent time for the legal community. The American Bar Association is revising its accreditation standards for law schools — particularly those concerning diversity and inclusion — and generative AI use is on the rise. Law schools face financial pressures, shifting societal expectations and evolving legal landscapes.

But Chilton is up for the challenges his new role may present. He said that the law school’s core values of free speech and inquiry, in addition to intellectual and ideological diversity, will help students endure whatever unexpected challenges the legal industry faces.

“A commitment to ourselves living up to those values, but also trying to instill a love of those values in our students, is exactly what lawyers need to thrive in the current moment,” he said.

Chilton assumed his new role July 1 and has since prioritized familiarizing himself with the law school’s operations in areas such as budgeting, finance and staffing, among others.

He has set his sights on increasing international collaboration, upholding the law school’s ideological values, planning for the debut of the NextGen Bar Exam and examining how to best deal with the increasing use of AI-powered tools in the legal profession.

Chilton has been meeting with staff in various departments to try to “understand the current scope of our operation, what’s going well [and] what could be improved,” he said.

To prepare for his new role, Chilton relied on his predecessor, Thomas J. Miles, for the last two months of Miles’ deanship. Miles, who headed the law school for a decade, is still involved with the university, serving as its Clifton R. Musser Professor of Law and Economics.

“We were in meetings every day, essentially,” Chilton said of Miles. “We were talking on the phone, were talking in person … and [that communication] continued to happen since July 1.”

Presently, Chilton is preparing for the upcoming academic year, which begins Sept. 29. He’s busy scheduling campus visits from judges, deciding on scheduled lectures and making decisions about faculty committees.

He’s also planning to connect with the university’s alumni. He already traveled to Nashville, San Francisco and New York to meet out-of-state graduates and is in the process of trying to organize events to connect with local alumni.

His focus is to get to “know the people that are already sort of deeply engaged” and to form long-standing relationships with them.

Read more at Chicago Daily Law Bulletin